Today’s trends
The woman-dominated majors of today are unsurprising to anyone who has attended a large university in the U.S.:
- Health Professions (85% women): nursing assistant, veterinary assistant, dental assistant, etc.
- Public Administration (82%): social work, public policy, etc.
- Education (79%): pre-K, K-12, higher education, etc.
- Psychology (77%): cognitive psychology, clinical psychology, etc.
Surprisingly to me, most of the STEM majors aren’t doing as bad gender disparity-wise as I expected. 40-45% of the degrees in Math, Statistics, and the Physical Sciences were conferred to women in 2012. Even better, a majority of Biology degrees in 2012 (58%) were earned by women. This data tells me that we don’t really have a STEM gender gap in the U.S.: we have an ET gender gap!
This ET gender gap has severe consequences. Computer Science and Engineering majors have stagnated at less than 10% of all degrees conferred in the U.S. for the past decade, while the demand for employees with programming and engineering skills continue to outpace the supply every year. Compare this to more woman-dominated majors such as Business and Health Professions, which comprise 1/3 of all college degrees in 2012 when combined.
Provided that far more women attend college than men, it seems the best way to meet the U.S.’s growing need for skilled programmers and engineers is to focus on recruiting more women — of any race or ethnicity — into Computer Science and Engineering majors. The big question, of course, is “How?” With the constant issues of subtle (and sometimes not-so-subtle) discrimination against women in these male-dominated majors, we have quite a tough task on our hands.
Looking at the historical trends, maybe we have something to learn from Architecture and the Physical Sciences, given that they were in our position only 40 years ago.
