Women’s share, by education

My family class spills over to a blog post about family and class.

Nothing original today, but I did make a graph for class that fits. This is from the Pew report that I wrote about earlier. It captures nicely both how women’s earning power within married couples has increased, and how that shift has been much greater for women with higher education.

Source: My graph from data from the Decennial Censuses and the 2007 American Community Survey, analyzed in this Pew report. They adjusted incomes to account for household size, then scaled them reflect a three-person household, so it’s not raw incomes. Seems reasonable to me.

Women may be earning a larger share of college degrees these days, and more people are going to college then in the old days. But still only 29% of women age 25-29 have BAs, so that’s not the whole story, gender-wise.