gender: education

Philip Cohen, at Family Inequality, posted an interesting graph displaying 30-44-year-old women’s share of their household’s income by level of education:

The graph shows that, on average, women with higher levels of education have incomes closer to that of their husbands than women with lower levels of education.  Cohen writes:

It captures nicely both how women’s earning power within married couples has increased, and how that shift has been much greater for women with higher education.

In other words, the figure suggests that efforts to close the wage gap between men and women have been much more successful at the top of the economic ladder than the bottom.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Cross-posted at Jezebel.

A new report from the Centers for Disease Control (via Family Inequality) reveals that boys report less sex education than girls.

What teenagers report learning from school:

What teenagers report learning from their parents:

Compared to boys, then, girls report more guidance from school and significantly more from their parents. This probably reflects cultural ideas that boys naturally desire sex, have a positive sense of their own sexuality, and that nothing really bad can happen to them; in contrast, the risk that sex poses to girls’ reputations and the possibility of sexual violence and pregnancy often shape how educators and parents manage their emerging sexualities.

Or it might be an artifact of self-reporting.  Thoughts?

See also our popular post on STI, pregnancy, and abortion rates in the U.S. versus select European countries (hint: the U.S. doesn’t come out smelling like roses).

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Dmitriy T.M. and Jeff H. sent in a link to Mapping the Measure of America, a website by the Social Science Research Council that provides an amazing amount of information about various measures of economic/human development in the U.S. Here’s a map showing median personal (not household) earnings in 2009:

The District of Columbia has the highest, at $40,342; the lowest is Arkansas, at $23,470 (if you go to their website, you can scroll over the bars on the left and it will list each state and its median income, or you can hover over a state).

You can break the data down by race and sex as well. Here’s median personal income for Native American women, specifically (apparently there is only sufficient data to report for a few states):

Native American women’s highest median income, in Washington ($22,181), is  lower than the overall median income in Arkansas, which is the lowest in the U.S. as we saw above.

Here is the percent of children under age 6 who live below the poverty line (for all races):

Life expectancy at birth differs by nearly 7 years between the lowest — 74.81 years in Mississippi — to the highest — 81.48 years in Hawaii:

It’s significantly lower for African American men, however, with a life expectancy of only 66.22 years in D.C. (again, several states had insufficient data):

The site has more information than I could ever fully discuss here (including crime rates, various health indicators, all types of educational attainment measures, commuting time, political participation, sex of elected officials, environmental pollutants, and on and on), and it’s fairly addictive searching different topics, looking data up by zip code to get an overview of a particular area, and so on. Have fun!

In case you haven’t yet seen enough evidence that men are treated as the neutral category, and women as a sub-category, Arielle C. and Ellie B. sent in another example, found on Neatorama. Here we have two rulers that list some important scientists throughout history, helpfully separated into Rulers of Science and Great Women Rulers of Science:

The only full image I could find of them is small, but I do see Marie Curie listed on both rulers. I can’t make out any other women on the Rulers of Science, but the text is very small and blurry in the image.

The point here isn’t really about the rulers themselves. I’ll give the company credit for trying to create a product that highlights women’s contributions to scientific discovery, only one of which would apparently be considered important enough to get a mention if we didn’t get a whole ruler all to ourselves. What’s noteworthy is the cultural repetition, experienced over and over in myriad large and small ways, of the message that default humans are male unless specifically marked otherwise, and that women aren’t neutral humans.


In this ten-minute talk, super-famous psychologist Philip Zimbardo talks about cultural differences in the perception and orientation towards time… and  how that translates into boys dropping out of high school and underperforming in college.  How does he make the link?  Watch:

Via BoingBoing.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Nia A. sent in a chart from an article in the Revista Española de Cardiología about gender in medical schools in Spain. Overall, the medical field is increasingly feminized. In 2008, 73% of new medical school graduates (licenciadas en medicina) were female (note that in Spain they use commas where we would use a decimal in a number in the U.S., so 73,04 = 73.04):

It’s a significant increase, but women also earned a significant majority of medical degrees by 1998, so this isn’t a new phenomenon. Women also earned just over half (52%) of Ph.D.s in 2008 (tesis doctorales aprobadas).

When we look at faculty (docentes en la universidad, total), women are a distinct minority, making up only 20%. This varies quite a bit by position (I’m relying on Nia’s comments and Wikipedia to translate Spain’s academic ranks to the U.S. equivalent; please let me know if I’ve misunderstood a category):

  • The percentage of women serving as teaching assistants (profesoras ayudantes) has gone down from 72% in 1998 to 50% in 2008 (the only area where the percentage of women decreased).
  • Women make up 22% of lecturers (profesoras asociadas, who may or may not be tenured) and 9% of titulares de universidad (which I think are what we would call associate professors in the U.S.). They make up a sizable minority of contratadas doctoras, a tenured position similar to a professor (42%).
  • Women made up a larger percentage of titulares de escuela universitaria (53%), a position at non-Ph.D. granting and technical colleges; however, this position was abolished in some academic restructuring in 2007. Those holding it keep their jobs, but no new hires will be made.
  • However, women make up only a tiny portion (4%) of catedráticas de universidad (roughly the same as a full professor — received tenure and then met a number of other requirements for promotion). Only this group is eligible to become a rector (university president)

This pattern is widespread in universities (see our post on engineering and tech faculty), and likely due to a number of factors. There is always lag time between demographic changes in a field and changes in faculty, since unless a lot of new positions are created, potential faculty have to wait until current ones retire. All things being equal, we’d expect the % of women faculty to go up steadily over time as more female Ph.D. candidates apply for positions previously held by men. Of course, women have been earning the majority of medical degrees since before 1998, so there’s been sufficient time for gender changes in the field to affect the composition of faculty.

But all things aren’t equal in university hiring. Historically women have faced significant gender discrimination, and this continues to occur. However, a large body of evidence indicates that family/work conflicts play a huge role. Because women still, as a group, have primary responsibility for childcare, they are more likely than men to face difficulties balancing family time with work requirements, such that they are less likely to advance to tenure or promotions. They are more likely to opt out of more demanding positions — applying to be Dean, say, or accepting a position at a research-heavy university as opposed to a community college — but also find that they may be “mommy tracked” by hiring committees who assume they’ll be taking too much time out of the paid workforce to raise their kids (and often make these assumption whether or not the woman has or plans to have kids or stay home with them).

I also suspect that if the data were broken down into specialty, we’d see more women earning degrees or teaching in areas associated with women or the family (ob/gyns, for example) as opposed to more masculinized specialties, often perceived as very high-status, like neurosurgery (we see more women than men in pediatrics and ob/gyn in the U.S., for instance).

Will the percent of female med school faculty in Spain and elsewhere increase? Undoubtedly over time it will. But due to factors including those I just discussed, it’s also likely that the increase will lag significantly behind what we’d expect just based on the number of women earning medical degrees.

Joel S. sent in a link to an article by Gonzalo Frasca at Serious Game Source about a management simulation game the U.K. branch of Intel released back in 2004. It was called The Intel IT Manager Game: The Simulation of an IT Department and was a free promotional program:

The player had to hire IT employees, as well as manage a budget and buy computer equipment, the latter of which was either generic or Intel-branded.

When you started out you selected the sex of your IT manager:

But then, when you went to hire employees…they forgot to include an option to hire any women. You could get a guy with a green mohawk, though:

After a few days the game was taken down and Intel said they were making revisions; it re-launched a month later, this time with  female employee options, including this one, whose hair looks like alien antennae to me:

You can see the current version here.

Frasca argues that such oversights are more important than the lack of female avatars in some video games:

The Intel game is not merely an entertainment product: it is a piece of corporate advertising that simulated an IT workplace for an audience of real IT workers. Unlike what happens in the fantasy world of Fable, gender inequality is a very real problem for IT workers.

The post mentions the National Center for Women and Information Technology, so I went over and looked at some of their data. Gender of students who take the SAT and say they plan on choosing computer/IT majors:

If anything, it looks like the gender segregation of computer/IT occupations is increasing:

Broken down by gender and race/ethnicity:

Asian/Asian American women are actually overrepresented compared to their percentage of the U.S. population (all Asian Americans make up just about 5% of the entire U.S. population, obviously Asian American women make up less than that, though I don’t recall the exact proportion). All other racial/ethnic groups listed here are significantly underrepresented in computing jobs.

The percent of patents in various fields invented by women in the early ’80s and the early…’00s (?):

Frasca suggests that one reason for the Intel snafu might be a lack of women working on the project — if there were women, they might have noticed the lack of female employee options. That’s possible. It’s also likely that having more women in a workplace makes their male colleagues more aware, and thus a guy might think, “hey, maybe we should add some women employees to the game.”

This is totally anecdotal, I know, but forgive me. I have a number of female friends who work in computing jobs; almost all of them have generally found themselves to be the only, or one of just a few, women in their office. And with few exceptions, they say that the men they work with aren’t openly hostile or unfriendly. They don’t deviously exclude them from projects or social events or make lots of sexist remarks. But they forget they exist (for instance, inviting everyone else in the office to lunch where they talk about new project possibilities, and then seeming genuinely sorry later when they realize they left out the only woman in the office…but doing it again anyway).

And things like the Intel game reflect and reinforce the invisibility of women in such fields.

Crossposted at Jezebel.

Andrea sent us a link to a post at Carpe Diem about the growing sex gap in college degrees. Current Department of Education estimates have women earning over 60% of all college degrees within 8 years:

A breakdown by type of college degree:

Nothing new there, in that scholars have been aware of this pattern for a while now. The author of the post on Carpe Diem uses this data to thus argue that women’s centers are no longer needed on campuses. He also asks,

Didn’t the “journey toward equity” that is mentioned in the book [he discussed] end back in 1981 when women started earning a greater share of college degrees than men?

This comes down to a question of what equality would mean. Does equality mean simply that men and women make up about half of those in any given institution? What about the continuing differences in the types of majors men and women choose, with women particularly underrepresented in engineering and the natural sciences? Or that female college graduates still make less than male college graduates? Even among men, attendance rates vary greatly by race and class.

This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be concerned that the gap is increasing, or that it doesn’t matter if men aren’t going to college at the same rates women are. But a bean-counting attitude toward issues of equity — that if there are equal or greater numbers of one group in an institution, they have automatically overcome any and all inequality — obscures a lot of information. For instance, a workplace could have very similar percentages of male and female employees…one group working as the lower-paid secretaries and assistants to the other.

My courses are overwhelmingly female. From that perspective, any inequity is in the direction of hurting men. On the other hand, my male students very rarely miss class because they had a sick child they had to stay home to care for or their childcare plans fell through. Issues such as sexual violence on campus, which affect female students more than male ones, might also indicate that paying attention to women’s issues on campus might not be obsolete quite yet.

Anyway, I think it’s an interesting case for starting us thinking about what sex and gender equality on campus would look like. Among other things…would men’s and women’s centers have to be mutually exclusive? Couldn’t we address the needs of male students without seeing it as a zero-sum game in which to do so we have to take away services provided to female students?