Women earn more PhDs than men
| 14 September, 2010 | Adie Chan |
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Last year marked the first year that more women than men finished their doctoral degrees in the United States, according to The Washington Post. It’s a trend that’s been changing for decades, with the proportion of women rising throughout the educational sphere. Indeed, women already had a 3-to-2 majority at the undergraduate and graduate levels. And now,
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While almost 500 more Ph.D.’s were handed out to women last year, statistically, women and men are on par now (<2% difference). Isn't this where all of the human rights movements of the 1960's was trying to get us?
That said, the drop in men doing undergraduate and graduate work (3-2 ratio) suggests our educational system has become tilted to far in the direction of women and we should look at re-balancing the system to make sure both sexes can be equally successful. Equality doesn't mean women first after all…..
A colleague of mine said to a grad student last year, “If you aren’t black, Native American or female, your chances are low [of getting a professorship].” The student left. I had to tell that student that in today’s world it’s more true than not.
The phrase, “to far” should read too far. But it’s certainly been men first up until last year.
Let’s redress this current inequality fast!
well said, women ought to go on a payday. Unfortunately it’s still not quite even in plenty of other areas where guys have held a disproportionate advantage for ages.
Affirmative action has been successful. The role of breadwinner for men has been supplanted by women who now juggle a multitude of roles. One can understand the anger of many older white men who feel that they have been sidelined as a result.
Those “angry older white men” are usually the ones who come home after work and expect dinner to be ready on the table, the children already taken care of and the house clean. No wonder they’ve been sidelined! If they started to share responsibilities with their spouse, then they would learn very quickly that there’s more to living than just “winning the bread”.
Would looking at GPAs and CVs of the graduates show an unfair advantage for women? If it doesn’t then maybe the boys just need to hit the books if they want to “level the playing field.”
So there are more females than males graduating, but there is still a male dominance in pay levels for the jobs we all get when we graduate and for professorships for those newly minted PhDs. I
As a female grad student and a feminist, these numbers are highly encouraging! Women are already dominating the biosciences and arts and have cracked the sealing in the math and engineering departments. Alas, the pay scales are yet to tilt. I work for a prestigious Bio Tech/Pharma company and have been extremely discouraged by the lower pay rate for women compared to men. You
At this point, as women in science, we should spare ourselves the annecdote. There is clear data indicating that women in the pipeline in STEM related fields has increased and the ability to earn PhD Degrees has evened out in the 2008/09 Academic Year. The next logic step is now to do some stats of the current state of affairs by gender as of 2008/09 and follow it up over the next 5-10 years. Some areas that come to mind -in no particular order and not exclusive of many others- are, for instance:
a) Male vs Female faculty in tenured positions
b) Time to achieve tenure
c) Male vs Female in research oriented vs administratively oriented positions
d) Attrition rate of females (and how it compares with the attrition rate of females in the last decade)
e) In the case of basic sciences, success in NIH-funding (and other sources) by gender
g) Males vs Females in Academic “higher level appointments” (Presidents, Deans, Chairs, etc)
f) Pay scale bias (obviously)
f) etc, etc…
In other words, this “landmark” announced here will be meaningful if the evening out in numbers translates simultaneously into:
1) a decline in the attrition rate of women into the next levels
2) a decline in the time required for females to achieve equivalent success in the next levels of career development, and
3) an elimination on the gender biased pay-scales.
We do not want to see that now the bottle neck of achieving the degree dilutes into a multitude of subsequent bottle necks thus not translating into a balanced work force where both females and males can contribute in harmony their uniqueness.
On those lines, the wise words of ‘Abdu’l-Baha come to mind:
“The world of humanity has two wings; one is woman and the other man. Not until both wings are equally developed can the bird fly. Should one wing remain weak, flight is impossible. Not until the world of woman becomes equal to the world of man in the acquisition of virtues and perfection’s, can success and prosperity be attained as they ought to be.”