Careers with the biggest gender pay gap

If nothing else, the uproar over comments about men's and women's earnings in professional tennis drives home the fact that a gender pay gap stubbornly persists.

Women in the U.S. earn less than 80 cents for every dollar a man takes home, and comments by Novak Djokovic and Raymond Moore, former tournament director at Indian Wells, suggest that some men believe equal pay may not always be appropriate. The overall gender pay gap also reflects the fact that women often work in lower-paying industries, or have shorter tenure in their jobs, among other differences.

Now the jobs site Glassdoor.com has analyzed what happens to the gender pay gap after adjusting for attributes like age and education, and comparing men and women in the same occupations. It turns out that the gap shrinks — but does not disappear.

Read on to find the industries with the biggest pay gaps.

— By CNBC's Kelley Holland
Posted 23 March 2016

Pay for those in health care varies widely, from orderlies and aides to rock star surgeons. And to some extent, pay gaps exist because of who pursues which medical fields.

Among doctors, for example, only 37 percent of anesthesiologists, a highly compensated specialty, are women, but women account for 71 percent of pediatricians, who are among the lowest paid.

The Glassdoor study looked at the pay gap for all health-care workers. The result: Even adjusting for training, skill level, experience, and the like, men still earn 7.2 percent more than women.

The insurance industry is heavily male, and that is one reason it was tied for the highest pay gap, at 7.2 percent, said Andrew Chamberlain, chief economist at Glassdoor.

"Men determine pay and promotions" in the field, for the most part, he said.

Metals and mining is a rugged industry, and that may account for the high concentration of men. As with insurance, the predominance of men likely helps to push the pay gap near the top of Glassdoor's list, at 6.8 percent.

Industry analyses also show that the mining workforce is aging, and wage gaps tend to widen as workers age.

The transportation and logistics business is heavily male, and it is becoming increasingly technical. Both factors are driving its gender pay gap to the fourth highest in the Glassdoor survey, at 6.7 percent.

"Technology is coming in on the logistics side. Database engineers and coders are doing really sophisticated logistics work," Chamberlain said.

The media world has changed dramatically in the last few years, but its gender pay gap persists. Media was the fifth highest in the Glassdoor survey, at 6.6 percent.

One reason is that media include many newer categories, like video-game designers, and pay gaps for those male dominated, tech-heavy jobs may be affecting the media industry's ranking.

The arts, entertainment and hospitality industries are not overly male, but they do have an adjusted gender pay gap of 6.6 percent. Jennifer Lawrence, Hollywood's highest paid female actor, famously earned millions of dollars less than her male counterpart in the year ending in mid-2015, but the difference exists in less rarefied parts of the business as well.

That may be due to consumers' own perceptions, Chamberlain said.

"If people will only go see movies where there are men on screen, male actors will be paid more," he said.

Finance was once known as a boy's club, and it has an above-average unadjusted pay gap of 6.4 percent — but it fares better than six other industries.

There are parts of the business that remain heavily male: Certain trading floors come to mind, for example. But the industry also brings in many young recruits, Chamberlain said.