Women Dominate Men In Advanced Fields
Category : Women Business, Women Lifestyle
A federal report released Thursday reveals that women are outnumbering men in the pursuit of advanced degrees such as law and medicine, the fields previously dominated by men. From biology to business, women now earn most of the diplomas in fields that men used to dominate. They are also gaining ground in undergraduate and graduate disciplines where they still trail men, earning larger numbers of degrees in math, physical sciences and agriculture.
But they’re still not paid as much as their male counterparts. Even with such enormous gains over the past 25 years, women are paid less than men in comparable jobs and lag in landing top positions on college campuses.
The findings were part of a 379-page report, “The Condition of Education,” a yearly compilation of statistics that give a picture of academic trends. Women now account for about half the enrollment in professional programs such as law, medicine and optometry, up from 22 percent a generation ago.
“Women are going in directions that maybe their mothers or grandmothers never even thought about,” said Avis Jones-DeWeever, who oversees education policy for the Institute of Women’s Policy Research.
In business, by far the most popular degree field among undergraduates, women earn slightly more than half of all bachelor degrees; it was one-third in 1980. “You have a large number of women in the administrative work force, and in the past, they were never able to be the managers and the vice presidents,” said Claire Van Ummersen of the American Council on Education. “Now they have those opportunities, and they are taking advantage of them. They can be something other than an administrative assistant.”
When it comes to whether men or women are the better planners, it is the men who are thinking ahead with 53% of men starting their businesses with a plan compared to only 40% of women. This research, which was conducted to mark the launch of Panasonic’s Be Your Own Boss campaign, flies in the face of much anecdotal evidence that women are better at planning their businesses.
Researchers say that men, for different reasons, are not enrolling in or completing college programs with the same urgency as women. Boys need to have their aspirations raised just as girls have, said Tom Mortenson, senior scholar for The Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education. By middle school, he said, many boys are tuning out and the problem is only getting worse. “Women have been making educational progress, and the men are stuck,” he said. “They haven’t just fallen behind women. They have fallen behind changes in the job market.”
There’s a question that haunted me lately, if an employer has to pay a man one dollar for the same work a woman would do for 59 cents, why would anyone hire a man? If women do produce more for less, I thought, women who own their own businesses should earn more than male business owners.
So I checked. I found that women entrepreneurs earn 50% less than their male counterparts.
Should women and children be paid as much as men for doing the same job? Oh, that seems like such an easy one. But do women and children have the same employment opportunities as men? Do they have the same experience, the same skills?
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