Disparities

Is Critical Theory an example of Begging the Question?

                                         Disparities

In 2018, women earned 62% or more of the bachelor’s degrees in 9 out of the 16 academic fields: Health Professions (84.5% and the greatest gender disparity for either sex for the 16 majors), Public Administration (82.8% and the field with the second-highest gender imbalance), Education (81.6% and the field with the third-highest gender disparity), Psychology (78.9%), English (70.8%), Foreign Languages (68.8%), Communication and Journalism (65.5%), Biology (62.2%) Visual and Performing Arts (61.4%).

Women have earned a majority of degrees in Biology in every year since 1988, and have earned more than 60% of those degrees in 8 of the last 17 years, including a peak 62.2% share in both 2004 and 2018.

Women have never earned fewer than 60% of bachelor’s degrees in any year of the following since 1971: Health Professions, Public Administration, Education, English, Foreign Languages, and Visual/Performing Arts. For Psychology, women have earned a majority share every year since 1974, a 60% share or greater starting in 1979, a 70% share or greater starting in 1988 and a 75% share or greater starting in 1999.

For the four academic fields of Business, Architecture, Math and Statistics, and Physical Sciences, women earned a slight minority of those degrees in 2018 ranging between 40.0% for Physics and 47.1% for Architecture. For the other two of the four fields, women earned 42.4% of Math/Statistics degrees, 47.0% of Business degrees. For degrees in Business, the female share exceeded 50% in 2002, 2003 and 2004 but then has gradually declined since then to a 47.0% share in 2018, the lowest share since 1990.

Over the 1971 to 2018 period, the three largest increases in the female shares of degrees were in Business (from 9.1% to 47.0% = +37.9 percentage points), Architecture (from 11.9% to 47.1% = +35.2 percentage points) and Psychology (from 44.4% to 78.9% +34.5 percentage points).

In 2018, the female shares of bachelor’s degrees in all of the 16 academic fields except Business increased from the previous year. The biggest annual increase in 2018 by academic field was the 1.8 percentage point increase in the female share of engineering degrees from 20.4% in 2017 to 22.2% in 2018, a new all-time high.