Gender Inequality: Pay Gap Still Present Among Male, Female Nurses

New findings published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) show that male and female nurses are not paid equally.

A new salary analysis revealed a trend of registered nurses (RNs) in the United states between the years of 1998 and 2013 that showed male nurses are paid more across multiple settings and specialities.

"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," said lead study author Ulrike Muench from the University of California, San Francisco via the Huffington Post.

It's really quite a travesty. Now, 50 years following the Equal Pay Act, income inequalities between genders have somewhat narrowed the occupations. Yet nursing does not appear have been one of them.

Researchers performed an analysis on income data that involved the quadrennial National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses (NSSRN) and the American Community Survey (ACS.)

The study included 87,903 RNs, 7 percent of which were men; the ACS sample included 205,825 RNs, 7 percent of which were also men.

Researchers found that the salary gap was about $7,678 for ambulatory care and $3,873 for hospital settings, which was seen across all specialties, excluding orthopedics. Salary gaps also ranged from $3,792 for chronic care to $6,034 for cardiology.

"The roles of RNs are expanding with implementation of the Affordable Care Act and emphasis on team-based care delivery," the study authors concluded. "A salary gap by gender is especially important in nursing because this profession is the largest in health care and is predominantly female, affecting approximately 2.5 million women. These results may motivate nurse employers, including physicians, to examine their pay structures and act to eliminate inequities."