Spotlight for Recruiting Professionals

Women currently account for more than half of all degrees conferred at every level, but are poorly represented in the engineering and computer sciences fields.

At the bachelor’s degree level, women earn approximately 57 percent of all degrees, but account for just 18.4 percent of engineering degrees and 18 percent of computer sciences degrees.

Women have held their ground in the engineering field; the percent of bachelor’s degrees in engineering earned by women has hovered in the mid to high teens since the 1990s.

In the computer sciences fields, however, the trend is away from women. The high-water mark was in 1983-84, when women accounted for 37.1 percent of bachelor’s-level computer sciences degrees; the percent has been dropping since then. (See Figure 1.)

Moreover, the gender gap extends to starting salaries, with women in engineering and computer science receiving average lower starting salary offers than their male counterparts. (See Figure 2.) The differential between men and women studying engineering hovers around 3 percent, but is 22 percent between men and women in computer sciences.

Figure 1: Number of Bachelor’s Degrees Conferred in Computer Science (Selected Years)

Figure 2: Average Starting Salary Offer, by Gender