The chart above displays the female shares of US bachelor’s degrees annually from 1971 to 2019 for the 16 major academic fields according to recently updated data from the Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics. A few observations and comments:
1. In 2019, women more than 62% of the bachelor’s degrees in 9 out of the 16 academic fields: Health Professions (84.3% and the greatest gender imbalance for either sex for the 16 majors), Public Administration (82.7% and the field with the second-highest gender imbalance), Education (82.0% and the field with the third-highest female share and the greatest share ever), Psychology (79.1% and a record high female share), English (71.3% and a record female share), Foreign Languages (69.1%), Communication and Journalism (65.6%, a new record high), Biology (63.2%, a new record high), and Visual and Performing Arts (62.2%).
2. Women have earned a majority of degrees in Biology every year since 1988, and have earned more than 60% of those degrees in 9 of the last 18 years, and each of the last three years including a peak 63.2% share in 2019. In 2019, there were 172 women majoring in biology for every 100 men – a huge gender disparity favoring women in a major STEM field. And yet don’t we hear all the time about a shortage of women in STEM? That’s certainly not the case in biology, but that significant overrepresentation of women in a STEM field receives no attention. In fact, women majoring in biology are still receiving generous scholarship and fellowship funding at universities like Fordham that isn’t available to their male counterparts.
3. In 6 of the 9 fields above in Item #1 above, women have never earned fewer than 60% of bachelor’s degrees in any year since 1971: Health Professions, Public Administration, Education, English, Foreign Languages, and Visual/Performing Arts. For Psychology, women have earned a majority share of bachelor’s degrees every year since 1974, a 60% share or greater starting in 1979, a 70% share or greater starting in 1988, and a 75% share or greater starting in 1999.
4. For the four academic fields of Business, Architecture, Math and Statistics, and Physical Sciences, women earned a slight minority of those degrees in 2019 ranging between 40.6% for Physics and 48.1% for Architecture (a record high). For the other two of the four fields, women earned 42.5% of Math/Statistics degrees and 46.7% of Business degrees. For degrees in Business, the female share exceeded 50% in 2002, 2003, and 2004 but then has gradually declined since then to a 46.7% share in 2019, the lowest share since 1987.
5. Over the 1971 to 2019 period, the three largest increases in the female shares of degrees were in Business (from 9.1% to 46.9% = +37.6 percentage points), Architecture (from 11.9% to 48.1% = +36.2 percentage points) and Psychology (from 44.4% to 79.1% +34.7 percentage points).
6. In 2019, the female shares of bachelor’s degrees increased in 13 of the 16 academic fields from 2018 and declined slightly only for Business (-0.3%), Health (-0.2%) and Public Administration (-0.1%). The biggest annual increases in 2019 by academic field a 1.0 percentage point increase in the female shares of both architecture and biology as both reached new record high shares of 48.1% and 63.2% respectively.
7. As can be seen in the chart above, there are only two academic fields where women were significantly underrepresented in 2019 and have been historically: Engineering (22.7%) and Computer Science (20.6%). It’s interesting to note that the female share of Computer Science degrees increased every year between 1972 and 1984 when it reached a peak of 37.1% before falling almost every year since then to a low of 17.6% in 2008, less than half the share in 1984. Over the last decade, the female share of Computer Science has gradually increased by 2.8 percentage points from 17.8% in 2009 to 20.6% in 2019. But for whatever reason(s), women’s interest in pursuing degrees in Computer Science peaked 35 years ago and declined steadily ever since to below 20% for more than a decade between 2007 and 2017 before a small uptick in recent years to 20% in 2018 and 20.6% in 2019.
8. Interestingly, there has been a similar though not quite as dramatic decrease in female interest in majoring in Mathematics/Statistics in recent years. After increasing steadily over time and almost reaching parity in 2001 when the female share of Math degrees reached 48.2%, the share has steadily decreased over the last 16 years and fell below 42% in 2017 for the first time since 1979 before increasing in 2018 to 42.4%.
9. For all of the attention being paid to a shortage of women in Computer Science and for all of the massive amounts of resources being devoted to “coercing” young girls to become more interested in Computer Science (e.g., Girls Who Code, Black Girls Code, Latina Girls Code, Native Girls Code, Project Scientist, Expanding Your Horizons, and hundreds of summer STEM/Code camps) there hasn’t been a lot of progress made in terms of increasing the female share of Computer Science bachelor’s degrees (see chart above).
And assuming that gender parity in Computer Science degrees is the ultimate goal of gender activists, progressives, and feminists, it will take almost 100 years until the year 2093 to reach parity, given the gender difference in growth trends in Computer Science majors over the last ten years of 8.5% per year for men and 10.5% for women, and the 2019 gender imbalance of 70,319 male Computer Science majors vs. 18,314 females.
Bottom Line: The academic interests of men and women vary significantly as reflected in the female shares of college degrees by academic field over the last nearly half-century displayed in the chart above. Some of those gender differences have changed over time and converged to parity or near parity (e.g., Business, Biology, Architecture, Mathematics/Statistics, Social Sciences, and Physical Sciences). Other gender differences/imbalances have remained fairly stable over time including female over-representation in Health Professions, Public Administration, Education, Psychology, English, Communications and Foreign Languages. The one trend that departs from the other patterns is the significant decline in the female share of Computer Science degrees since the mid-1980s.
What is maybe the most striking feature of the patterns displayed in the chart above is the relative stability of the female share of bachelor’s degrees in all 16 academic majors this century. The female share of four of those fields has changed by 1% of less (Economics/History, Health Professions, Physics) and nine have changed by 3% or less (the four above plus Visual/Performing Arts, Business, Foreign Languages, Psychology and Public Administration). And 11 of the changes in degrees by major since 2000 have been increases in the female share, and only four majors have seen a decrease in the female share (Business, Computer Science, Foreign Languages and Math), while the female share of Economics/History didn’t change.
The gender differences in college degrees by academic field will likely continue to shift gradually over time, but major departures from the current pattern of fairly stable shares by gender are unlikely. Let me conclude with the following question.
Q: Can we just accept the fact that there are gender differences in academic interests, reflected in their voluntary choices for college degree programs and majors, and stop with the selective obsession about female under-representation in Computer Science and Engineering while ignoring the significant female over-representation in 9 out of the 16 fields above, and the significant female over-representation in college degrees overall for associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s and doctor’s degrees?
