University of California paid 114 doctors over $1 million last year. How many were women?

The University of California’s health system paid 113 medical professors at least $1 million in total pay last year.

Only 12 of those high-earning health professionals were women, according to a Sacramento Bee analysis of 2022 payroll data from the UC Office of the President.

About 61% of the state’s doctors are men, according to the Kaiser Family Foundation. According to a Bee review of Census data covering the years 2017 through 2021, 81% of full-time doctors in California with personal incomes of at least $600,000 identify as men.

The gender pay disparity at the University of California was even more pronounced at the very top of the pay scale.

Of the 35 highest-paid medical professors — each earning at least $1.285 million — just one of them was a woman: Dr. Teresa Soriano, a dermatology surgeon at UCLA.

Highly compensated doctors at the University of California usually draw their compensation mostly from clinical fees or grants — not taxpayers.

The UC Office of the President said the university is “committed to equitable compensation practices.” Spokesperson Heather Harper said the university employs several methods to ensure pay equity, including regular salary equity reviews, compensation transparency and salary adjustments based on location and field of specialty.

“This is a complex issue, and there may be differences in compensation for medical faculty members based on their field of expertise, seniority, years of experience and location,” Harper wrote in an emailed statement.

Why are women doctors paid less?

Several factors could contribute to male doctors outearning their female counterparts, said Dr. Theresa Rohr-Kirchgraber, former president of the American Medical Women’s Association.

First, studies have found that women doctors are less likely than their male counterparts to competitively negotiate their salaries during the hiring process. This can set up a female doctor for an entire career of substandard pay.

“There is no institution that says, ‘Oh, I’m going to pay you less,’” said Rohr-Kirchgraber, who currently serves as a professor of medicine at the Augusta University/University of Georgia Medical Partnership. “They all want to do well. But they’re a business. It’s not the business’s responsibility to negotiate the first offer.”

Rohr-Kirchgraber acknowledged that while women physicians bear some individual responsibility for upping their bargaining skills, medical employers also must stop building gender inequities into their pay structures. A significant number of medical institutions offer bonuses to doctors based on their patient satisfaction surveys. Higher scores equal bigger bonuses.

But a 2019 study that Rohr-Kirchgraber helped write found that those patient satisfaction surveys showed measurable bias against “underrepresented” physicians, which include women and people of color. Although the bonuses only make up a small portion of a physician’s salary, over time that extra pay can snowball into large disparities.

“I can’t help it — I was born a girl and a person of color,” said Rohr-Kirchgraber. “The cards are just stacked against me.”

Medical employers also have a responsibility to hire more women and physicians of color in the first place and offer them competitive hiring packages, Rohr-Kirchgraber said. She almost always finds herself probing her peers on hiring committees to search more diligently for women and people of color — candidates who are supposedly “difficult to find.”

“You really have to make a conscious decision that, ‘I really want to find a person of color and a woman to fill this role,” she said. “It’s like, ‘No, honey, they’re there. You’re just not looking for them.”

A more systemic challenge to fix is how to keep women physicians in the workforce long-term. A small 2019 survey found that within six years of completing their medical training, nearly 75% of women doctors either switched to part-time or were considering part-time work. The study authors found that family was the most common explanation for why the women changed their work patterns. Rohr-Kirchgraber said, in her experience, women doctors tend to dedicate more time to their patients and, as a result, frequently put in extra hours to complete administrative paperwork.

“We have to continue to pressure our institutions to be more proactive about addressing the disparities,” said Rohr-Kirchgraber. Otherwise, we’re not going to be able to keep our women physicians.”