In the 52 years since the enactment of Title IX—the federal law prohibiting discrimination in education on the basis of sex—women have made tremendous strides in closing educational gaps that once seemed insurmountable. Women now make up about 60 percent of college students in the United States and earn 56 percent of law school degrees. They also outnumber men in undergraduate communications programs by nearly two to one. In the humanities, graduate-level enrollments flew past parity decades ago. Today, about 60 percent of master’s and more than half of doctoral degrees awarded in the field go to women.
Yet, despite the steady progress, women still lag in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM)—accounting for just 39 percent of bachelor’s degrees, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The more technical the degree, the fewer women. Women received only about a fifth of the mechanical and electrical engineering degrees conferred in 2022, for example. The result is that women make up only a third of the workforce in STEM industries, including just 17 percent of engineers.
This underrepresentation is a major problem for several reasons. First, America is facing a shortage of the scientists and engineers needed in some of our fastest-growing industries. The U.S. semiconductor sector, for instance, will have about 67,000 unfilled jobs by the end of this decade. The simplest way to meet this human resource demand is for more women—the group that makes up the majority of undergraduate students—to major and graduate in STEM fields. The boost to American prosperity and competitiveness would be phenomenal.
More women in STEM fields of study won’t just mean a bigger tech workforce, though—it’ll mean a better one, as well. A diversity of backgrounds and perspectives on teams working on complex problems leads to better solutions and more breakthroughs. If personnel is policy in government, personnel is performance in STEM.
Just as importantly, getting more women in STEM will ease the gender pay gap in the United States. Today, STEM industries make up 69 percent of the U.S. GDP, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics estimates that in all, an additional 1.1 million STEM jobs will be created by 2032. According to a 2021 Pew Research Center analysis, full-time workers 25 and older in STEM fields make over $30,000 more than their counterparts in non-STEM jobs. Earning a high salary means working in STEM.
For many years, the underrepresentation of women in STEM fields was blamed on a lack of interest—or even on genetic differences. In a speech in 2005, then Harvard University President Larry Summers suggested that innate disparities between men and women might explain the underrepresentation of women in science and math careers. The remark in part cost him his job, but the notion hasn’t gone away. In 2017, a Google engineer named James Damore authored a widely circulated internal memo that claimed women’s biology makes them less adept at working in technology jobs than men. (For this, Damore, too, lost his job.)
We at the Washington Monthly know these explanations are nonsense. Why? Because we’ve run the numbers. Using data from the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System, we compared the gender distribution of every STEM program at 1,027 U.S. colleges and universities—an exercise no other media outlet has done. We then ranked the 20 undergraduate programs with the highest and lowest percentage of recent graduates who are female in 10 popular STEM fields—computer science, chemical engineering, natural resources, and so on. (The rankings are available here and at the bottom of this page.)
Look at the “lowest percent female” rankings and you’ll notice that some large public and private universities—Brigham Young, Auburn, the University of Arizona—have embarrassingly small percentages of women in some of their STEM programs. But the “highest percent female” rankings show that women are overrepresented in STEM programs at some of the most selective universities in the country. At Carnegie Mellon, women make up 50.8 percent of the student body, but 62.1 percent of the chemistry graduates and 66.1 percent of the civil engineers. Women are overrepresented, too, in the chemical engineering department at Columbia, the mechanical engineering department at MIT, the natural resources department at George Washington, and other leading programs.
It is hard to square these extraordinarily high rates of women succeeding in STEM at elite universities with the notion that women aren’t interested or can’t compete with men in these endeavors. Misogynists might assert (without evidence) that these colleges are lowering their standards for women. But if that’s the case, corporate America must be in on the conspiracy—according to our data, women in these programs earn the same high salaries as men five years after graduating. In our rankings, we combine men’s and women’s income five years out because the differences are so miniscule, but in some fields, like computer science, women actually earn more.
If women are choosing and succeeding in STEM in high percentages at some universities, what explains the dismal percentages at others? The answer, according to numerous studies and my own reporting, is that getting women into and through STEM programs requires colleges to reduce the barriers that have kept them out of these male-dominated fields for years. It’s not easy, but it’s not rocket science either.
One barrier is that women enter college with relatively less preparation in STEM and consequently fear they can’t catch up. To overcome that obstacle, the University of Washington split its introductory computer science course into a three-quarter sequence. Students can choose to start with the first class, which is geared toward those with no experience; the second class, which is for students who have some familiarity with coding; or the third class, which is for those who took AP computer science in high school or have a similar proficiency. All the students wind up at the same level by the end; only their entry points are different. As a result, 47.1 percent of graduating computer and information science students are women, placing it fourth on our list.
Another difficulty women thinking about majoring in STEM careers must overcome is the high testosterone culture of many such programs. New York University, which ranks sixth on our list of chemical engineering programs, has dealt with that problem, in part, by setting aside a floor in a dorm for female STEM students to live together and support each other. There is also a highly structured mentorship program that requires at least eight meetings per semester.
A lack of female professors in STEM departments is yet another hurdle. Research shows that having female representation among faculty can help women students see themselves as belonging in the field. But the academic pipeline to STEM professorships for women is itself riddled with obstacles. Many women in academia and especially in STEM departments report unsupportive or openly hostile work environments that don’t allow for a work-life balance conducive to having children. Today, only about 28 percent of faculty in STEM fields are women.
Cornell has long emphasized the importance of recruiting female faculty. In 2006, the university received an ADVANCE grant from the National Science Foundation to support this work. After the grant ended in 2013, Cornell’s Women in Science and Engineering group, which was formed in the late 1990s, stepped in to continue the work. The group has pushed for pay equity for initial salary offerings and for more even distribution of lab start-up funds. On average, just 19.6 percent of tenured and tenure track professors in engineering programs in the U.S. are women, but women made up 29 percent of engineering professors at Cornell last year. (The rate was only 10 percent in 2006, the year Cornell received the ADVANCE grant.) Cornell appears in the top 10 on our computer and information science ranking, our computer science ranking, and all four of our engineering categories.
Other interventions require more money and resources. Tuskegee University, which ranks fourth for women graduating with chemical and electrical engineering degrees and 10th for women pursuing biology degrees, hosts a summer science camp to bring high school students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds to campus. Funded by a grant from NASA, participants get a chance to take part in lab-based research projects, get career counseling, and hear guest speakers talk about how they navigated their paths as scientists and engineers. While the program is open to men, more women apply. And many of those women eventually matriculate to Tuskegee and go on to major in a STEM field. Once enrolled, students have access to a variety of supports, including opportunities to work with faculty in a lab and career mentorship.
Another way to get more women into STEM fields is to stress the positive impact they can have on society with their degree. “We try to focus our course descriptions, research, and outreach on the idea that computing can help the world,” says Ed Lazowska, the former chair of the University of Washington’s Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering. “We make it clear that the reason to have faster processors is you can do better things for society.” For Lecia Robinson, an assistant professor of biology at Tuskegee, a STEM degree brought an opportunity to study diseases that affect women. “That was a big determining factor for why I went into STEM,” says Robinson, who investigates the mitochondrial function in breast cancer types that affect Black women. “Hopefully my research will help create more treatment options.”
While most of the top-performing schools in our rankings are elite private colleges and flagship state universities, there are plenty of exceptions. For example, Winston-Salem State University, a historically Black public university 80 miles northeast of Charlotte, North Carolina, has the fifth-highest-ranked computer and information sciences program in the country thanks to its Women in Science Program, which includes mentorships, small-group research projects, and forums that address alternative careers in STEM. Other non-famous public institutions—New Mexico State, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, Eastern Washington University—achieve similarly impressive results.
Successes like these mean there is no good reason why other non-elite public universities can’t do a far better job of recruiting and graduating women in their STEM programs. And since those institutions are where the vast majority of U.S. college students earn their degrees, increasing their output of women STEM graduates would go a long way toward eliminating a costly and unjust gap in America’s human capital and fulfilling, finally, the promise of Title IX.
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