Medicine:
Increase in women doctors changing the face of medicine
Since 1975 the percentage of female doctors has nearly tripled, from 9 percent to 25 percent. And the wave is far from cresting: 38 percent of doctors under age 44 are women, and half the students in U.S. medical schools are women, a change that is expected to intensify.
Real the whole article, and judge for yourself….
Law:
Women go from 4% of law students in 1961 to 49% in 2001 cite.
Women in undergrad engineering:
Sex ratio (male/female) by race in undergraduate engineering enrollment 2002:
White: 84/16
Asian/Pac. Isl.: 77/23
Black: 70/30
Hispanic: 78/22
Nat. Am.: 79/21
Are whites more sexist (cite)?
Female graduate students:
Female share of S&E graduate students, by field: 1991 and 2001.
Females accounted for more than half of all graduate students in some science fields: in 2001, for example, females made up 74 percent of the graduate students in psychology, 54 percent in biological sciences, and 52 percent in social sciences.
Roughly 30–40 percent of the graduate students in most other science fields were female.
Females accounted for 20 percent of graduate students in engineering and 30 percent of graduate students in computer sciences in 2001.
Doctoral degrees awarded in S&E and non-S&E fields, by sex: 1966–2001
By 2001, females earned 37 percent of S&E and 57 percent of non-S&E doctoral degrees, up from 8 and 18 percent, respectively, in 1966.
The number of males earning S&E doctoral degrees dropped between 1996 and 2001.
OK, I took some NSF stats, and ordered the fields from least female (percentage wise) to most female in terms of doctoral awards in 2001. There are three columns, 1994 & 2001 percentages, and the growth of women in the field in those 7 years, and finall the field. Note some of the samples are small, to see those, go here (“History of Science”). The take home message is that the number of women is increasing, and in some fields they dominate. I am simply skeptical that if sexism is the primary component in this variation that mechanical engineering (yes, stereotypically a male field if any) is that much more sexist than psychology (remember, the recent upsurge in women is a post-World War II phenomena, even though there were more female psychologists than engineers in 1950, the numbers were still small).
30.2 36.5 17.1% All S&E fields
6.8 9.5 28.8% Mechanical
8.8 12.9 31.7% Electrical
11.3 13.0 13.0% Physics
4.8 13.8 65.3% Aerospace
10.9 16.8 35.1% Engineering
11.7 18.7 37.5% Civil
15.2 18.8 19.1% Computer sciences
37.0 20.0 -85.2% History of science
15.4 21.0 26.8% Materials
14.5 21.5 32.6% Industrial
13.6 21.8 37.8% Other
17.4 22.0 21.2% Astronomy
20.2 24.1 16.5% Atmospheric
20.8 24.6 15.4% Physical sciences
15.6 24.8 37.1% Chemical
21.1 27.4 23.1% Mathematics and statistics
22.6 28.2 19.9% Economics
18.7 29.2 36.1% Earth
22.2 31.5 29.5% Earth, atmospheric, and ocean sciences
27.7 31.7 12.7% Chemistry
10.7 32.3 66.8% Other
30.3 33.4 9.2% Political science and public administration
23.1 34.0 32.0% Agricultural sciences
30.4 37.8 19.6% Oceanography
39.3 40.0 1.6% Other
35.7 41.9 14.6% Sciences
37.0 42.9 13.7% Social sciences
40.5 44.8 9.6% Biological sciences
36.5 48.1 24.1% Other
51.6 58.4 11.6% Sociology
53.8 58.5 8.0% Anthropology
60.6 59.4 -2.1% Linguistics
53.3 66.0 19.2% Area and ethnic studies
62.2 66.9 7.0% Psychology
Posted by razib at 04:47 PM