More on the Pay Gap

Rightwingprof has some great data and charts that follow up on my post from earlier this week on the pay gap amoung men and women in the years following college:

So women were awarded more bachelor's and master's degrees than men. The only degree awarded to more men than women was the doctorate. Whether this means women are more successful university students is another matter; we'd have to check the degree stats against matriculation stats, and see whether men or women have a higher degree completion rate. However, these data do show that women are in no way "disadvantaged" by American universities.

But what about the fields men and women choose? Is there a significant difference, as the Post article and AAUW report claims?

Prof then goes into great detail looking at the degrees fields in which men and women get degrees based upon data from the National Center on Education Statistics. Read the whole post, but here is the conclusion:

These Department of Education data support the same conclusions drawn by the Post article and the AAUW study. Whereas more women are getting degrees that will get them high paying jobs, men still show more interest in the fields of study that will get them high salaries than are women. To draw a crude generalization, men approach higher education more pragmatically than do women. The inevitable result, of course, is a so-called "pay inequity" between the sexes.

The fact that it is illegal for employers to pay men and women different when they perform the same work with the same qualifications means that there must be some other cause of the pay differential. What we are discovering and RWP is supporting is that people make decisions early in life that impacts their earning potential.

The follow up question would be why do people make the choices they make? What are the factors leading to young men and women making the choices they make?