STEM education and gender income parity in USA, 2019

Abstract

Gender economic parity is critical toward attaining sustainable economic development. Scholarship has attributed gendered structure of occupations and earning differences as manifestation of their human capital skills and personal choices—based on the availability of jobs and labor in the market—as proposed by the Human Capital and the Neoclassical Economic Theorists. Feminists, however, question such simplistic likening of earnings and occupational attainments with their human capital skills as it masks the complex layers of discrimination faced by women in contemporary labor market. All over the world, women have restricted access to quality education, especially in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM)- and professional-disciplines. This occurs due to the complex ways in which patriarchal society, culture, class, race, regionality and local-scale policies intersect with each other. This study examines the relationships between professional and STEM-based educational attainments among women with their earnings and earning-gaps compared to men in U.S. Counties. I use 5-years-(2015–2019)-Amerucan Community Survey (ACS) data from the National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS) to compute occupation-based location quotients and for descriptive, correlations and regression analyses. Low-to-modest levels of education for women associate with lower earnings whereas women with Professional and Master's degree and those majoring in Business and Science & Engineering associate with higher earnings and relative wellbeing. However, there exists better gender parity concerning female-versus-male earnings for modest-to-lower educated categories. This suggests better negotiation power of males in the labor market regardless of their education. These findings point toward the significance of Feminist Political Ecologists and Labor Market Segmentation theorists in capturing nuanced complexities of gendered discrimination across U.S. Counties.