Women Top Men at Earning Bachelor’s Degrees, U.S. Data Show
February 10, 2011
Source: Bloomberg Business Week
By John Hechinger
Feb. 10 (Bloomberg) -- Women in the U.S. are almost twice as likely as men to earn a bachelor’s degree by age 23, underscoring decades of gains by females in schools and the workforce, according to a government survey.
By that age, almost one in four women earned the college degree compared with one in seven men, the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a report released today in Washington. The research comes from a study that annually follows the lives of the same 9,000 people, born from 1980 to 1984, according to an agency release.
Women’s outperformance coincided with their increasing opportunities in the workforce as jobs shifted from male- dominated factories to offices open to female employees, Jay Meisenheimer, a bureau economist and one of the study’s authors, said in a telephone interview.
“We’ve seen this great transformation in the workforce away from manufacturing toward more of a service economy,” Meisenheimer said. “Now that there are more opportunities for women to work, we’re seeing a growing number completing high school and college and going on to graduate and professional programs.”
This year’s results mark the first time the study had a big enough sample of students old enough to have finished college to make a meaningful comparison between men and women, Meisenheimer said. Participants’ responses have been tracked annually since the survey began in 1997.
--Editors: Chris Staiti, Jeffrey Tannenbaum