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Women with High Educational Attainment Are Closing the Gender Employment GAP but Lag in Salary

Bloomberg Businessweek March 22, 2021 pp68 |THE LAST THING|With Bloomberg Opinion| “Where More Education Doesn’t Mean More Jobs” by Justin Fox



Chart from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics bls.gov

Not in the Bloomberg article. These data are from 2019 and hold true to the adage that the best investment is in knowledge (Ben Franklin) but are we seeing a reversal in that trend as mentioned in the Bloomberg Opinion piece?


Read the brief article for all detail


Summary of the article

Employment-population share by education level. As of Fall 2018 women made up 60% of graduate students and 56% of American undergraduates and with gains in educational attainment women are closing the employment gap. With an advanced-degree, women have an employment share of ~68% while men are at ~72%. The gap increases progressively with less educational attainment such that women with less than a high school diploma have an employment share ~ 25% while men have an employment share ~50%. Men, still seem to dominate the most prestigious graduate programs and lead in median salary at $136K versus $88K for women with advanced degrees. Perplexing is that in February 2021, “74.6% of men 25 and older with only a bachelor’s degree were employed…” versus 72.7% of men with advanced degrees but this didn’t hold for Asian American men as their employment share was “75.8%” (BA) versus advanced degree at “82.8%.” Currently, “men with graduate and professional degrees make up only 6% of the country’s 25-and-older population, and those who do have jobs are the highest paid people in the labor force...” The author recognizes this is not a disadvantage group and that “Some highly credential male labor force dropouts may have just gotten rich and retired early.”



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