More Women Are Doctors and Lawyers Than Ever—but Progress Is Stalling

Originally posted on The Atlantic.

In the Wall Street Journal last week, Josh Mitchell reported that “Women account for a third of the nation’s lawyers and doctors, a major shift from a generation ago.” The report was triggered by anew analysis of occupations from the Census Bureau, which showed women increased their share of doctor and lawyer by four percent and six percent, respectively, from a decade earlier.

These professional advances mark “very significant progress,” according to feminist economist Heidi Hartmann, and I don’t disagree. Still, when I spoke to Mitchell I suggested he consider a glass-half-empty perspective, which somehow ended up on the cutting-room floor.

My question is, will progress continue? It doesn’t look good. I happen to be a demographer, but you don’t need to be one to see that progress for women in these fields is stalling.

First, look at the degrees earned. This figure uses statistics from the Department of Education and breaks the gender trend in law and medical degrees up by decades. Both trends show slowing progress—a smaller increase in women’s representation each decade—and both peaked (for now) at just under 50 percent female.

If half of new doctors and lawyers are women, eventually it should be possible to have professions that are gender-balanced. But don’t hold your breath.

I looked at today’s doctors and lawyers using the 2008-2010 American Community Survey (you can get the data here). Here is the representation of women among full-time and year-round working doctors and lawyers by age. Half of the youngest doctors and lawyers are women, while only one in eight of the oldest are. So as they all age, equal representation should be on the way.

But women are much more likely to drop out of these professions (and others). Among early-career professionals—people ages 25 to 44—who list their most recent jobs as doctor or lawyer, you can see that women are much more likely to be out of the labor force:

With the kind of dropout rates that produce these disparities, we would need much more than 50 percent female in the graduating classes to reach equal representation in these professions.

In Mitchell’s report, the economist Claudia Goldin, who has recently investigated women’s success as pharmacists, argues that the corporatization of medicine has helped women by introducing the concept of work-family balance, and reducing the gender earnings gap—all changes that helped women in pharmacies as well. But I don’t see the evidence that such practices have yet changed the medical industry enough to reduce the gender differences in drop-out rates. And the research evidence shows that explicit diversity policies—with teeth—often are necessary to break the logjam.

And Mitchell’s story did not mention any efforts to reduce the segregation of men and women—especially in medicine—into different specialties. That segregation is a big part of what drives the earnings gap among doctors and lawyers. Here are the median earnings by age for doctors and lawyers, from the same source:

At the peak of that curve—ages 45 to 50—female doctors are earning just 62 percent of men’s median earnings. As they make their decisions about whether to enter the field, and how to specialize, and how to handle their family demands and opportunities, these disparities in representation and rewards come into play. The decisions men and women in these professions make should never be seen as free choices unconstrained or unaffected by the institutional environment.

Women’s Economic Dominance: Is It Really Inevitable?

Originally published at TheAtlantic.com.

Both Liza Mundy (The Richer Sex) and Hanna Rosin (The End of Men) argue that the transition to a postindustrial, service- and knowledge-based economy—in conjunction with declining gender discrimination—are leading inevitably to women’s economic dominance. I have critiqued those stories in a series of posts on my site Family Inequality.

But there is one piece of Mundy and Rosin’s argument I haven’t questioned until now. It is so intuitively appealing that I assumed it was true: The demands of the economy are shifting dramatically in women’s favor. Brains have superseded brawn and social skills have become increasingly important, they both claim (and I accepted without thinking much about it) which all favors women over men.

Mundy and Rosin make frequent references to a set of projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), showing that the occupations with the largest expected growth are dominated by women rather than men. But that description is, it turns out, misleading.

Occupations Projected

First, here is how Mundy and Rosin use the BLS numbers. Mundy writes:

Projections made by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics show that women’s occupations will be favored in the next decade. … All in all, of the ten jobs with the largest projected job growth—nurses, home health aides, customer service reps, food preparation and serving workers, home care aides, retail sales, office clerks, accountants and auditors, nursing units, and postsecondary teachers—nine are majority female.

Rosin uses similar statistics, which have been repeated in reviews like this one in the Chicago Tribune, this one in the Globe and Mail, and blogs like this one at the World Bank. She writes (in a passage approvingly quoted by David Brooks):

The recession merely revealed—and accelerated—a profound economic shift that has been going on for at least 30 years, and in some respects even longer…. Of the fifteen job categories projected to grow the most in the United States over the next decade, twelve are occupied primarily by women.

Okay, here’s the first moment I should have paused. Women are almost half the labor force. So if occupations are “majority female” or “dominated” by women, how different are they from average? Does this really mean the occupational structure really strongly shifting in women’s favor?

The BLS projections are detailed here. They include hundreds of occupations, but they also summarize this pattern for 22 “major occupation groups,” which range in size from 1 million to 23 million workers. I added in the gender composition of each group to show the relationship between gender composition and projected growth.

As you can see, the female-dominated occupations are projected to grow fastest. For dramatic effect, one might point to the top-right point: healthcare support occupations are 87 percent female and projected to grow 35 percent over the decade. On the other hand there are production occupations: 26 percent female and aiming for a paltry four percent growth. But that would be cherry-picking examples. What the sophisticated reader really wants to know is the overall relationship between gender and job growth. And that is not what it appears.

Here is the same graph, but with the occupation groups shown in proportion to thethe number of workers they represent, and the trendline redrawn to reflect their disparate weights.

Now the picture is much different. That giant dot on the lower right is 23 million office and administrative support workers – 72 percent female and growing slowly. And near the middle are three large occupation groups that are 40 to 50 percent female, also growing slowly (sales, food preparation and serving, and management). The gender action is all in the occupations that employ a smaller number of people. The big story about growth and gender composition of major occupation groups is not true. (In technical terms, the slope of that line in the first figure is reduced by half when we account for the size of the dots. And in fact the slope would be cut in half again if we just dropped the healthcare support occupations point, which exerts outsized influence as an outlier.)

So how do Mundy and Rosin come up with the dramatic lists of occupations projected to grow the most? The top 10 growing occupations (at the detailed level) are mostly female-dominated. But those occupations made up just 15 percent of the workforce in 2010, and are projected to make up only 17 percent by 2020. The top 15 are projected to increase from 22 percent to just 23 percent of the workforce. The growth in these jobs just doesn’t represent that much of a change for the entire economy.

If occupations aren’t really shifting in women’s directions anymore, we shouldn’t be surprised. In 2001, analyzing occupational trends of the 20^th century, David Cotter, Joan Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman concluded:

Change in the occupational structure is not responsible for the continued growth in women’s labor force participation after 1970. That is, it is not the growth of traditionally female occupations that is driving the continuing growth in women’s labor force participation rates in the 1970s and 1980s.

Rather, it was – and still is – the growth of integrated middle-class occupations, and women moving into new occupations, that provide the impetus for women’s increased labor force share. Hard as it is to believe, the overall shift toward traditionally female-typed occupations largely ended by the 1970s. Yes, there are more nurses and home health aides today than there were then, but there are also fewer maids and domestic servants. And although blue-collar manufacturing jobs have continued to decline, truck-driving and construction have not. (I extended their trend through 2010 to check whether this is still true. Women’s share of the labor force would have increased from 38 percent in 1970 only to 41 percent in 2010 based on occupational shifts alone, if the gender composition of each occupation hadn’t changed. That means about 70 percent of the increase in women’s share of the labor force came from occupations becoming more integrated instead of occupations growing and shrinking.)

In other places in her book, Rosin presses the ongoing structural change in the economy in terms of industries (what firms make) instead of occupations (what workers do). Here she is on slightly firmer ground. She writes:

Since 2000, the manufacturing economy has lost almost 6 million jobs… During the same period, meanwhile, health and education have added about the same number of jobs. But those sectors continue to be heavily dominated by women, while the men concentrate themselves more than ever in industries—construction, transportation, and utilities—that are fading away.

In one respect here, Rosin is exaggerating: She is referring to 4.5 million as “about the same number” as 5.7 million. And construction, transportation, and utilities, rather than “fading away,” in fact are togetherprojected to produce 2.7 million new jobs from 2010 to 2020, a 26 percent increase.

But she nevertheless makes a true and important point: Those masculinist industries are growing slower than education and health services, which are projected to add 6.5 jobs, a 33 percent increase. During the next decade, BLS projects education and health will grow from 15 percent to 17 percent of the workforce. But outside of that group, there is no relationship between gender and projected growth. Here is the chart:

The blue line shows the relationship with education and health services included—big dots out on the edges have a huge influence on the trend. If you exclude that you get the pink line. Manufacturing is shrinking, but it’s already only nine percent of workers, and shrinking to eight percent by 2020. Most of the employment growth is in the integrated industries: retail trade, professional and business services, leisure and hospitality, and government—which affect men’s and women’s employment. Health and education growth are a big part of our expected future, but they’re not the whole economy.

Conclusion

Overall, you might be surprised to learn—I know I was—that women are projected to increase their share of the labor force from 46.7 percent in 2010 only to 47.0 percent in 2020. That’s it: less than one percent. How can that be? So many people are so attached to this narrative of women’s rapid advance that they haven’t noticed there has been no advance in the last 17 years: Women have occupied between 46 percent and 47 percent of the labor force every year between 1994 and 2011.

This stagnation itself complicates a big part of Rosin’s and Mundy’s narratives. The continuous—and fast—pace of change is why they argue that we are heading not just toward equality but beyond it, to female domination. As Rosin writes:

Yes, the United States and many other countries still have a gender wage gap. Yes, women still do most of the childcare. And yes, the upper reaches of power are still dominated by men. But given the sheer velocity of the economic and other forces at work, these circumstances are much more likely the last artifacts of a vanishing age rather than a permanent figuration.

And, after several paragraphs of statistics comparing the present mostly to the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s, Mundy concludes: “Given these trends, it is only a matter of time before a majority of working wives outearn their husbands.”

But the reality is that it is not only a matter of time. The ostensibly gender-neutral processes of economic transformation are not the source of women’s progress they once were. And that’s the real danger in their stories: creating the impression that women’s progress is inevitable and unstoppable.

12 minutes in segregationland

When my daughter was 3 I accidentally told her the “gas guy” was coming to work on the house. Then I corrected myself, “Actually, I don’t know if it will be a man or a woman.”

She said, “I think it’s a man.”

Children seem to have much better learning capacity than adults (or at least better than I do). A parent telling them something about gender segregation doesn’t have much weight compared with hour after hour, day after day of simple observation.

So the other day I had 12 minutes to kill at the train station in DC. I took pictures of everyone I saw working, including the unpaid work of childcare but not including people working as servers behind counters. This is not research. I was just wondering what a child might notice about gender and work.

Here’s who I saw, with the national gender composition of their presumed occupations, from the American Community Survey:

Railroad conductors and yardmasters: 93% male

Baggage porters, bellhops, and concierges: 84% male

Grandmother (?) and grandchild: 91% of children who live with a grandparent live with a grandmother. 9% live with a grandfather and no grandmother present. http://www.census.gov/hhes/families/data/cps2011.html

Janitors: 75% male

Concrete finishers: 99% male (or could be construction laborers, 98% male)

Construction supervisors: 97% male

Shoe shiners: gender composition not listed.

Driver/sales workers and truck drivers: 96% male

Family members caring for children: 97% of married stay-at-home parents are women (those staying out of the labor force all year while spouse works all year)

Finally, a non-gender-typical worker, a man caring for young child in a stroller.

Not shown:

Male security guards: 78% male

Male police officers: 86% male

Again, this is not research — I was just looking around.

Male nursing explodes: from 9% to 10%

Lots of buzz over a New York Times article about men moving into female-dominated occupations, which reported that “more and more men are starting to see the many benefits of jobs long-dominated by women.”

The Times produced this table, which shows the fastest growing occupations for (for some reason) college-educated White men, ages 25-39.

The ones with the pink dots are 70% female or more. The increase of young college educated White men in these occupations over 10 years appears striking, but the numbers are small. For example, compare that increase of (round numbers) 10,000 young White male registered nurses to the 1,900,000 full-time year-round nurses there were in 2010.

Moreover, consider that increase of 10,000 nurses in light of the overall growth of registered nurses from 2000 to 2010: about 500,000. Overall, the representation of men among full-time year-round registered nurses increased from 9.4% to 10.3% during the decade.

The Times article attempts to describe a broad trend of men moving into “pink-collar” jobs:

The trend began well before the crash, and appears to be driven by a variety of factors, including financial concerns, quality-of-life issues and a gradual erosion of gender stereotypes. An analysis of census data by The New York Times shows that from 2000 to 2010, occupations that are more than 70 percent female accounted for almost a third of all job growth for men, double the share of the previous decade.

Bold claims. But check the next sentence: “That does not mean that men are displacing women — those same occupations accounted for almost two-thirds of women’s job growth.” So, lots more men are in these jobs, but even more women are? How does that reflect an “erosion of gender stereotypes”? It seems like it reflects an increase in the size of female-dominated occupations.

In fact, as I reported briefly before, occupational gender segregation dropped barely a hair in the 2000s, from 51 to 50 on a scale of 0 to 100, compared with drops of 5 or 6 points in the decades before 1990. That is a lost decade for integration.

And if you look specifically at the category the Times chose — occupations that are 70% female or more — the percentage of men in those occupations increased, but only from 5.0% to 6.1%. And nurses? In 2010, 0.4% of all full-time year-round working men were nurses, up from 0.3% in 2000. Women are still 11-times more likely to be nurses than men.

Now that’s what you call a “gradual erosion of gender stereotypes.”

Sources: U.S. Census tables for 2000 and 2010 (table B24121).

Coming soon

To get the latest on trends in gender segregation and what they mean, look for the session titled, “Gendered Work: Occupational Segregation and Differential Representation,” at the American Sociological Associations meeting in Denver this summer. Among the papers there will be “Still Stalled? Occupational Gender Desegregation, 1950-2010,” by David Cotter, Joan Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman. Their abstract:

This paper examines trends and patterns in occupational gender segregation over six decades, from the 1950s to the 2000s. It identifies two distinct periods: first a period from 1960 to 1990 of relatively rapid integration of occupations and a period after 1990 of diminishing declines in segregation. In short, while the level of occupational gender segregation fell steadily in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, it declined much more slowly in 1990s and little if any in the 2000s. While most of the desegregation in the early period can be attributed to changing sex composition of occupations, in the later period most of the desegregation comes from shifts in occupational structure. These diminishing declines are observed regardless of the measure of segregation or occupational classifications, and broadly across race, class, and cohorts.

Gender gap, 2011

The good people at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research have a new brief report on the gender gap in pay, based on 2011 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The gender pay gap reflects both the tendency of women to work in lower-paid occupations, and the tendency of men to earn more than women within occupations. IWPR calculated women’s median weekly earnings as a percentage of men’s, for those working full-time only, for the 20 most common occupations among men and women. Here is my figure from their results, with occupations listed from most to least female-dominated. It shows the extent of segregation in major occupations, and the nearly-universal gender pay gap within them, regardless of gender composition:

A few occupations were on both lists, and some had two few women or men to calculate relative wages, so only 30 are shown here.

Men’s earnings are higher in all but one of these occupations (stock clerks), though the gaps are larger on average in the more-male occupations.*

This report follows a recent appearance by IWPR’s president, Heidi Hartmann, on the Rachel Maddow show. Hartmann has posted this review of their discussion about the gender pay gap.

Recent related posts:

• What if women were in charge?
• Gender integration’s lost decade
• What it’s all worth, in work-life cash
• Gender gaps by education and age

* This is the opposite of the pattern Matt Huffman and I found in our 2003 paper, where the gender gap was greater in female-dominated jobs (with statistical controls and 1990 data). Something to look into.

Flattering motherhood, still

I offered the first draft of this — for free — to the major newspapers, to no avail. In the meantime, there have been some great short pieces written on the recent motherhood-is-work kerfuffle. I don’t remember them all, but I liked those by Katha Pollitt, Nancy Folbre, Adia Harvey Wingfield, Barbara Risman, Laura Flanders, Feminist Hulk, and Linda Hirshman. The feminist field on this issue has been crowded, which is great.

* * *

Hopefully we can agree that that the true measure of motherhood is somewhere between “toughest job in the world” and “nothing.”

On the one hand, both President Obama and pundit Hilary Rosen have now called motherhood the world’s hardest job. And with the Romneys flopping onto the all-mothers-work bandwagon, it appears we’re reaching a rare rhetorical consensus.

On the other hand, the majority in both major political parties agrees that poor single mothers and their children need one thing above all – a (real) job, one that provides the “dignity of an honest day’s work.”* For welfare purposes, taking care of children is not only not the toughest job in the world, it is more akin to nothing at all. When Bill Clinton’s endorsed welfare-to-work he famously declared: “The days of something for nothing are over.” President Obama and Mitt Romney both support that welfare reform.

Of course parenthood is work. But it’s really many jobs, not one. And now that more and more of them are also available for a fee — as real jobs — we can see how much the “market” thinks they’re really worth. Answer: not much. When sold as services, the many tasks of parenthood are disproportionately done by women. Some of its core tasks – such as cooking, cleaning, diaper-changing and laundry – are among the lowest-paid, most demeaning, female-dominated occupations.

Source: My calculations from 2010 American Community Survey.

As I wrote before, when it comes to reproductive labor, there’s work and there’s work:

Katha Pollitt made this point more eloquently in her column:

But the brouhaha over Hilary Rosen’s injudicious remarks is not really about whether what stay-home mothers do is work. Because we know the answer to that: it depends. When performed by married women in their own homes, domestic labor is work—difficult, sacred, noble work. … When performed for pay, however, this supremely important, difficult job becomes low-wage labor that almost anyone can do—teenagers, elderly women, even despised illegal immigrants. But here’s the real magic: when performed by low-income single mothers in their own homes, those same exact tasks—changing diapers, going to the playground and the store, making dinner, washing the dishes, giving a bath—are not only not work; they are idleness itself.

Instead of the money men get for their labors, mothers are asked to settle for less money and a rhetorical pat on the head (if they are middle class “moms” instead of merely poor mothers — I think that’s known in economics as a “compensating differential“). As Barbara Ehrenreich put it, nobody ever put motherhood on a pedestal until feminists pointed out that “the pay is lousy and the career ladder is nonexistent.”

Still, the universal agreement that motherhood is “work” marks a genuine moment. Among other possible interpretations, it is a victory of “choice” feminism – which would have us “respect women in all the choices they make,” in the words of the newfound feminist Mrs. Romney. (Work = respect, nowadays in America, though it wasn’t always that way.) But celebrating the choice to do something most women can’t choose is the dangerous outcome of putting motherhood on a pedestal. It divides women according to the value of their motherhood.

Accepting pedestal status instead of equality is a bargain some feminists have refused for a century or more. One of those was Harriet Stanton Blatch (Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s daughter), who wrote in 1908: “Of all the people who block the progress of woman suffrage, the worst are the women of wealth and leisure who never knew a day’s work and never felt a day’s want, but who selfishly stand in the way of those women who know what it means to earn the bread they eat by the sternest toil” (emphasis added).

Parenthood won’t get the respect it deserves – including men embracing it in more equal numbers – until the monetary reward it draws matches the rhetoric of its symbolic value. That means recognizing the real value of parents’ sternest toils – even if they’re not married – from which we all benefit.

–

*California Gov. Pete Wilson, Washington Times, 12/7/1995, p. A21.

Gender integration’s lost decade

The 2000s were the worst decade for gender integration since the 1950s.

It’s not easy to track long-term trends in segregation, because our measurements are affected by the level of detail used to record occupation titles, by changes in the composition of the labor force, and by the type of measurement used. However, comparing one time point to another using the same data source and measurements is the safest bet. That’s what I have done for 2000 and 2010 (using Census data from 2000 and 2010).

A 2004 report by my old colleagues David Cotter, Joan Hermsen and Reeve Vanneman last did that for 1950 to 2000, using a system of coding occupations according to the 1990 standard. I have graphed their results with my new calculations, which use the 2000 Census standards. Since these use new occupation definitions, and a greater number of occupations (more than 500), my segregation score is a little higher. But it’s the decade-to-decade changes I’m interested in.

This measure, called the index of dissimilarity, shows the percentage of men — or women — that would have to change occupations in order for every occupation to the have the same gender composition.

The graph clearly shows the declining pace of progress toward integration in the 1990s, compared with the 1970s and 1980s, and now we can see the 2000s showed slower progress still.  In the last decade, there just was a smidgen of change — just enough so that, if it continues at that pace, we will have complete gender integration… by the middle of the 26th century.

The picture in 2010

What does this level of segregation look like graphically? Here are two takes on that, using the 2010 Census data on about 500 occupations. First, I broke the workers up by gender and sorted them into occupations according to their percentage female (or 100-male). The histogram shows the distribution of men and women across 10 categories, and I labelled each category with the most numerous occupation it includes, such as truck drivers in the under-10% group, and secretaries in the 90+% group.

For another view, I lined up all the men and women by occupation from least-female to most-female, and traced their cumulative distributions. This shows the complete distribution for each group. I labeled some key points for comparison.

Why?

Why is there still so much segregation, and why has progress toward integration stalled? One thing to consider is education.

As I reported before, progress toward educational integration stalled in the 1990s. That is, even though women keep increasing their share of college degrees, progress toward integrating fields of study has completely stalled, and now even reversed. The segregation score between men and women, using the 35 fields of study reported by the National Center for Education Statistics, increased from 28 to 29 in the last decade.*

Here is the gender breakdown of the top 15 college majors in 1998-99 and 2008-09:

Notice how the most female-dominated majors — from English to the health professions — became even more female-dominated in the last decade. But overall it’s a picture of not much change in a decade. (For PhDs, see these charts.)

Much of the earlier progress toward integration has come because women increased their share of college graduates, for whom integration has been faster. But without more change in the distribution in majors, that source of progress may have run its course.

Another thing to consider is cultural attitudes.

In a new analysis of the General Social Survey (GSS), the Cotter et al. team turn their attention toward the trend in responses to questions about gender roles. They believe an antifeminist backlash has taken root, promoting motherhood under a pseudo-feminist rhetoric of “choice.”

The paper shows a clear pattern of stalled progress toward egalitarian attitudes on these four indicators of women’s role in politics, employment, household work, and caring for young children:

Trends in public attitudes are complicated. People are born and die, education levels rise, ethnic composition shifts, and so on. Unlike a simple poll like most in the news, the GSS includes lots of demographic and other information about its respondents, so analysts can try to sort it all out.

After testing for a variety of explanations for the trends, the authors conclude:

The lack of a ready structural or broadly ideological explanation of the mid-1990s shift strengthens the case for a specifically antifeminist backlash in the popular culture as the most likely explanation for the attitude shift…. We argue that the result has been not a reversion to the gender traditionalism of the 1950s but the rise of a third cultural frame of “egalitarian essentialism” combining support for stay-at-home mothering with a continued feminist rhetoric of choice and equality. We believe this cultural explanation is also consistent with the broader pattern of gender changes that also shifted in the mid-1990s.

Those changes include not only gender segregation, as we see more and more, but also employment levels, wages, political representation, and the division of housework.

It’s a compelling paper, essential reading for those with a research interest in gender inequality.

*Note: Those with advanced interests in gender segregation measures might like to know I also calculated the “size-standardized index” of dissimilarity for these education data, since some majors are much bigger than others. That measure looks worse, increasing from 35 to 38 over the decade.

Managing women

The march of progress, by baby steps.

The Government Accountability Office has a new report out on the progress of women in management in the 2000s. And by progress, I mostly mean in terms of the passage of time. From 2000 to 2007, the percentage of managerial workers who were women increased from 39% to 40%. Matt Huffman, Stefanie Knauer and I have previously reported that women’s entry into management slowed in the 2000s, up to 2005.

The report calls attention to the role of family barriers to women’s advancement. Notably, they found that women in management were less likely to be married and have children than men:

And the pay gap among managers was larger among those with children. The adjustments they made, which included marital status and presence of children, narrowed the gender among managers with children from 66% to 79% in 2007. That means those factors are an important part – though not the only part – of the pay gap.

Source: From the report. The “adjusted” pay gap controls for age, hours worked beyond full time, race and ethnicity, state, veteran status, education, industry sector, citizenship, marital status, and presence of children in the household.

The GAO report and news reports on it focused on which industries have more of fewer female managers, but they did not include a breakdown of managerial occupations, which we have found is crucial. There is a lot of job segregation by gender among managers. As they sliced it, lower level human resource managers and CEOs are all counted as “managers.”

This all matters for gender inequality more broadly, as our research shows that having more women in management improves the gender situation for women below them in workplaces as well as the labor market more generally.

The implications of this and other aspects of the gender gap were the subject of a hearing before the Joint Economic Committee of Congress yesterday, including as experts my friend Michelle Budig (who appears at 53:40 in the video), Catalyst, and others. Michelle was the co-author of the classic article, “The Wage Penalty for Motherhood.”

Dr. Woman

PhD’s: Count ‘em.

In 2008-2009, U.S. women pulled even with men (+/- a few hundred) in the total number of doctoral degrees awarded, according to stats from the Council of Graduate Schools.

Amazingly, women only account for 22% of new engineering PhD’s, which is truly remarkable when you realize that, even at one day old, female infants are significantly quicker at determining that it’s useless to stare at a mobile.

Although women are gaining in engineering, math, and physical sciences, they headline is driven by the rapid growth of female PhD’s in health sciences, which now has the highest proportion of women. In that area, women’s average annual increase in PhD’s was 14% for the last 10 years, compared with 4% for men.

The breakdowns, by total number and gender representation, look like this:

So the increased access to doctoral-level education is not decreasing segregation between fields as much as it could. Overall, the segregation level between fields — very broadly defined into just 11 groups — is 28, which means 28% of men or women would have to change fields in order to even out the gender distributions. That number is comparable to the segregation score for U.S. occupations overall, measured at the broadest level (10 occupation groups).

The closer you look, of course, the more segregation you find. Among BA-level degrees, the segregation level is about 35, and apparently rising. In the detailed occupation breakdown, the segregation level is more than 50 (and it is notably lower among those with more education).

Apart but not separated

Which spouses live apart?

When the Census Bureau collects information on marital status and family structure, they count some people as “married, spouse absent.” These are people who aren’t separated — in the sense of a legal separation or with the intent of getting divorced — but who are:

married people living apart because either the husband or wife was employed and living at a considerable distance from home, was serving away from home in the Armed Forces, had moved to another area, or had a different place of residence for any other reason [except marital discord].

These are not to be confused with couples that are “living apart together” (LAT), a kind of relationship increasingly recognized by demographers but not counted by the Census, because they are not married and don’t live together.

So who are these “spouse absent” people, besides a problem for data coding and analysis?

In this category, in 2008 there were an estimated 4.6 million adults listed as having an occupation (meaning they are employed or were recently). These are the most common occupations they reported:

Here’s what I get from this:

1. They are disproportionately working class. Rich people may travel for work, but they don’t have separate residences as much as these folks.
2. They are disproportionately foreign born — an estimated 41% of those reporting an occupation.
3. Among the U.S.-born, the men are more likely to be away from home for work — especially driving trucks and doing construction. The women are more likely to be left home (their occupations look more like the general female population). Some of the women have husbands in the military.
4. Among the foreign-born, there are more men (which means their wives are not in the U.S., or they are married to U.S.-born women). But lots of the foreign-born women have families back home, as we know especially from studies of those in the caring industries like those listed here.

Among the family inequalities, not having a family is an umbrella category — from orphans to widows to people denied family rights legally or through wars. But some people have families, they just don’t live with them, by choice or necessity. Partly because so much of our data are collected by the household — so a family is defined as people living together — this kind of inequality is usually overlooked.