College Majors That Put Women on Equal Footing With Men

The typical full-time female worker still earns about 81 cents for every dollar that her male counterpart earns. As we’ve written before, much of that wage gap can be explained by the types of careers the different women go into as well as other demographic considerations, like education, age and experience. Even after controlling for those factors, though, an unexplained gap still exists across nearly every job category. The gap is particularly large in the highest-paying professions.

PayScale, a company that collects salary data, has analyzed its database of millions of employee profiles to see how that gender pay gap varies by college major. (Note: Workers opt into PayScale’s database, rather than being randomly selected. PayScale has said that it regularly compares its data to those from the Labor Department and other sources to make sure its numbers appear accurate and representative.)

Here are the comparisons for the pay of men and women whose highest degree was a bachelor’s, after controlling for demographic differences (but not the exact number of hours worked for full-time salaried worker, since salaried workers select from a range of hours, and the top option is 40 hours or more). Higher percentage difference in the last column indicate that men earn a bigger premium over women who studied the same subject:

Major	Uncontrolled Median Female Pay	Calculated Male Pay Using Controlled Percent Difference	Controlled Percentage Difference Between Female and Male Pay
Chemical Engineering	$74,600	$76,900	3%
Electrical Engineering	$72,000	$72,700	1%
Computer Science	$67,400	$69,100	2%
Mechanical Engineering	$64,000	$64,100	0%
Management Info Systems	$61,100	$61,300	0%
Nursing	$59,600	$60,800	2%
Computer Information Systems	$58,800	$59,800	2%
Civil Engineering	$56,900	$57,700	1%
Information Technology	$55,400	$54,900	-1%
Economics	$53,100	$53,900	2%
Mathematics	$51,900	$53,200	3%
Accounting	$50,700	$52,200	3%
Finance	$50,200	$51,500	3%
Architecture	$48,900	$51,500	5%
Business	$48,700	$50,400	4%
Marketing/Management	$45,800	$47,700	4%
Political Science	$44,000	$45,100	2%
Communications	$43,900	$44,300	1%
Biology	$42,600	$43,600	2%
Education	$40,900	$42,900	5%
English	$42,000	$42,600	1%
History	$41,000	$41,800	2%
Sociology	$39,500	$39,800	1%
Graphic Design	$38,900	$39,400	1%
Psychology	$38,000	$38,600	1%
Criminal Justice	$36,200	$37,900	5%
Social Work (SW)	$35,800	$36,600	2%

As you can see, the only one of these disciplines that graduates women who earn more than their equivalent male counterparts is information technology. Mechanical engineering and management information systems have about equivalent earnings. The majors whose male graduates earn the biggest premium over female graduates are architecture, education and criminal justice.

These data exclude workers who went on to get graduate degrees. The numbers are based on over 1,000 employee profiles for each major, ranging from 15,000 for accounting to 1,200 for social work.

I was interested to see whether the gender composition of each major affected the split in pay (e.g., maybe disciplines that were female-dominated produced graduates with more egalitarian pay schemes). Here’s a scatterplot of those numbers:

There doesn’t seem to be a particularly strong relationship between two variables. (For the data geeks out there: In a linear regression, the R² is 0.0545.)

In any case, workers whose highest degree is a bachelor’s generally have a small wage gap between the sexes, as you can see from the tiny percentages above. As workers get more education though, the gap grows: