Gender Disparity in 2013-2018 Industry Payments to Plastic Surgeons

The gender pay gap in medicine has been under intense scrutiny in recent years; female plastic surgeons reportedly earn 11% less than their male peers. "Hidden" pay in the form of industry-based transfers exposes compensation disparity not captured by traditional wage-gap estimations.

The aim of this study was to reveal the sex distribution of industry payments to board-certified plastic surgeons across all years covered by the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services Open Payment Database (CMS OPD).

We obtained the National Provider Identifier (NPI) for each surgeon in the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS) member directory to record gender. Next, "General Payments" data points from annual files for all years present in the CMS OPD, 2013 to 2018, were aggregated and joined to provider details by Physician Profile ID before quantitative analysis was performed.

Of 4840 ASPS surgeons, 3864 (79.8%) reporting ≥1 industry payment were included with 3220 male (83.3%) and 644 female (16.7%). Over 2013 to 2018, females received mean [standard deviation] 56.01 [2.51] payments totaling $11,530.67 [$1461.45] each vs 65.70 [1.80] payments totaling $25,469.05 [$5412.60] for males. The yearly ratio of male-to-female payments in dollars was 2.36 in 2013, 2.69 in 2014, 2.53 in 2015, 2.31 in 2016, 1.72 in 2017, and most recently 1.96 in 2018.

Individual male plastic surgeons received over twice the payment dollars given to their female counterparts, accepting both more frequent and higher-value transfers from industry partners. Payment inequity slightly declined in recent years, which may indicate shifting industry engagement gender preferences.