About one out of every five women who earned a doctorate in 2025 paid for their degrees primarily from their own funds or savings. For men who earned doctorates that year, 11.1 percent used their own funds or savings as the primary source for paying for their education.
In 2025, there were 49,166,000 women over the age of 25 in the United States who had earned at least a bachelor’s degree. There are still more men than women holding professional degrees and doctorates.
Throughout the past two decades, girls continue to be overrepresented in AP courses in languages, humanities, and the arts, while boys are overrepresented in AP STEM courses. These participation gaps tend to align with gender gaps among top-performing students, but this varies widely by subject.
When we look at doctoral degree awards in specific disciplines, we find that wide gender gaps persist in many fields. There are numerous STEM disciplines where women earn less than one third of all doctorates awarded.
“By making managerial performance attributable, comparable, and visible, firm structure can influence who advances to the highest levels of leadership. For women managers, divisionalized structures may provide a clearer path to CEO promotion because they make accomplishments harder to overlook and easier to evaluate,” the study authors write.
While use of AI chatbots has increased among all U.S. adults over the past two years, women saw a steeper increase. Today, men and women are about equally likely to say they use AI chatbots. However, women remain more skeptical about the technology's future.
For all doctoral recipients in 2025 who had employment commitments by the time they received their doctorate, women were to receive a median salary of $87,800 compared to a median salary of $114,750 for men.
Across a large sample of faculty at nearly 300 universities, women were more than twice as likely as men to report prior experiences of devaluation at work. Among respondents who had experienced devaluation, women were more likely than men to say devaluation was tied to their gender, race, age, or parenthood status.
“These data show us that a very large portion of those entering our specialty are struggling and not getting the help they need, and we’re not having meaningful discussions about how to help them,” said Helen Kang Morgan, clinical professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Michigan Medical School.
Of the 50 universities in the United States that awarded the most doctorates in 2025, only 11 universities awarded more doctorates to women than to men.
Among the top 10 journals by total first authorships, only two increased their representation of female first authors by more than four percentage points over the past decade and only four had women make up at least one-third of first authors in 2025.
A new survey from the Radio Television Digital News Association and the Newhouse School at Syracuse University has found a decline in the overall representation of women working in television newsrooms across the country. Declines were particularly sharp in leadership representation.
