Male specialists get more work and earn more money than their female counterparts, research by the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) has found.
The association is pitching a new referral system that could end that preferential treatment.
OMA said it looked at OHIP billing data for 7.6 million new referrals made by 32,824 physicians to 13,582 surgeons and other specialists in Ontario in 2018-19.
The research found “female specialists earned 4.7-per-cent less per referral than males,” OMA said.
It also found physicians were more likely to refer to specialists of the same gender as themselves, though physicians of both genders referred more patients to male specialists, impacting the total number of referrals and therefore payment for each patient.
The association said a study published this month in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed the pay and referral gap found much the same south of the border.
“The fact that the gender pay gap in medicine remains so many years after it was first identified is worrying, especially as more than 40 per cent of physicians in Canada are women,” said OMA President Dr. Andrew Park in a news release. “This kind of research provides valuable evidence on which to build solutions.”
What’s needed, OMA said, are policy changes to even the playing field for female specialists.
“One solution would be to create a gender-blind, centralized referral system. Being transparent about individual specialists’ wait times may help female doctors who are thought to have shorter wait lists than men because of referral biases,” the association stated in the release.
The OMA has already recommended the province create a centralized wait list and referral system in each of the six Ontario health regions for certain surgeries and procedures.
The study found that while referring physicians had 6.6 per cent higher odds of referring to specialists of the same gender, they were also more likely to refer to specialists with similar years of experience and those practicing at the same hospital.
“Our study found the gender pay gap among specialists was due both to the number of referrals to male specialists and the higher billings that resulted,” said Dr. Lyn Sibley, director of the OMA’s Healthcare Evaluative Research department. “We found that 83 per cent of the difference was due to the greater number of referrals and 17 per cent to the higher billings.”
