In our last post on our new book, The Rise of Women, we presented seven charts that document the rapid gains women have made in education during the latter half of the 20th century. Women are more likely than men to persist in college, obtain degrees, and enroll in graduate school. But even as the number of advanced degrees earned by women has increased dramatically, gender segregation in fields of study has stubbornly persisted. Men and women in college choose different majors, a trend that has major implications for gender segregation in the workplace. The following two charts, also taken from The Rise of Women, show the academic trends among male and female college students:

Authors Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann explain the data presented above:

These figures demonstrate that sharp differences persist in the distribution of degrees within each gender. No single field of the seven dominates the male distribution, though business degrees have constituted the largest share since the late 1970s, while engineering and other health and education degrees constitute the second and third largest shares. The natural and life sciences constitute the smallest shares throughout the thirty-five-year period.

The trends for females in figure 8.4 look quite different than the trends for males. First, degrees in other health and in education constitute a much larger share of the degrees for women than for men. This category constituted over 60 percent of the degrees earned by women in the early 1970s, and its share fell toward 40 percent as opportunities for women increased in other fields. Over the past twenty years, however, this area has held a steady and even slightly increasing share of the advanced degrees for women. Another prominent trend shown in figure 8.4 concerns business degrees, which constituted a rapidly growing share of degrees for women until the mid-1980s and a more gradually growing share thereafter. Degrees in medicine, dentistry, and law also constituted a growing share of all degrees earned by women until the mid-1980s, but since then their share has gradually fallen, even though the female share of all degrees awarded in these areas has grown continually throughout this period (see figure A.12). Degrees in physical science, mathematics, and engineering have constituted a relatively small share of all degrees earned by women from the early 1970s to the present day (emphasis added).

Later this week, we will examine why more women do not choose to study engineering or the physical sciences.