If you search for “gender gap in STEM education,” you’ll find piles of articles calling to reverse the national emergency of women who don’t like math. But there’s another gender gap that often gets less attention: women have started to consistently outnumber men in graduate schools, year after year, and not just in non-STEM fields.
Mark J. Perry at AEI Ideas analyzes the latest data from the Council of Graduate Schools (CGS), which found that women outpace men in graduate studies by some significant margins. For the fifth year running, women earned the majority of all doctoral degrees in 2013, and outnumbered men in graduate school enrollment 137.5 to 110.
Women also outnumbered men in 7 out of 11 graduate fields—one of them being biology, a STEM field.
Men have been losing out in the education arena for some time. Women are increasingly more likely to graduate high school and college than men. A study several years ago predicted that, by 2019, there will be three women for every two men enrolled in college.
With minorities, the story is largely the same: Hispanic women are more likely than Hispanic men to enroll in college. While black women used to be less likely than black men to enter college after high school, in recent years their enrollment rates have climbed while those of their male counterparts have remained the same. Some of the worst graduate school dropout rates are among minority men.
And in an economy where education has become an arms race, falling behind matters. Graduate school applications jumped 8.3 percent in 2009, with many undergraduate students realizing there is little demand for college grads in a market flooded with them.
Perry predicts that, if the report gets any attention, it will be hysteria over the fact that two of the fields in which men outnumber women are STEM fields. If the past few years of education reporting are any indication, he’s probably right.
