New research from the Ontario Medical Association (OMA) found that male specialists got disproportionately more referrals than female specialists and earned almost 5 per cent more for each referral.
"The fact that the gender pay gap in medicine remains so many years after it was first identified is worrying, especially as more than 40 per cent of physicians in Canada are women," said OMA President Dr. Andrew Park.
The OMA looked at OHIP billing data for 7.6 million new referrals made by 32,824 physicians to 13,582 surgeons and other specialists in Ontario in 2018-19.
The research showed that physicians were more likely to refer to specialists of the same gender, but in total doctors of both genders referred more patients to male specialists than female ones.
"Our study found the gender pay gap among specialists was due both to the number of referrals to male specialists and the higher billings that resulted," said Dr. Lyn Sibley, director of the OMA's Healthcare Evaluative Research department. "We found that 83 per cent of the difference was due to the greater number of referrals and 17 per cent to the higher billings."
Researchers predict that this gap will remain unless policy changes are made.
One solution suggested by the OMA, would be to create a gender-blind, centralized referral system. It's believed this would not only give female specialists more opportunity to perform procedures and acquire skills, but it would also shorten wait lists for patients by giving them more options.
The centralized wait-list has already been recommended by the OMA as one of its proposals to improve the health-care system.
The OMA represents more than 43,000 of Ontario's physicians, medical students, and retired physicians.
