This is the third in a series of AEIdeas posts to celebrate Women’s History Month. The posts look at the progress women have made in different areas.
By now the story of the gains women have made in education attainment are broadly known. Today’s debate centers on how those gains are rewarded in the marketplace and what’s happening to men in terms of education and labor force participation.
It is worth quickly reviewing how far women have come. At the beginning of the 20th century, women received 19 percent of all bachelor’s degrees. By 1981, half were awarded to women, and in 2021–2022, the latest year for which data are available, women received slightly more than 58 percent of college degrees. According to the Pew Research Center, women ages 25–34 are more likely than men to have a bachelor’s degree in every racial and ethnic group.
Women have also made impressive gains in higher education. In 1900, 19 percent of master’s degrees were awarded to women. That figure climbed to nearly half in 1981, and in the most recent data, women received 62 percent of all master’s degrees. As for PhDs, Ed.Ds, MDs, DDS, and law degrees, women received only six percent at the turn of the century. Half were awarded to them by 2005–2006 academic year, and today 59 percent are.
Still, there are broader warning signs for the country’s education future as our AEI colleague Mark Schneider recently documented in his overview of the 2024 National Assessment of Education Progress’s (NAEP) report. He called the results a “five-alarm fire,” with the number of students who don’t meet NAEP’s “basic” level of performance for the lower grades reflecting a decline in educational achievement.
The gender gap in educational attainment starts early. In the younger grades, girls generally do better than boys in reading and writing, and they are gaining in math. In high school, according to data compiled by the American Institute for Boys and Men (AIBM), women have higher GPAs (SAT scores are closer). Young women tend to better prepare themselves than boys by taking more AP and IB courses, and they are then more likely to go onto college. The story of men falling behind is a development highlighted first by AEI Senior Fellow Emeritus Christina Hoff Sommers in her 2015 book The War Against Boys and more recently by AIBM founder and president, Richard Reeves.
If past is prologue, during Women’s History Month, we will hear the familiar cry that women earn only about 84 cents on the dollar compared to men. Most of the difference can be explained by their educational choices, the careers they choose, and their work experience. The gap for young people is much smaller. According to Pew, women in the 25–34 year age group earned 95 cents on the dollar compared to men. If would be foolish to say that there is no discrimination, but it is certainly not pervasive.
The success of women is well worth celebrating even as it has revealed some areas that need attention.
The post Women Making History: Women’s Education Advance appeared first on American Enterprise Institute – AEI.
