This week news reports stated that just as many women as men hold a college degree, according to recent census reports. Also reported was that women earn 77 cents for every dollar earned by men.
No real conclusions can be drawn from the statistics. For example, knowing that some degrees are more valuable than others, do we have a breakdown of who earned what degree? For example, engineering degrees pay more than teaching degrees. It doesn’t take a rocket science degree to figure out that more men earn engineering degrees than women.
To some degree, money is a good measure but it is not the whole picture. With a teaching degree a mother with children in school can be off work when their children are. But no monetary value is placed on this in the reports.
So, I conclude that the newspapers are just out to make headlines from speculating about an issue that is hard to measure accurately.
Which in turn makes for a good blog post.
See: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba392
“Beyond work behavior, women gravitate to sectors of the economy that compensate workers at lower levels. While women hold 53 percent of all professional jobs in the United States, they hold only 28 percent of jobs in professions averaging $40,000 or more in annual compensation. For example, fewer women have chosen to enter such technical fields as computer sciences, math and science teaching, medicine, law and engineering. In 1998, women earned only 26.7 percent of computer science degrees.”
A little old, but still applies. Also lists women’s lifestyle choices , entry and exit from the job market (to have children) and high percentage of women part-time workers as other probably causes of the disparity.
Jake,
Like I said, the newspapers are making headlines out of two separate statistics. Nice quote, it nails it down.