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For first time, women hold more advanced degrees than men

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Amanda O'Connell attends her graduation Saturday, May 7, at the University of Dayton where she earned a Master of Engineering degree in renewable and clean energy.

Jan Underwood Amanda O'Connell attends her graduation Saturday, May 7, at the University of Dayton where she earned a Master of Engineering degree in renewable and clean energy.

By Christopher Magan, Staff Writer Updated 5:43 PM Saturday, May 7, 2011

Amanda O’Connell always excelled in school and knew from a young age she wanted more than the typical four-year college degree, but she never thought she’d make help make history doing it.

O’Connell received her master’s in engineering for renewable and clean energy from the University of Dayton Saturday, joining an historic number of women earning advanced degrees. For the first time in American history, according to the 2010 Census, more women than men hold advanced degrees.

“It’s something I always wanted to do. I feel like everyone has at least an undergraduate degree,” the Cincinnati-area native said. “I’ve always enjoyed school, I don’t have a family yet, so I thought: What better time to do it than now?”

Census figures show women hold 10.6 million advanced degrees compared to 10.5 million for men. Last year, just more than half the doctorate degrees awarded went to women.

Women are also inching closer to men in overall educational attainment, with men holding only a slight edge among those over 25 holding degrees. A decade ago, the gap was wider.

The census data illustrates how the education attainment of women continues to climb along with their growing presence in the workforce, which is now just under half of all workers. Conversely, the number of stay-at-home mothers continues to drop while men acting as primary child-care takers has risen slightly.

Jessica Saunders, a 2003 UD graduate now community relations manager for Children’s Medical Center in Dayton, said women don’t have the obstacles their mothers did when it comes to earning advanced degrees. She earned a master’s degree the same year as her mother, Jackie Gruenke, a long-time teacher who went back to school after having a family.

“It is a credit to our mothers and grandmothers who fought for this and now we can take advantage of it,” Saunders said.

Women dominant  on local campuses

The trend is visible in this year’s graduating class. Women dominate both bachelor’s and master’s degrees at Miami University, the University of Dayton and Central State University, which all award diplomas this weekend. The same is true at Wright State University and 60 percent of the enrolled students at Sinclair Community College are women.

Nationally women have outnumbered men on college campuses since the 1980s and earned more bachelors degrees since 1996. But they continue to trail men in the fields of science, math, engineering and computers programing.

Bruce Cochrane, dean of the graduate school at Miami University, said that tide is slowly turning. Women have long dominated graduate programs in fields like education and health care, but have recently made significant advances in science and engineering.

“It is particularly gratifying to see a trend like that,” Cochrane said, because, historically women haven’t been as encouraged as men to enter science fields. “They are moving into fields we don’t traditionally think of women as being prime recruiting candidates. In a lot of those fields it takes a masters degree to have a career.”

Career development has become a top priority for women, said Paul Vanderburgh, dean of the UD graduate school. “They are making career decisions first,” Vanderburgh said. “They want to ensure they have earning power and a job they like before having a family.”

Past gender roles are not even on the radar for students like O’Connell, who plans to marry this fall. “My mom was a stay-at-home mom. I thought I might like that too, then reality set in,” she said. “I don’t know of many households now where both parents don’t have to work.”

Technology continues to make it easier for women to juggle career and family, Vanderburgh said. Telecommuting and nontraditional work schedules can help bring more women with young families into the workplace.

“Technology will help those barriers fall,” he said.

But Saunders, a working new mother, said technology can also present distractions for working women who, thanks to mobile phones and email, are never beyond reach of their jobs. “Sometimes, it is easy for technology to interfere with family life,” she said. “It intermingles life and work. As much as it can be helpful, at the same time, it can be hard.”

Women  still earn less

Women currently make up 47 percent of the workforce and the number of female workers is growing faster than men, yet they earn roughly 80 percent of what men make, data from the U.S. Department of Labor shows. They also continue to trail men in top administrative posts in both private business and public institutions.

Miami graduate Abby Custer thinks that gap will close as young, highly educated women continue to enter the workforce. After earning her undergraduate degree in marketing she will start a job with Goodyear Tire and Rubber in Akron. She hasn’t seen a difference in the salary offers between her male and female friends.

More schools are trying to make obtaining an advanced degree easier, including UD, which is developing a bachelor’s plus master’s degree program, Vanderburgh said. “We are building a model for students to do it in five years and trying to make sure there is adequate financial aid available for the last year,” he said.

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