Data Shows What the Gender Pay Gap Looks Like in Emergency Medicine

Despite working similar hours, seeing a comparable number of patients, and having equivalent work experience, women emergency medicine (EM) physicians earn significantly less than their male counterparts, according to new data from Offcall’s first major gender pay gap study.

It’s the year 2025, and women physicians continue to be paid far less than their male counterparts in emergency medicine. That’s the unfortunate conclusion from Offcall’s first major gender pay gap study – based on anonymous compensation data collected from thousands of physicians across the country.

Offcall is building the world’s largest transparency data set about compensation and workload for physicians in the United States. We’ve begun releasing the most important data findings (see previous data about how physicians really feel about managing NPs and PAs), and we specifically added a question about gender to our anonymous survey so we could analyze how pay differs between men and women physicians.

“When I first created Offcall, I wanted to include gender specifically to be able to hit on this topic dead on,” said Offcall’s co-founder and emergency physician Dr. Graham Walker. “The field is optional so people can choose not to answer it, but I thought this would be a great way to give people access to data that is self-reported about this important issue.”

While we know this is far from the first study examining pay gap issues nationally, or in medicine specifically, what makes this data set different is the scale and breadth of insights about physicians in particular: We’ve collected thousands of data points from physicians across all specialties, with emergency medicine being our largest specialty data set thus far.

“I think the more transparency we have, and the more information we have, is what allows us to then fix the structural problems and give individuals negotiating power when it’s time to ask for a raise or promotion,” said emergency medicine physician and author of MicroSkills: Small Actions, Big Impact Dr. Resa Lewiss.

In the coming weeks, we plan to release additional data about what the pay gap looks like in other specialties (Note: any physician can participate here – it’s free and anonymous!). Here are some of the most important takeaways for emergency medicine:

1. Key Finding #1: Women Emergency Physicians Earn $21,000 Less Annually Than Their Male Counterparts

Consider this troubling fact: Two emergency physicians are identical in every professional respect. Both have 12 years of experience. Both work 2,100 hours annually. Both supervise staff, are salaried, work full-time, see 20 patients per day, and practice in a suburban California hospital. Except one is a man and the other is a woman. When you control for all relevant covariates – the woman physician will earn approximately $395,000, compared to $416,000 for their male counterparts.

“When I saw this data, it upset and really disappointed me,” said Graham. “I think there’s this general feeling that for shift workers, and especially ER doctors, the pay gap doesn’t apply or there’s some kind of explainable factor that makes it a non-issue in the emergency department. But when you see that systematically our colleagues who are female are paid a lot less money per year, that totally shatters that illusion.”

We adjusted for relevant covariates and also factored in workload and experience as we examined the data. What we found is that male and female emergency physicians treat nearly identical patient volumes on a daily basis — averaging 19.5 and 19.4 patients per day, respectively…

They work nearly the same number of hours per year — averaging 1,540 and 1,490 hours respectively (less than 1 hour difference per week)...

And they have comparable levels of experience, with women averaging 12.3 years practicing compared to men averaging 11.1 years…

The only differences we observed involved job type, where women physicians are slightly more likely to work part-time (a trend consistent with previous studies about why women leave medicine)...

As well as pay structure, where women are more likely to take salaried positions rather than productivity-based ones, compared to their male counterparts…

Still, controlling for these various factors and more – years in practice, annual work hours, staff supervision responsibilities, pay structure, job type (full-time vs. part-time), daily patient volume, hospital location (urban, suburban, rural), and state-level cost of living — we observe that women emergency physicians are largely doing the same work as men, yet are getting paid significantly less.

“Excuses tend to range from: 'Oh, well women physicians have kids so they take maternity leave and that means they’re less experienced' or 'Male doctors just work more hours' and that is not at all what we see from the data,” said Graham.

“The number of hours that female physicians are working is equivalent, but the pay is just less.”

2. Key Takeaway #2: The Pay Disparity Grows More Extreme With Career Progression