While women outnumber men on campus, their later earnings remain stuck
Originally published by Jon Marcus for NPR
Madeline Szoo grew up listening to her grandmother talk of being laughed at when she spoke of going to college and becoming an accountant.
“‘No one will trust a woman with their money,'” relatives and friends would scoff.
When Szoo excelled at math in high school, she got her share of ridicule too — though it was slightly subtler. “I was told a lot, ‘You’re smart for a girl,'” she said. “I knew other girls in my classes who weren’t able to move past that.”
But Szoo had no doubt she would go to college, and she’s now a student at Northeastern University, studying chemical engineering and biochemistry. She plans on getting a Ph.D. and becoming a mentor to other women as they break through glass ceilings in fields such as hers.
Szoo is part of a long-running rise in the number of women pursuing higher education, while the percentage of students who are men has been declining — a trend that’s beginning to hit even male-dominated fields such as engineering and business. The number of college-educated women in the workforce has now overtaken the number of college-educated men, according to the Pew Research Center.
While this would seem to have significant implications for society and the economy — since college graduates make more money over their lifetimes than people who haven’t finished college — other obstacles have stubbornly prevented women from closing leadership and earnings gaps.
Women still earn 82 cents, on average, for every dollar earned by men, Pew reports — a figure that is nearly unchanged since 2002.
And after steadily increasing for more than a decade, the proportion of top managers of companies who are women declined last year, to less than 12%, according to the credit ratings and research company S&P Global.
“I think we’re getting there, but it’s slow,” said Szoo, taking a break from her studies in a conference room at a gleaming new engineering and robotics building on Northeastern’s campus.
That slow progress comes despite the fact that women now significantly outnumber men in college. The proportion of college students who are women is closing in on a record 60%, according to the U.S. Department of Education. Women who go to college are also 7 percentage points more likely than men to graduate, the National Student Clearinghouse Research Center reports.
While engineering is one college discipline in which men continue to outnumber women, Northeastern has since 2022 been admitting slightly more female than male first-year engineering students.
Still, “in no way have we declared victory,” said Elizabeth Mynatt, dean of Northeastern’s Khoury College of Computer Sciences. For one thing, many of the rest of the degrees that women earn are disproportionately in lower-paying fields, such as social work (89% women) and teaching (83% women).
Women still make up fewer than a quarter of engineering majors nationwide and fewer than half of business majors — fields that can lead to higher-paying jobs.
“Even as we see some shifts and changes, disproportionate numbers of men are pursuing pathways through higher education that tend to lead to higher earnings,” said Ruth Watkins, president of postsecondary education at the Strada Education Foundation, a nonprofit focused on postsecondary education and opportunity.
As in Szoo’s case, the disparity often begins in high school, where classes in subjects such as math, engineering and computer science “are still pretty gendered,” said Mynatt. “And if you don’t know you want to be a computer scientist as a sophomore in high school, you’re going to have a hard time getting into that program.”
As early as middle school, more than twice as many boys as girls say they plan to work in science or engineering-related jobs, one study by researchers at Harvard University found.