Women Earned More Doctoral Degrees

According to a recent report by the National Council on Graduate Schools, women received more doctoral degrees than men for the first time ever. In 2008-09, women earned 50.4% of doctoral degrees awarded in all disciplines, compared to 44% eight years prior. This is good news, as it shows that the parity reached first in undergraduate degrees and then masters degrees, has finally trickled up to the doctoral degrees. Some credit for this must go to Title IX, which prohibited gender caps and quotas that limited women's admissions in higher education, and helped prepare these future Ph.D.s by strengthening their educational opportunities in early education as well.

But despite this good news, it is too early to declare that discrimination in education is dead and buried. First, there is still a wage disparity. NPR coverage of the NCGS study noted that male professors with PhDs earn $87,200 on average -- $16,600 more than their female counterparts. Moreover, even though there is overall parity in doctoral degrees awarded, there are extreme disparities within disciplines. Men earned the vast majority of doctoral degrees in engineering, math and hard science, while women dominated fields like education, health sciences, and public administration. The belief that such polarization can be explained by innately different brains is rapidly losing scientific credibility, which requires us to examine those fields for the presence of bias, double-standards, or a structure that somehow tends to favor or support graduate students personal lives and obligations that are often gendered (i.e., pregnancy and childcare). Other possibilities: are men are deterred from helping professions by stigma or low earning potential? Are they able to climb the ladder in those fields without a ph.D.? While cheering the overall degree parity in doctoral degrees, the fact that many fields remain highly gendered should still be cause for concern.

Women Graduates Expect to Earn Less than Men

A recent study by Duquesne University professor Charles Wilf shows that women who graduate from college expect to be paid less than their male counterparts. The survey, called the Collegiate Seniors' Economic Expectation Research (SEER) Survey & Index, is intended to be administered annually and tracks trends in career expectations.

Fifty-one percent of women and 35 percent of men polled expect to earn under $30,000 in their first year after college. Twelve percent of women and 24 percent of men expect to earn more than $50,000. (A 2007 report by the American Association of University Women has similar findings: women earn 80 percent of what men make one year after college; that gap widens to 69 percent after 10 years.)

This gender gap in expected earnings results, at least in part, from the choice of academic major. Women who participated in the survey tended to major in the social sciences while men tended to major in fields like computer science and engineering, which generally have higher starting salaries and greater marketability. This finding only highlights the importance of encouraging women students to feel supported and mentored when pursuing fields such as computer science and engineering, something that many colleges and universities are still struggling to achieve.