Gender Disparities in Medical Industry Payments

Abstract

To the Editor We commend Sullivan et al 1 for their important study highlighting gender inequity in medical industry payments to US-based physicians. The article and accompanying Invited Commentary 2 appropriately discuss the financial implications for female physicians, the lost opportunities for personal academic advancement, and the lack of defensible justification for the discrepancies uncovered. However, we believe that another implication is worth highlighting: the potential impact on the next generation of female physicians.The finding that male physicians receive significantly higher payments from medical industry companies than their female counterparts is discouraging but not likely to surprise most readers given a widespread increased awareness of inequities women face in personal and professional realms. However, the findings that this gender payment gap increased between 2013 and 2019 and that it is observed even in femalepredominant specialties, such as obstetrics and gynecology, may be more unsettling. With an increasing number of women in most medical specialties, one might expect their recognition and accolades to grow proportionally; however, the relationship is not so simple.We have previously shown that female authorship in preclinical cardiovascular studies, which precede and inform clinical trials, has increased over time. However, the proportion of published studies with first and senior authors of different sex has remained unchanged. 3 Using author position as a proxy for mentor-mentee relationships, our data suggest that although female authorship is increasing (as expected with their increase in numbers in the field), a tendency to form same-sex mentorship relationships exists and persists. The reasons for this are likely myriad and complex. It is not difficult to imagine that senior female physicians may better understand the difficulties their junior female colleagues face in medicine and how to navigate them and that mentees benefit from it. It may