Even in Nursing, Men Earn More
The nursing profession is predominantly women, but it’s the male nurses who earn more – $5,148 more per year on average.
“Male RNs out-earned female RNs across settings, specialties, and positions with no narrowing of the pay gap over time,” according to a salary comparison from 1998 through 2013 in the Journal of the American Medical Association. Other research has revealed pay gaps in teaching, another women-dominated profession.
Today is Equal Pay Day, and the media is replete with reminders that American women earn 77 cents for every dollar that men earn. Nursing is the single largest profession in the growing health care sector, and the pay gap affects some 2.5 million women employed in a profession established in 19th century London by Florence Nightingale, who wrote “Notes on Nursing: What It Is, and What It Is Not.”
The importance of a woman’s earnings level goes beyond the obvious implications for her current standard of living. Earnings are also key to how much she can accumulate over a lifetime.
The largest pay disparity is for nurse anesthetists: men earn $17,290 more than their female counterparts. The only category in which women out-earn – by $1,732 – is university professors in the nursing field. The researchers isolate the role a nurse’s sex plays by controlling for demographic characteristics such as education level, work experience and other factors that also influence how much someone earns. Only about half of the gap between men and women was explained by these identifiable factors, leaving half unexplained.
The chart below shows pay gaps, by type of nurse specialty.
