A recent study from the Census Bureau took a look at the relationship between education and the gender wage gap. According to the data, increasing the number of women with bachelor’s degrees won’t change difference in earnings.
Below is a graph from the Census Bureau showing the male/female gender split, ages 25 to 64, by degree topic and median annual earnings in 2022.
Whatever the category, men earned more per year than women. At the top, electrical engineering, it was $123,800 to $105,200. Computer science — $115,500 to $91,990. Mechanical engineering was $108,000 to $92,380. Going down the graph, men continue to have an economic advantage. To make that clearer, look at the graph that shows the percentage men have over women in each discipline in 2022.
There’s an irony, as women represent increased percentages over men of those with bachelor’s degrees (24.1% to 22.9%) and master’s degrees (11.9% to 9.5%), as Census Bureau data shows. But for professional (1.3% to 1.8%) and doctorate (1.8% to 2.4%) degrees, more men have them, and they are often a key to the highest levels of pay in a given field.
Even in non-STEM types of degrees, men have advantages in median annual earnings. Family and consumer sciences include educational instruction and library occupations; management occupations; office and administrative support occupations; community and social service occupations; and business and financial operations occupations. In that grouping, men had a 36.5% median annual earnings advantage.
These numbers don’t explain exactly what factors might be at work. Gender seems clear, but is it a choice of particular career type in a field? Socialization of women to be less effective in negotiations around compensation? It’s not even possible to tell how frequently people enter a career that has nothing to do with their degree. It’s impossible to say with this level of data.
Another factor, though, is clear in a separate graph like the one below showing shares by gender of degree fields.
Women strongly dominate the fields that also happen to pay less. Here is another graph from the same report.
This shows how as the concentration of women in a field of study increases, the amount of compensation. Nursing is an obvious outlier, though an unusual one. Otherwise, the other areas show a coherent and strong pattern.
“Social scientists for decades have been trying to identify factors contributing to the gender wage gap, which these data show existed even among holders of bachelor’s degrees in the same field of study,” the Census said. “These differences in earnings may be related to differences in occupation, work experience, full-time versus part-time work and/or educational attainment beyond a bachelor’s degree.”
Is there some inherent reason why? The data suggests differently. Perhaps. Should the jobs being done be paid more because they perhaps deserve more than currently assigned? Maybe.
Such controversies, as they play out, show how complicated the world is and how difficult it can be to get to social, business, and governmental policies to address a problem.