The gender wage gap seems like it’s disappearing throughout most of the workforce, but within the health care arena the opposite is happening. In an article in the Washington Post, Sarah Kliff wrote about how over the past decade, the gender pay gap for doctors, dentists, and other healthcare professionals has been growing according to new research from the Journal of the American Medical Association. Male physicians once earned 20% or $33,840 more annually than their female colleagues. At the start of the 2000s, the percentage grew for doctors, dentists, and physician's assistants to 25% or a difference of $56,019 annually.

In the study, researchers did their best to adjust the data for confounding variables. Notably, one variable they could not account for was different specialties because doctors such as surgeons and radiologists tend to make more money than other specialties such as primary care providers. Women make up over 50% of US pediatricians but less than 10% of the country’s orthopedic surgeons, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges. Three authors, Seth Seabury, Amitabh Chandra, and Anupam Jena, pondered the idea, based on the data from the AAMC, that some women may prefer a lower-paying specialty, such as pediatrics or primary care. The researchers are asking the question: are female doctors choosing lower-paying specialties, or do they have less opportunity to enter a higher-paying specialty than male physicians do because of their gender?

Although women have been gaining more rights in the past hundred years, the gender pay gap is a sign that we are still not even close to equality. Gender is a cultural construct, an identity that is defined and dictated by society based on reproductive organs. There are two types of identities, ascribed and achieved. An ascribed identity is the identity that you have little or no choice over. Your biological sex that you are given at birth is considered to be an ascribed status. An achieved identity is the identity you choose and create for yourself based on your actions and efforts. My ascribed identity is a female, and my achieved identity is a female pre-med college student. Some people’s ascribed and achieved identities may be much different than mine. Someone may have an ascribed identity of a female, but an achieved identity of a male or vice-versa.

Having different reproductive organs should not be the primary reason for a person to make more money than his female coworker. Gender roles are assigned by society. In the past, a women’s role was to stay at home, clean and cook for her family while her husband went to work and was the sole provider. These gender roles have followed women over time. Even though women can now get jobs that were very difficult to get a hundred years ago, such as being a doctor or lawyer, they still face a lot of gender-related issues on the job, such as being stereotyped. There are gender stereotypes that men are always masculine and women are always feminine, but as time goes on those stereotypes are being proven wrong. Men are able to perform the same tasks traditionally thought to be a woman’s, such as staying home, cooking and cleaning, and women can be the sole provider for the family. A person’s personality, feelings, and gender should not have any bearing on how much money they make. That should be determined by their intelligence and work ethic.