Women still significantly underrepresented in STEM fields, impacting U.S. competitivenes The U.S. Commerce Department’s Economics and Statistics Administration (ESA) today issued the second in a series of reports on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) jobs and higher education.
As expected, the report, Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation , finds there are fewer women than men in STEM jobs and attaining degrees in STEM fields. But interestingly, that’s true despite the fact that the wage premium for women in STEM jobs is higher than that for men and that there’s greater income parity between genders in STEM fields than there is in the employment market as a whole.
While women make up 48 percent of the U.S. workforce, only 24 percent hold STEM jobs. Over the past decade, this underrepresentation has remained fairly constant, even as women’s share of the college-educated workforce has increased.
Women with STEM jobs, however, earned 33 percent more than women in non-STEM jobs in 2009, exceeding the 25 percent earnings premium for men in STEM. Women in STEM also experience a smaller gender wage gap than their counterparts in other fields.
Women in STEM: A Gender Gap to Innovation is based on analysis to date from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and Current Population Survey. For the purposes of this report, STEM jobs are defined to include professional and technical support occupations in the fields of computer science and mathematics, engineering, and life and physical sciences. The STEM occupation list contains 50 detailed occupation codes.
On July 14, ESA released the first report in the series profiling STEM employment and STEM workers in the United States, titled STEM: Good Jobs Now and for the Future. A copy of today’s ESA report can be found here.
Source: U.S. Department of Commerce
