Study: College majors contribute to gender pay gap early in career

Global Business

Study: College majors contribute to gender pay gap early in career

Job search company Glassdoor examined nearly 47,000 resumes to find out the majors with the largest gender pay gaps in the first five years after graduation.CGTN’S Mark Niu reports.

Topping the list was health care administration with a 22 percent pay gap, followed by mathematics with an 18 percent gap, and then biology with 13 percent.

“In the years after college, men seem to be getting fast tracked toward more technical positions and more senior managerial style roles. As by contrast, more women ended up in more general, lower paid, less technical, less senior,” Andrew Chamberlain, Glassdoor Chief Economist said.

But Glassdoor also found a reverse pay gap. That is, some majors that are leading women to make more than men. Architecture topped that list with a 14 percent gap favoring women. That was followed by music and social work.

“The women who major in those fields they actually go into social work, or for example for music majors, the women in those fields become music teachers or audio engineers whereas the men who major in music tend to go in totally different unrelated jobs.

Women in those fields are actually sticking to what they’ve learned and getting relatively high paying jobs after school,” Chamberlain said.

Environmental Sciences is another field that showed a reverse gap favoring women by nearly seven percent.

Stanford student Mia Sosa studied that for her undergraduate degree and is now studying civil and environmental engineering in graduate school.

“I grew up never seeing females in engineering, just in books or any kind of general media. So that’s taken a long time for me to start to break down and think, why not me,” Sosa said.

One of Sosa’s related major, civil engineering actually turned out to have no salary gender gap at all. A rarity, given Glass Door still found nine of the top ten highest paying majors to be dominated by men.