Women now dominate higher education, but we have to make smarter choices if we want to achieve as much as men

For every black man who’s earned an associate’s degree, two black women have earned one. For every five Asian American men who’ve earned a bachelor’s, six Asian American women have. For every 10 Hispanic men who’ve earned a doctorate, 13 Hispanic women have. For every five white men who’ve earned a master’s, more than eight white women have.

Per new data flagged by Mark J. Perry at the American Enterprise Institute, women now dominate higher education, at least as far as degree qualification goes. The gender disparity, which some will celebrate rather than wish for gender parity, elucidates a truth that women studying the “gender pay gap” have known for years: Women need to make better choices.

The gender pay gap is really a gender lifetime earnings gap. Employers generally do not discriminate between equally qualified and experienced men and women for the same jobs. Rather, the lifetime earnings gap arises due to fewer years worked and thus a dropoff in human capital that limits earnings potential when back on the job. If you want to lay blame, then lay it at the feet of women’s propensity to become the primary caretakers of their children. Still, the future looks bright for women to really have it all. With an already increasing portion of the nation working from home and technological improvements in homemaking and transportation, the future of parenting looks freer than ever for full-time mothers to work from home, at least part time.

Motherhood isn’t the only factor here. Women, on average, simply make poorer life choices when it comes to maximizing their earning capacity. That starts with their tendency to choose fields with poor financial returns.

Petroleum engineering is almost universally accepted as the most lucrative bachelor’s degree in the country today, and more than four out of five of its recipients are men. That’s par for the course for engineering, perhaps the most prosperous field on average, as a discipline. Women account for fewer than 20% of all bachelor’s degrees in engineering, with even fewer in the extremely lucrative metallurgical, mining, nuclear, and computer disciplines of engineering. Fewer than two out of five physical science and technologies degrees go to women. In the fields of mathematics and statistics, another domain with high-earning potential, women fare better, but at just 43% of the degree field, they have a ways to go to achieve gender parity.

In contrast, women dominate in the degree fields of visual and performing arts, foreign languages, and education. A whopping seven in 10 degrees in area, ethnic cultural, gender, and group studies go to the fairer sex. The result is a lifetime earnings pay gap that hinders our GDP from reaching its maximum potential. Women can make more, and they will if they make better choices in their education.

When women choose wisely, the story is quite different.

One domain where women have come to dominate is medical sciences. The weekly earnings gap between men and women in that field is almost nonexistent. The same is true for a vast swath of the healthcare industry, and male and female health science Ph.D. holders make the exact same salaries on average.

So no, don’t blame sexism. If your goal is to earn more, then choose a major with greater career potential. And if it isn’t, then don’t blame sexism when your lifetime earnings don’t quite match up.