Among women who entered college in fall 2019, 64.3 percent completed their degree by 2025. For their male peers, only 58.1 percent completed their degree within six-years.
Thanks to an ongoing partnership between the California Department of Corrections and California State University, Los Angeles, a group of 22 women at the California Institution for Women have earned a bachelor's degree in liberal studies. They are the university's first graduating class of incarcerated women.
There are over 5.9 million more women than men in the United States that hold at least a bachelor's degree. While women hold a larger share in master's degree attainment, men still hold a larger share of Americans with professional degrees and doctorates.
For 2023 doctoral recipients who had a job offer, 41.5 percent of women had accepted positions in the academic arena. In 2008, 58.2 percent of women who earned doctorates had secured an academic appointment by the time they were awarded their doctoral degree.
A total of 17 universities awarded more than 300 doctorates to women during the five-year span from 2019 to 2023. Of these, women earned a majority of the doctorates at only three institutions: Walden University, the University of Minnesota, and the University of Georgia.
While women earned 47 percent of all doctorates awarded by universities in the United States, there was a huge gender gap in many specific disciplines.
If we exclude data for foreign students and restrict the data to U.S. citizens and permanent residents of this country, we find that 18,893 women earned doctorates in 2023. This was 53.1 percent of all doctoral recipients among U.S. citizens and permanent residents.
Despite representing over half of all graduate degree holders in the United States, women with graduate degrees earn, on average, $34,000 less per year than their male peers.
In analyzing data of postsecondary education among students who were in ninth-grade in 2009, the study found women were more likely than men to complete their postsecondary education at all levels.
Men were far more likely than women to earn a doctorate before the age of 30. Some 43.2 percent of women earned their doctorate before the age of 30. For men, 46.8 percent of all doctoral degree recipients in 2022 were below the age of 30.
The good news is tempered by the fact that in 2022 women earned only 32.7 percent of the doctorates in the physical sciences. In engineering, women earned 27.2 percent of the doctorates awarded in 2022 and in mathematics women earned just 22.7 of all doctorates awarded.
