Male NHS doctor on £740,000

... that’s 2½ times the highest earning woman

TOP women doctors in the NHS earn thousands less than their male colleagues, an investigation has found.

And just five of the 100 highest-earning consultants in England are female – despite women making up a third of the overall workforce.

The BBC probe found the bestpaid man earned £740,000 – twoand-a-half times that of the top woman, who earned a comparatively modest £281,616.

On average, full-time female consultants earned 12 per cent – nearly £14,000 a year – less than men.

It is believed the gap could be partly accounted by male doctors working more overtime.

However, critics said it showed how much needed to be done to tackle the problem.

Dr Anthea Mowat, of the British Medical Association, told the BBC: ‘With women making up the majority of medical graduates in recent years, it’s vitally important that we address the root causes of the gender pay gap, and develop a wider programme of work to eliminate it across the medical workforce.’

Full-time male consultants earned an average of £127,683 in the NHS, including bonuses.

This was 12 per cent more than female consultants, who made an average of £113,874.

But this pay gap closes to £1,500 when overtime and bonuses are stripped out.

Dr Jacky Davis, a radiologist and former chairman of the NHS Consultants Association, added: ‘Some of it we can explain. Men are more likely to do overtime, for example. But that doesn’t account for it all. In my experience men are better at pushing for more money, putting the case for awards – and they get them.’

Dr Sally Davies, of the Medical Women’s Federation, said: ‘We need to do more to support women. They often fall behind when they have children and have to take time off. By the time they get to the point where overtime is available or the awards are being handed out they find themselves behind men. It’s a serious problem.’

Danny Mortimer, chief executive of NHS Employers, said: ‘ This appears to be a long-term and serious problem within the medical workforce which the Government, the profession and employers are committed to resolving.’

A spokesman for the Department of Health and Social Care said: ‘We are committed to ensuring that our hard-working doctors are rewarded fairly and equally for their work – regardless of gender – and have commissioned an independent report alongside the medical profession to examine exactly how that can be achieved.

‘We are also supporting negotiations to reform the existing consultant contract, which was agreed back in 2003, so it offers fair pay based on performance, and have already introduced mandatory reporting of gender pay gaps in the NHS to help us identify and tackle unequal pay.’

Last year it was reported that male senior doctors are more likely to get bonuses than their female colleagues because they ask for them.

More than 52 per cent of 43,856 NHS hospital consultants in England received the awards – ranging from £17,000 to £77,000 – in 2015. Of those getting one for the first time, 252 were men while only 65 were women.

Yet a report by the Advisory Committee on Clinical Excellence Awards found that women who applied for bonuses were just as likely to get them as men – with a 26 per cent success rate.

Clare Marx, president of the Royal College of Surgeons, suggested women are less inclined to ask for a bonus. She told The Sunday Telegraph: ‘We find women are unlikely to put themselves forward unless they feel they can tick all the boxes – whereas by and large men are more likely to just give it a whirl.’

‘Men more likely to just give it a whirl’