Women earned more doctorates than men at American universities in 2002, according to results recently released by the Survey of Earned Doctorates.
The percentage of males who earned doctorates in 2002 has dropped steadily since 1997 by nearly 15 percent. While women earned almost 51 percent of doctorates in 2002, the total number of awarded degrees is falling, the report found.
American students earned the lowest number of Ph.D.s in a decade last year at 39,955, a decrease of 2 percent from the previous year and a 6 percent drop in the last five years.
But experts have differing opinions about the trends these statistics show.
Joan Burrelli, senior analyst at the National Science Foundation, said she felt the drop in males awarded doctorates led to the higher female doctorate percentage.
“There’s been a drop in the white college age population,” Burrelli said. “But the people who are doctorate recipients have been in school for seven to ten years, so [the percentage of men earning Ph.D.s] is going up now.”
Burrelli said although the numbers of men awarded doctorates decreased, not all male groups are on the decline.
“It’s the predominantly white males that have dropped,” she said. “For the most part, minority males [awarded doctorates] have continued to go up.”
Nearly 19 percent of American doctorates were awarded to minority groups in 2002, the largest percentage in history. Forty percent of the doctorates awarded to African American students were in education, while one out of every three doctorates earned by Asian Americans was in life sciences.
Burrelli said NSF was still collecting data for 2003, but that the drop in men enrolled in graduate programs has leveled out, as opposed to decreases in the past decade.
Maresi Nerad, faculty at the University of Washington, director of The Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education and associate dean for research at University of Wisconsin graduate schools, believes the results showcase a different trend entirely.
“In actuality, numbers of women Ph.D.s have increased,” Nerad said. “Federal agencies have been very good to increase participation in women to earn their doctorates.”
CIRGE at the University of Washington conducts research on alumni careers and the effectiveness of graduate programs, both for other graduate schools and the employers of most U.S-trained Ph.D.s.
Nerad said although it is positive that an increasing number of women are earning doctorates, the real problem arises after the qualified women reach the job market.
“If women want to go on and stay in academia, there comes the trouble,” she said. “Institutions have done a lot to increase women in doctorate work, but it stops there.”
Nerad said that while 61 percent of all women Ph.D.s had a spouse with a Ph.D., J.D. or M.D. in 2002, only 21 percent of men have spouses who are highly educated.
“The combination of being a woman and having a partner that is also highly educated is tricky,” she said. “Very few universities have dual spousal hiring, and it’s very complicated to get both people stimulating jobs in the same town, and one partner has to make a sacrifice to stay together.”
While women have earned the majority of doctorates awarded in education and humanities, Nerad said social and biological sciences were split evenly in 2002, and female engineering doctorates fell short of 20 percent.
“The number of successful women who have had Ph.D.s awarded are not medical,” Nerad said. “But women earning doctorates in 2002 made an increase in all fields.”
SED is sponsored by six federal agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Education. Data is compiled by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and used to spot trends in Ph.D. recipients.
