By Laura Cameron •
Over the past two decades, college-aged women in the U.S. have not only caught up with their male counterparts, but they are now surpassing them when it comes to college enrollment and the completion of four year degrees.
This has led to a new gender gap in higher education in the U.S., not only affecting enrollment rates, but also other social factors in college and later in life. Currently, over 57 percent of the nation’s college attendees are female when public and private school stats are combined. Men are becoming the new minority on campuses across the country.
“What we’ve seen is that over time is there has been a shift in the opportunity structure for women to participate more in formal education and also to be successful in education,” said
Dr. Donna Bobbitt-Zeher, a professor of sociology at Ohio State.
Between 1900 to 1940, men and women attended college in almost equal numbers; however, women fell behind in terms of gaining their certification or bachelor degrees. During this time, female occupations consisted primarily of jobs including teachers, social workers, nurses, and librarians. According to the National Bureau of Economic Research , a highpoint of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1.
Female college graduates in the late 40s and early 70s had a high fertility rate after marriage, being the mothers of the ‘Baby Boom’ generation and thus causing them to drift away from education in order to raise their children and create a stable family life, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research.
“The desire didn’t change nearly as much as the ability to do it. There used to be a lot more formal road blocks for women who wanted to go on to higher education or get the highest degrees out there. Those are some of the places we’ve seen the shift where we get into the mid 80s and women kind of catch up with men,” said Dr. Bobbitt-Zeher.
In 1982, the numbers begin to shift significantly in favor of women who were not only enrolled in higher education institutions but who also successfully matriculated through their education and obtained degrees.
Causes of the Gender Gap
Contributions to the college gender gap begin well before college.
“You see it from Kindergarten,” said Thomas DiPrete, the co-author of The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools. “Girls as a group do better in school than boys. That’s a core determinant of the gender gap, and it’s not because girls are smarter than boys. Girls and boys on average are equally smart. Boys do a little better at math and girls do better at reading.”
According to American Psychologist, Dr. Leonard Sax, five factors are responsible for the decline in school performance among boys: video games, prescription drugs, endocrine disruptors, devaluation of masculinity in popular culture, and teaching methods.
In addition to these five factors, he believes the way young boys are being taught isn’t making school appealing and may lead to them falling behind as they matriculate through their education and make them less likely to pursue higher education.
Unbalanced Ratio
Out of the top five colleges with the largest undergraduate population, Ohio State University is the only school with a higher male ratio. Over 60% of its student body is male; however, this is not very common amongst other schools.
The University of Central Florida is the biggest public college in terms of on-campus enrollment numbers in the U.S. UCF has a total undergraduate enrollment of 56,972, with a gender distribution of 46 percent male students and 54 percent female students.
While some schools may be able to find some parity in terms of finding a more balanced ratio than others, the graduation rate of women continues to surpass men. Men who do enroll in college are more likely than women to drop out, and they graduate at lower rates, the Education Department reports.
According to the Department of Education, women earned 57.3 percent of all bachelor’s degrees in 2016, which reflects a “whopping 25.6 percent gender college degree gap for men, who earned only 816,912 bachelor’s degrees in 2016 compared to 1,098,173 degrees earned by women,” notes Mark J. Perry, a scholar at American Enterprise Institute and professor of economics and finance at the University of Michigan.
Some men feel like they have more alternatives than girls do. If opposed to a four-year college, more often men look to 18-month vocational-education programs or two-year technical institutes where they have the potential to make just as much money as any woman with a Bachelor’s degree.
“The technical institutes also have these majors that might appeal to men in a gender segregated way. The debt is a real thing, the possibility of taking on debt,” according to Yolonda Wilson, Professor of Philosophy at Howard University. “For a lot of everyday people on the ground, they’re not seeing their incomes rise or level out in the way that they were beforehand. The economy is difficult for everyone, and that may be one of the reasons that is pushing young men into these technical institutes.”
Out of the top 5 two-year trade schools, only one school, Lancaster County Career and Technology Center had higher female enrollment numbers.
Students enrolled at Lancaster County Career and Technology Center in full-time Undergraduate programs are majority White Female (27.5%), followed by Black or African American Female (7.11%) and Hispanic or Latino Female (6.4%).
Effects on Marriage, Pay, & Gender Dominated Fields
The college gender gap has a larger effect on society. The gender gap can have an effect on several aspects of society including marriage, gender dominance in certain majors and professions, and the pay gap according to experts and research.
College is where many hope to meet their future husband or wife at their alma mater.
According to a survey conducted by the Independent Women Forum, three out of five female college students agree that college is where they hope to meet their mate
Statistics show that marriages with differing education levels more often end in divorce than couples with the same educational achievements. Women who set college educational goals may not want to settle for men with less motivation – at least when it comes to academics.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, marriage patterns differed markedly by age at marriage and by educational attainment.
“One thing we have seen is historically is gender segregation in schooling, so if you’re thinking about college majors, things like engineering have historically been male-dominated. Majors like education are more female dominated. There is a relationship between the gender composition of majors and the pay gap. It tends to be the more male-dominated the field is, you tend to see higher wages,” according to Dr. Bobbitt-Zeher.
Although women make up a large number of the college population, there are still gender gaps within specific majors. According to recent research, fashion design, interior design, social work and nursing, and occupational therapy are largely made up of women. Many of these fields require creativity or compassion for others, which are traits, encouraged to girls at a young age. On the other hand, fields such as constructional management, mechanical engineering, electrical engineering, physics, aerospace engineering, civil engineering, and computer science are heavily male populated. Noticeably, the male-dominated fields fall into math and science categories. Many of these fields are paid more due to the level of expertise required to obtain jobs in these fields.
“Philosophy is situated in the humanities. The humanities are in the other disciplines very heavy on women. Philosophy is very male-dominated, especially compared to other humanities disciplines; however, I think given the demographics at Howard, you end up with a lot more women philosophy majors. What we don’t see is as many black women going on to grad school in philosophy. There are only about 50 black women PHDs in the country,” said Wilson.
People with a bachelor’s degree or higher earn 14 percent more than they did in 1979,on average, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics; people with only a high school degree earn 12 percent less. Jobs that do not require a college degree tend to pay less. In the majority of occupations that require a college degree, workers earn an average annual wage of at least $65,000, compared the median annual wage across all occupations of $37,690.
These numbers begin to shift in favor of men, and when researchers begin to look at the intersectionality of gender and race, the college gender gap widens.
In 2012, women earned just 80.9 percent of the salaries of their male counterparts. Many Americans struggle to make ends meet due to the wage gap. While women earn less than their male counterparts, 49 percent of employed women in the United States, including 42 percent of working women with children, say they work primarily because they are their family's main breadwinner, according to a joint NBC News-Wall Street Journal poll.
On average, women are paid 20 percent less than men. Depending on field and race, it could be even less. In industries like tech, women are offered lower starting salaries than their male counterparts for the same job at the same company 63 percent of the time, and, some employees, still experience discrimination even at companies like Google, according to CNBC.
“Women are pursuing these four year degrees. Looking at Howard alone 69% of our student body is women yet our pay doesn’t catch up with that or track that. Even as we are getting more professional opportunities, it’s not like we are making tons of money to reward our education to the extent that the national mythology that education is the great equalizer, you’ll have all the opportunities, and the world will be your oysters. The reality is the economy doesn’t support that anymore,” said Wilson.
Women in STEM
Over the past few years, there has been an extreme push for women to pursue careers in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM). According to a recent study by KPMG, 73% of female university students don’t plan to pursue a career in STEM.
“It’s still the case that physical science and engineering fields are heavily male-dominated. Women have caught up in some field including life sciences. They even exceed men. It’s not that STEM is closed to women, but there is still this gendered pattern,” said DiPrete.
While women make up 46 percent of the overall workforce, women in STEM make up only 14 percent of American engineers. This statistic is up from 5.8 percent in the early 1980s, but it’s remains low compared to other industries, according to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers.
Hoping to increase women’s involvement in STEM, several programs have been initiated to supplement this mission and promote more young girls and women to pursue STEM areas of study. Programs including National Girls Collaborative Project, National Math and Science Initiative, Million Women Mentors, and Scientista hope to build a stronger community of women in STEM.
Women are often discouraged at an early age from seeing themselves as scientists or engineers. A 2010 research report by AAUW, Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) presents in-depth yet accessible profiles of eight key research findings that point to environmental and social barriers — including stereotypes, gender bias, and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities — that continue to block women’s progress in STEM.
Bridging the Gap
“Part of the challenge is integration is very slow, and the other part of it is, it is often very one directional. Women are trying to integrate. You don’t see men integrating into what is the traditionally more feminine majors or jobs, and that’s probably because there’s not a whole lot of incentive for them to do it. The physical incentive is not there,” said Dr. Bobbitt-Zeher.
Researchers have not found a common solution to bridging the college gender gap; however, co-authors, Thomas A. DiPrete and Claudia Bauchmann’s research shows that “boys have less understanding than girls about how their future success in college and work is directly linked to their academic effort in middle school and high school.”
They argue that making that connection clearer could go a long way toward closing the gender gap in higher education.