More than 50/50: Understanding Gender Equity in Bachelor's Degree Attainment

Della Cox, University of Chicago

While women tend to out-perform men in high school STEM preparation, STEM course grades, and college entry, women entering college are less likely than men to enter STEM majors conditional on entering college and to complete STEM degrees conditional on initial choice (Xie and Shauman 2006; Mann and DiPrete 2013). This results in STEM majors having male-dominant gender ratios in aggregate. However, women earn over 50% of degrees in a handful of STEM fields, such as biology. I argue that the gender composition of a field is not a useful metric of gender equity. That more women than men complete biology degrees tells us virtually nothing about whether women’s (or men’s) probability to major in biology has changed. Using hierarchical Poisson regression, I calculate these probabilities from 1980 to 2019. This is the period that women reached and continued to earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees. The gender composition of biology bachelor’s recipients has been increasingly female. I find that only in 2000 did biology degrees become more common among women than men, more than a decade after women earned 50% of biology degrees. I find that the transition of biology from a male-dominated field to a female-dominated field is attributable to (1) women’s increasing share of all bachelor’s recipients and (2) the decline in biology’s popularity among bachelor’s recipients, especially for men. Because the decline was sharper for men, the gender gap decreased, but did not favor women until 2000. There is high variability in the gender gap across schools, as some schools maintained high levels of biology degrees as accessibility to college education increased. While the gender composition of biology transitioned to favoring women, the actual probability of majoring in biology among female bachelor’s recipients declined after 1980 and has only recovered to its 1980 level by 2019.

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 Presented in Session 69. Education and its Discontents, From Pre-K to PhD