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1. Introduction
- Russell Sage Foundation
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 chapter 1 introduction w omen typically make less money than men. They seldom occupy the most powerful offices in government or corporate america. and they still do the bulk of the child care and routine housework in the home. These and other features of gender inequality have led some observers to write of the “stalled gender revolution” (england 2010; carlson 2011). Not long ago, women also lagged considerably behind men in their educational attainment. in the united States and most industrialized societies, however, the days when gender inequality in education meant female disadvantage are now more than twenty years in the past. in fact, women have made substantial gains in all realms of education and now generally outperform men on several key educational benchmarks. in 1970, 58 percent of college students were men, but by the 1980s the gender gap in college enrollment favored women, and in 2010, 57 percent of all college students were women (Snyder and dillow 2012). women are also more likely than men to persist in college, obtain degrees, and enroll in graduate school. This growing female advantage in higher education has attracted the attention of college administrators, policymakers, and the media, and researchers are trying to make sense of this reversal from a male advantage to a female advantage in educational attainment as it has unfolded not only in the united States but also in most industrialized societies.1 The striking gains by women in the educational arena have multiple causes. certainly, their gains in education are part of a larger story about the changing place of women in the labor market and in society more generally. But three important features of the trend favoring females in education suggest that women’s educational gains do not follow solely from their changing status in society. First, women have not merely gained educational equality with men; on many fronts they have surpassed men by a large and growing margin. Second, women have overtaken men in the total number of college degrees earned even as gender 2 The Rise of women segregation in fields of study has persisted. Third, trends in the size of the gender gap have differed considerably by race and ethnicity. These three features of the gender gap in education have far-reaching implications for american society and raise important policy questions. This book examines the rise of women in education with a focus on these three complex aspects of the phenomenon. let’s dig a bit deeper into the story of the reversal of the gender gap in college completion. it is a story about females’ real gains, but also about stagnation in education for males that raises daunting challenges for american society. Just fifteen years ago, the united States boasted the highest rate of tertiary education completion in the world. Today it lags behind many other industrialized countries on this front (organization for economic cooperation and development 2010a). in light of the importance of college completion rates for national wealth, quality of life, and international competitiveness, the obama administration has expressed concern about the stagnant rates of college degree receipt in the united States and has set regaining international leadership in higher education as a national goal. it is important to understand, however, that america’s stagnation in college completion is largely due to the stagnation of men’s college completion rates. Trends in bachelor’s degree completion for males and females are shown in figure 1.1. This figure is based on u.S. census data from 1940 to 2000 and on american community Survey (acS) data from 2010. Males from the birth cohorts of 1912 through about 1950 had a lead over females . among cohorts born after 1940, females began closing the gap with males; their gains accelerated as women born in the late 1950s and early 1960s (who were of college age during the 1980s) overtook men in their rates of completing bachelor’s degrees.2 women continue to increase their educational attainment along roughly the same trajectory they have followed since the 1960s. on a cohort-by-cohort basis, the male college graduation rate peaked around the birth cohort of 1950 and then remained essentially flat for about fifteen birth cohorts (diprete and Buchmann 2006). Thereafter, male cohorts gradually increased their rate of college completion, but these gains lagged behind the contemporaneous gains for women and the gains for male cohorts born before 1950. By 2010, twenty-six- to twenty-eight-year-old females had a more than...