Nationwide men earned nearly 4,000 more doctoral degrees than women in 2013. But there were several states where women earned more doctorates than men. The states with the highest percentage of women among their doctoral degree awardees were Vermont, Maine, and Mississippi.
In 2013, women earned 46.2 percent of all doctorates awarded by American universities. But there are many specific academic disciplines in which the gender gap in doctoral degrees is substantial.
Dr. Wendy Raymond came to Davidson College in 2013 after teaching biology at Williams College in Massachusetts for 19 years. She was also associate dean for institutional diversity at Williams.
Fay Lomax Cook is a professor of human development and social policy in the School of Education at Northwestern University. From 1996 to 2012 she was the director of the Institute for Policy Research at the university.
For women who earned doctoral degrees in 2012, the average number of years that they spent from the time they graduated from college to the time they earned their doctorate was 9.4 years. For men the figure is 8.7 years.
Women earned 70.2 percent of all doctorates in the health sciences and 68.7 percent of all doctorates in education but only 28.5 percent of all doctorates in the physical sciences and 22.5 percent of all doctorates in engineering.
Women have made impressive gains over the past decade in doctoral degree attainments in STEM fields such as computer and information science (up 127.5%), physics and astronomy (up 120.7%), engineering (up 110.6%), and mathematics (up 81.5%).
Bevlee Watford, associate dean for academic affairs at the College of Engineering at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, will be the program manager for broadening participation in the engineering education and centers division of the NSF.
After serving as the president of Purdue University from 2007 to 2012, Dr. Córdova has been the chair of the board of regents of the Smithsonian Institution.
In the four years after the program began at the University of Rhode Island, 54 percent of new faculty hires in science programs were women, compared to 24 percent in the three years prior to the initiation of the program.
Pupa Gilbert, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin. received top honors in the 2012 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge for her photograph from an electron microscope of the forming end of a sea urchin's tooth.
