For a long period of time, a major women’s rights issue has been the idea of the “glass ceiling”. This term describes the belief that women get paid lower than men overall, and that the comparison is especially notable when observing men and women who have the same job title. The United States made a law that prohibited differential pay for men and women who complete the same work; however, this practice is believed to still be prevalent (Ludden, 2010). For example, it is a common belief that men doctors get paid a higher yearly salary than women doctors with the same job responsibilities. Many people believe that this is due to the traditional role of the women as a homemaker; there are those that believe that women have no place in the workforce (Schein, 2001). This is particularly problematic because a majority of employers are men; therefore, there may be some degree of discrimination.

Although it seems like women have more equality in today’s workforce, this may not be the case; therefore it is necessary to conduct a study to determine whether men earn higher salaries than women in comparable fields. To do so, I acquired salary data for both men and women who work as doctors. In order to determine a statistical difference between their wages, I computed the mean, mode, median, range, interquartile range, and standard deviation of these values for the two groups using Microsoft Excel and then compared them.

The data used for this study was acquired from the United States Department of Labor, Division of Labor Statistics (US Department of Labor, 2009). The salary figures analyzed comprised of twenty randomly selected men and women in varying medical fields who live in various parts of the country.

The summary of men and women yearly salary in dollars is as follows:

The above chart summarized the mean, median, mode, range, interquartile range (IQR), and standard deviation (st. dev) of the salaries of male and female doctors in the United States. From this data, we see that the mean yearly salary is clearly higher for the male doctors; the same holds true for the median salary. No conclusive mode was able to be determined from this specific data set because not a single salary repeated itself more than once in the acquired list. Male doctors also had the highest salary range, indicating that while some male doctors achieve high salaries, some earn much more than others. The smaller range seen in the women category shows that women doctors generally earn around the same salary. The IQR represents the difference between the first and third quartiles; this difference is very large for the men and extremely tiny for the women. Lastly, the standard deviation is much greater for men, again indicating that their salaries tend to vary more greatly from one another than the women’s.

In conclusion, the belief that men earn more money than women is true when examining doctor salaries in the United States. To further examine this relationship, one should consider a larger data set that studies this link between larger groups of people. Because only 20 doctors were used in this study, the results may lead to bias. For example, if another student in my class completed the same study as I did with a different set of data, he or she may come to a different result. However, it is difficult to find a large quantity of this kind of salary data, so it may be useful to go to a hospital and conduct surveys in order to find a definite answer to this question.

• Ludden, Jennifer. (2010). Despite New Law, Gender Salary Gap Persists. National Public Radio.
• Schein, Virginia. (2001). A Global Look at Psychological Barriers to Women’s Progress in Management. Journal of Social Issues, Vol, 57, No. 4, pp. 675-688.
• US Department of Labor. (2009). Databases, Tables, and Calculators by Subject. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Retrieved from http://www.bls.gov/data/