Table of the Day: Bachelor’s degrees for the Class of 2016 by field and gender. Oh, and the overall 25.6% degree gap for men!

Summary: 

  1. Overall, women earned 57.34% of all bachelor’s degrees in 2016
  2. Women now have an uninterrupted 35-year record of earning the majority of bachelor’s degrees in the US that started back in 1982
  3. Female share of computer science degrees (nearly 19%) in 2016 was about the same as the female share of Google’s tech jobs  in that year (20.6%). And the female share of Google’s not-tech jobs (54%) is just slightly higher than the female share of business bachelor’s degrees (47%)

Does it make sense to say that women should have 50% of all the computer programing jobs when they only have 21% of all the CS degrees? 

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AEI posts the data. MJP makes the following observations: 

The table above shows the number of bachelor’s degrees by major field of study and gender for the College Class of 2016, ranked by the female share of each field (based on recently released Department of Education data here). A few observations:

1. Overall, women earned 57.34% of all bachelor’s degrees in 2016, which means there were 134 women graduating from college that year for every 100 men. It also reflects a whopping 25.6% gender college degree gap for men, who earned only 816,912 bachelor’s degrees in 2016 compared to 1,098,173 degrees earned women.

2. Although data are not yet available for bachelor’s degrees by field and gender in 2017, the Department of Education reported last month that women earned 57.3% of all bachelor’s degrees last year, so women now have an uninterrupted 35-year record of earning the majority of bachelor’s degrees in the US that started back in 1982. The Class of 2017 was also noteworthy for being the 18th straight college class that had more than 57% female representation for earning bachelor’s degrees – a milestone first reached by the Class of 2000.

3. Women earned nearly 60% of degrees in biology in 2016, which is one of the fields in the STEM area that we hear so much about in terms of female under-representation. And actually, if you include health professions as a STEM field, women earned more STEM degrees in 2016 (318,714) than men (265,000) for degrees in the seven STEM fields above marked with an asterisk (*). Or if you count just biology, mathematics, and physical sciences (e.g., chemistry, physics, etc.) women earn a majority (53%) of those of those STEM degrees. It’s really only when you include engineering and computer science that men have an overall majority of STEM degrees.

4. Now that Google has been in the media spotlight since former Google engineer James Damore’s July 2017 diversity memo, it’s interesting to note that the female share of computer science degrees (nearly 19%) in 2016 was about the same as the female share of Google’s tech jobs  in that year (20.6%). And the female share of Google’s not-tech jobs (54%) is just slightly higher than the female share of business bachelor’s degrees (47%), assuming that a business degree might be the most common college degree required for those positions (marketing, sales, accounting, human resources, finance, etc.).

5. Note the wide variation in degrees by gender shares. Women earn the large majority of degrees in health professions, psychology, education, English and communication, and men earn the large majority of degrees in engineering, computer science, and theology.

https://www.aei.org/publication/table-of-the-day-bachelors-degrees-for-the-class-of-2016-by-field-and-gender-oh-and-the-overall-25-6-college-degree-gap-for-men/

Right-Mind