Humanities Resources Online

Gender Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities

NOTE TO READERS: Please include the following reference when citing data from this page: "American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators, http://HumanitiesIndicators.org".

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Updated (4/2/2010) with data from 2007.

See the Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators and the Note on the Definition of Master’s Degrees and First Professional Degrees.

Since 1966, the humanities have been one of the fields with the most balanced gender distribution of degrees at the master’s level. While master’s degrees were awarded somewhat more often to men than women in the mid-1960s, by 1970, gender parity had been achieved. Women subsequently went on to become the majority of humanities master’s recipients, garnering 61% of all degrees awarded in 2007 (Figure II-13a). At the beginning of the 21st century, only education/social service professions and the health sciences awarded a substantially greater percentage of master’s degrees to women than did the humanities. Business, engineering, law, and physical sciences awarded a considerably smaller share. At the master’s level, as at the bachelor’s, the percentage of humanities degrees awarded to women has been traditionally higher than that for all fields combined, though the gap has been steadily narrowing, almost disappearing in 2007 (see Indicator II-5, Gender Distribution of Undergraduate Degrees in the Humanities).

	Figure II-13a, Full Size
	Supporting Data

In the mid 1960s, the humanities, like all other academic disciplines, awarded only a minority of doctoral degrees to women. Though they fared better in the humanities than in nearly all other fields, women still received only 19% of humanities doctorates at that time (Figure II-13b). Throughout the 1970s, however, this percentage increased steadily, so that by the early 1980s, women represented approximately 45% of all new humanities doctoral degree recipients.

	Figure II-13b, Full Size
	Supporting Data

Note on the Definition of Master’s Degrees and First Professional Degrees

The Humanities Indicators Project uses the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES) definitions of master’s degrees and first professional degrees. According to the online version of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System Glossary, master’s degrees are those “awards that require the successful completion of a program of study of at least the full-time equivalent of 1 academic year, but not more than 2 academic years of work beyond the bachelor’s degree.” First professional degrees are those “awards that require completion of a program that meets all the following criteria: (1) completion of the academic requirements to begin practice in the profession; (2) at least 2 years of college work prior to entering the program; and (3) a total of at least 6 academic years of college work to complete the degree program, including prior required college work plus the length of the professional program itself.” The following ten fields award first professional degrees:

Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.)
Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.)
Law (LL.B., or J.D.)
Medicine (M.D.)
Optometry (O.D.)
Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.)
Pharmacy (Pharm.D.)
Podiatry (D.P.M., D.P., or Pod.D.)
Theology (M.Div., M.H.L., B.D., or Ordination)
Veterinary Medicine (D.V.M. or V.M.D.)

Although some fields (e.g., library science, hospital administration, and social work) require specialized degrees for employment at the professional level, the NCES does not count degrees in these fields as first professional degrees; instead, they are included as master’s degrees.

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Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators

The data that form the basis of these indicators are drawn from the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics’s (NCES) Higher Education General Information System (HEGIS) and its successor, the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System (IPEDS), through which institutions of higher learning report on the numbers and characteristics of students completing degree programs (as well as a variety of other topics; for more on this major data collection program, see http://nces.ed.gov/ipeds/). The HEGIS/IPEDS degree-completion data going back to 1966 have been made easily accessible to decision-makers, researchers, and the general public by the National Science Foundation (NSF) via its online data analysis tool WebCASPAR. The NSF has traditionally used the NCES data to tabulate science and engineering degree awards as part of its Science and Engineering Indicators Program, which since 1973 has issued a biennial report designed to provide public and private policymakers with a broad base of quantitative information about the U.S. science, engineering, and technology enterprise.

The NSF has developed a set of standardized disciplinary categories that can be used across the various data sources it relies upon to construct its indicators. Because the NSF focuses on trends in science and engineering education, its disciplinary classification is most detailed in these areas. The utility of the NSF system for the purposes of the Humanities Indicators (HI) is limited. For example, the NSF scheme does not distinguish between the academic study of the arts, considered by the HI to be part of the humanities, and art performance. This makes it impossible for the HI to include in its tally those degrees conferred in the areas of musicology, art history, film studies, and drama history/criticism. Moreover, while the HI considers such disciplines as archeology, women’s studies, gay and lesbian studies, and Holocaust studies to be part of the humanities field, NSF categorizes them as social sciences. Additionally, NSF places interdisciplinary degrees in areas such as general humanities and liberal studies in a broad “Other” category that includes degrees for many disciplines that are clearly not within the purview of the humanities as conceptualized by the HI. Consequently, such interdisciplinary degrees, along with those mentioned above, cannot be captured in humanities degree counts from 1966 to 1986.

For 1987 and later years (1995 and later for data on the race/ethnicity of degree recipients), however, NSF also categorizes earned degrees according to the more detailed Classification of Instructional Programs (CIP), which permits a more precise count of humanities degrees; that is, a count that includes degrees in all those programs that are part of academic disciplines included within the scope of the humanities for the purposes of the HI. (For an inventory of the disciplines and activities treated as part of the humanities by the HI, see the Statement on the Scope of the “Humanities” for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators.) The CIP was first developed by NCES in 1980 as a way to account for the tremendous variety of degree programs offered by American institutions of higher learning and has been revised three times since its introduction, most recently in 2009 (this version is referred to as “CIP 2010”). The CIP has also been adopted by Statistics Canada as its standard disciplinary classification system.

For the purposes of the Humanities Indicators the CIP has several advantages over the NSF classification system. For example, because the NSF system groups degrees in the nonsectarian study of religion with those awarded in programs designed to prepare students for religious vocations and since the latter type of degree is much more common, the HI cannot include what the NSF considers to be degrees in religion in the humanities degree counts for years prior to 1987. With CIP-coded data, however, academic disciplines such as comparative religion can be separated from vocational programs such as theology and thus can be included in the humanities degree tally. Additionally, when using CIP-coded data, the HI can include degrees in all the excluded disciplines mentioned above, from art history to Holocaust studies, in its counts of humanities degrees from 1987 onward. For an inventory of the NSF and CIP disciplinary categories included by the HI under the broad field headings (“humanities,” “natural sciences,” etc.) used throughout Part II of the HI, see the NSF and CIP Discipline Code Catalog. This catalog also indicates which degree programs are included by the HI within specific humanities disciplines (e.g., for the purposes of the HI, English degrees include those classified under CIP as being in “English Language and Literature,” “American Literature,” and “Creative Writing,” among others).

In constructing indicators that use IPEDS data to track historical trends in the academic humanities, the HI has employed completion data that were classified using both the NSF and CIP systems. In these cases, either a note accompanying the chart or a break in the trend line indicates where estimates based on the NSF classification system leave off and those based on CIP begin. For those indicators reporting degree data gathered in 1987 or more recently (1995 or more recently for the charts and tables describing the proportions of all degrees received by members of racial/ethnic minority groups), CIP-coded data are used.

In the case of several of the degree-related indicators, the humanities are compared to certain other fields such as the sciences and engineering. The nature of these fields is specified in the Statement on the Scope of the “Humanities” for Purposes of the Humanities Indicators. These broad fields do not encompass all postsecondary programs. Therefore, where fields are being compared in terms of their respective shares of all degrees, the percentages will not add up to 100%. Also, none of the graphs showing change over time includes a data point for the academic year 1999, because the NCES did not release data for that year.

The degree counts presented as part of the HI do not include so-called double major degrees. When degrees are earned concurrently in this way, only the first degree is counted. Although second degrees are not common (in the 2006–2007 academic year, they accounted for 5.2% of all degree completions), anecdotal evidence suggests that a preponderance of such degrees are in the humanities. Second-degree data first became available via WebCASPAR in November 2010. If resources permit, an analysis of these data will be conducted in 2011.

Data on the number of students completing minors are not collected as part of IPEDS, but such information was compiled for selected humanities disciplines as part of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences–sponsored Humanities Departmental Survey (HDS; see the HDS final report, page 8, Table 12).

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