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,
Updated (3/11/2013) with data for academic year 2010 (July 1, 2009–June 30, 2010).
Note on the Data Used to Construct Degree-Related Indicators
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees.
Although master’s degrees in the humanities 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
60% of all degrees awarded in 2010 (a slight decline from 2004’s record high of
62%; Figure II-13a). In 2010, 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 considerably smaller shares. At the master’s level, as at the bachelor's, the percentage
of humanities degrees awarded to women has traditionally been higher than that for
all fields combined, although the gap narrowed steadily over time, almost disappearing
in the early years of the new century.
In the mid-1960s, the humanities, like all other academic disciplines, awarded only
a small 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, and by the mid-1980s women represented approximately 45% of all new humanities
doctoral degree recipients.
As the 1980s continued, growth of women’s share of humanities degrees slowed, and
gender parity was not reached until the mid-1990s. Thereafter, doctoral degrees
continued to be distributed quite evenly between men and women, in contrast to the
lower degree levels where the share of female degree recipients continued to grow.
Nonetheless, the percentage of humanities doctorates awarded to women has traditionally
been greater than that for all fields combined. By the mid-2000s, however, the situation
was similar to that at the master’s level: the share of humanities doctorates awarded
to women was approximately the same as that for all fields considered together.
(For information regarding the gender distribution of advanced degree completions
in particular humanities disciplines, please see Part II, Section C, Undergraduate
and Graduate Degree Information for Specific Humanities Disciplines).
Note on the Definition of Advanced Degrees
According to the National Center for Education Statistics’ (NCES)
Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) Glossary, master’s degrees are “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
The NCES, which collects the degree completion data presented as part of the Humanities
Indicators, defines first professional degrees as those awards that require completion
of a program that meets all the following criteria: (1) completion of the academic
requirements to begin practice in a profession; (2) at least two years of college
work prior to entering the program; and (3) a total of at least six academic years
of college work to complete the degree program, including prior required college
work plus the length of the professional program itself. According to NCES, the
following ten fields award first professional degrees:
Chiropractic (D.C. or D.C.M.)
Although some fields (e.g., library science, hospital administration, and social
work) require specialized degrees for employment at the professional level, NCES
does not count degrees in these fields as first professional degrees; instead, they
are treated as master’s degrees.
Dentistry (D.D.S. or D.M.D.)
Law (LL.B. or J.D.)
Osteopathic Medicine (D.O.)
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.)
Whereas all doctorates had previously been included in a single category, for academic
years 2008–2009 and 2009–2010 NCES gave schools the option of employing a new classification
system that distinguishes among three types of doctoral degrees:
Research/Scholarship—A Ph.D. or other doctoral degree that requires advanced
work beyond the master’s level, including the preparation and defense of a dissertation
based on original research, or the planning and execution of an original project
demonstrating scholarly achievement;
Schools could classify certain degrees that had historically been treated as first
professional degrees as either “Professional Practice” doctoral degrees (as in the
case of medical degrees, for example) or master’s degrees (as in the case of advanced,
nondoctoral degrees in theology).
Professional Practice—A doctoral degree conferred upon completion of a program
providing the knowledge and skills for the recognition, credentialing, or licensing
required for professional practice; or
Other—A doctoral degree that does not meet the definition of the research/scholarship
or professional practice doctorate.
To ensure comparability with previous years, for 2007–2008 and 2008–2009 the Humanities
Indicators counted as doctorates all of those degrees classified by postsecondary
institutions as “Doctorate Degree,” “Doctorate Degree—Research/Scholarship,” or
“Doctorate Degree—Other.” The HI treated as “master’s and professional degrees”
those degrees classified by schools as “Doctorate Degree—Professional Practice,”
“First Professional Degree,” or “Master’s Degree.”
For academic year 2010–2011, NCES eliminated the “first professional degree” category.
The agency now requires schools to use the three-category system described above
to classify all advanced degrees other than 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’ (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 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
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. The HI thus cannot 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 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
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 because 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 academic 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 the HI includes 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 in the share of degrees awarded to members of traditionally underrepresented
ethnic/minority groups 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 “second majors” because
NCES began collecting data about these degrees only in 2001. The HI deals separately
with the issue of second majors in
Figure II-1c (“Humanities
Bachelor's Degrees Earned as ‘Second Majors,’ 2001–2010”).
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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