A new study has revealed yet another example of the gender pay gap: it appears that male nurses earn around $5,000 more than their female counterparts.

Nursing is mostly a woman’s profession, as nine out of ten nurses in the United States are women; yet men in this profession earn higher salaries than their female counterparts. A new study has come to this conclusion and has revealed that the gender pay gap has remained constant over the last 25 years in America.

According to a new report published in the journal of the American Medical Association, JAMA, the typical gender pay gap has been around $5,000 after adjusting for education, experience, work hours, parental and marital status and clinical specialty.

Ulrike Muench, from the University of California, San Francisco and lead author of the study, said that nursing is indeed the largest female dominated profession, so naturally, one would think that if any profession could have women earning the same as men, it would be the nursing profession.

For the study, Muench and his colleagues use two data sets from the United States to examine earning over a large period of time. One data set was the American Community Survey, from 2001 and 2013, that had information gathered from around 206,000 registered nurses and the other data set was the National Sample Survey of Registered nurses, from 1988 to 2008, with information from around 88,000 nurses.

After careful examination of the data, the scientists found that every single year, each set of data showed that men earned more than women did. The gender pay gap ranged from a whopping $10,243 to $11,306 in one of the studies and from $9,163 to $9,961 in the second study.

The largest gender pay gap was experienced by nurses in the outpatient settings ($7,678), followed by hospital nurses ($3,783).

Overall, men earned more than women in all but one specialty (orthopedics), with the gender pay gap ranging from $3,792 in chronic care to $17,290 in anesthetics.

This present study provides data over enough time to reveal that the gender pay gap isn’t as random as it was thought. Muench concluded:

My hope is that this raises awareness and can start a discussion about what additional steps could be taken to achieve equal pay.

Image Source: James Madison University