A new study has found that men continue to dominate the nursing sector, just like any other industry, as far as higher salaries are concerned.
According to the researchers, women dominate the field as far as their representation is considered, but men in the same profession earn handsome salaries.
Nine out of ten nurses are women, researchers said. But men in the field earn higher than women and the salary gap between the two has continued to remain constant over the past quarter century.
The study found that the typical salary gap between the two sex has consistently been nearly USD 5,000 even after adjusting for several key factors like education, experience, work hours, marital and parental status and clinical specialty.
Ulrike Muench, lead study investigator from the University of California in San Francisco, said, “Nursing is the largest female dominated profession so you would think that if any profession could have women achieve equal pay, it would be nursing.”
For the study, the researchers collected two large US data sets, namely the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses and the American Community Survey, and examined the earnings of the participants over time.
The responses from about 88,000 participants were provided by the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses for the period between 1988 and 2008. On the other hand, the American Community Survey provided responses from roughly 206,000 registered nurses between 2001 and 2013.
Each data sets realized that men earned more than women every year. Their unadjusted pay gap also ranged between USD 10,243 to USD 11,306 in one of the survey, while between USD 9,163 to USD 9,961 in the other study.
There existed a pay gap of USD 3,783 for hospital nurses and USD 7,678, for nurses in outpatient department.
The study found men out-earning women in every specialty, excluding orthopedics, where the pay gap was ranging from USD 3,792 in the chronic care to USD 17,290 for the nurse anesthetists.
The findings of the study were published in the journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA.
