“Which College Majors Screw Over Women the Least?” Yay for IT!

A rather provocative title from the Jezebel site leads to some interesting statistics.  If you follow the link to the NYTimes site, you find that CS still has men paid 2% more than women.  IT is the winner, where women make more than men. What I find it interesting that few women choose IT for a career, despite the obvious economic advantages: Lots of jobs, high-paying jobs, and jobs where women get paid better than men.  That suggests that decision away from IT is not an economic one — there are other factors at play.

According to the Times’ Catherine Rampell, it looks like a woman’s choice of college major may determine her future income equality. Rampell analyzed information provided by salary data-collecting company PayScale and found that a surprising number of majors actually eliminate much of the discrepancy between male and female pay. Women who majored in Mechanical Engineering or Management Information Systems, for example, earn identical salaries to their male counterparts, even when controlled for demographic differences. Women who studied Electrical Engineering, Civil Engineering, Communications, English, Sociology, Graphic Design, or Psychology earn only 1% less than men doing the same job. And women who studied Information Technology in undergrad and didn’t go to grad school actually outearn similarly educated men by 1%.

via Which College Majors Screw Over Women the Least?.