Women earn degrees, but men out-earn them?

When I was a kid, I heard the elders talk about how a proposed alliance (the arranged marriage system) for my dad's cousin sister didn't pan out because she was not a "graduate."  It was a new word for the  elementary school student that I was, and I had to seek clarification.

That was about forty years ago, and serves as a wonderful anecdotal evidence on the changing conditions for women.  It was rapidly eliminating the old joke about what the secondary school exams were for.  Those days, it was called the SSLC, which was for Secondary School Leaving Certificate.  The joke was that it meant differently for girls: Stop Studying and Learn Cooking!

By the time I was of college-age, there were female students in all kinds of disciplines.  It seemed like a bus full of my girl classmates in high school went on to medical school.  A government engineering college in the town where I completed my undergraduate studies came across as a women's college because of the huge numbers of girls there.

Females going to college is a worldwide phenomenon, and we are all better off because of it.  In the university where I teach, the ratio of women to men is almost two-to-one.  In the Honors Program that I used to direct, the female participation is even more lopsided.  So much so that quite a few girls used to joke that perhaps we ought to recruit guys by advertising the program as their best chance to meet a whole lot of smart and beautiful women.  (This ratio generates other social dynamics as well.)

As the Economist noted a few months ago:

[More] girls than boys now complete their secondary education in 32 of the 34 countries that are members of the OECD ... Moreover, female graduates greatly outnumber male graduates. Overall they account for 58% of graduates within OECD member states in 2009, the most recent year for which data are available, up from 54% in 2000.

 The chart also immediately reveals that:

Men, however, continue to dominate the sciences: some 60% of science graduates are male.

 There are plenty of reasons for this, and I do not want to make anything simplistic out of a complex situation.

Laura Noren, who is a doctoral candidate at New York University, has a wonderful graphic that neatly sums up higher education enrollment by gender (ht):

However, we still have some ways to go regarding bridging the gap between what women earn for doing the same kind of a job that men do, especially in certain fields:

The showcasing of Lily Ledbetter at the recently concluded Democratic National Convention was, therefore, more than merely symbolic. 

The good news, though, is that we have come a long way.