Gender inequality in higher education

In a new blog post at The Enterprise Blog, economist Mark J. Perry quotes Stuart Taylor’s recent National Journal article “Selective Concern On Sex Imbalances”:

It is an article of faith in the Obama administration, Congress, and much of the academic establishment that there are no innate differences between females and males in interests or cognitive capacities. From this dubious premise, they conclude that only pervasive, ongoing sexism and stereotypes can explain the huge gender disparities in academic fields—hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics—that are still male-dominated.

But advocates of this disparity-proves-discrimination dogma apply it quite selectively. They have shown virtually no concern about the small and shrinking percentages of males in colleges generally and in most academic fields.

The graph and chart below, produced by Professor Perry, “provide new evidence of the shrinking percentage of men graduating from college in general, and the female dominance in almost all academic fields at the graduate level.”

Perry writes:

The graph documents the complete gender reversal between 1970 and 2007 in the percentage of college degrees granted to men and women, from men earning 59 percent of all college degrees in 1970, followed by a gradual and consistent shift towards women, so that by 2007 slightly more than 59 percent of all college degrees were awarded to women (Department of Education data here). For the class of 2007, 144 women graduated with a college degree (at all levels) for every 100 men. The shrinkage of males in higher education that Taylor discusses is real and will continue to worsen each year—within eight years the Department of Education estimates that 167 women will earn associate’s degrees for every 100 men, and 148 women will earn master’s degrees for every 100 men.

The table above displays graduate school enrollment by gender in 2008 using data recently released by the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS). Women represented 58.9 percent of all graduate students in 2008, meaning that there were more than 143 women enrolled in graduate school for every 100 men. Further, women outnumbered men in 7 out of the 10 fields of graduate study tracked by the CGS, and were underrepresented in only three fields (business, engineering, and physical sciences). In the field of health science, women now outnumber men in graduate school by almost 4 to 1, and in both education and public administration graduate programs, there are about three females enrolled for every male.