Do Women Hate Money?

Some majors tend to lend to a lot of money. Some majors don’t. For some reason females tend to cluster in certain majors and males in others. Using data from the 2009 American Community Survey (Aside: I’m so excited that they finally added major to this survey! I really think education research makes a great deal more sense once you recognize not all majors have equal market impact.) I looked at the concentration of majors by gender for people 25 to 35.

 

These pictures give rise to a couple of questions. Why do women choose to major in such low paying fields of study? (The top fifteen female majors earn, on average,  39% less than the top 15 male majors.) Do they value non-pecuniary benefits more than men? Do they plan on not working? Why are male majors so tightly clustered? (The top fifteen majors for men account for 52% of all men, while the top 15 only account for 29% of women.) Do men focus on the “money majors” while women pursue a wider variety of educational inputs?

Furthermore, this doesn’t appear to be just discrimination or social pressure. I think most people would agree that women have been increasingly less discouraged from entering male dominated fields. But when you look at majors by age it looks like female participation in the highest paying fields the increase has been flat for 50 years.

High paying majors are frequently more math-y than low paying ones so you could claim that this is a result of men having slightly higher average math scores and higher variance. But I don’t think that brings much to bear here since the difference in variance only creates large disparities at 3 or 4 standard deviations which I don’t think is enough to matter at the level of undergraduate degrees. Maybe it is. I guess we could look at SAT scores and planned majors but I certainly moved around a lot from freshmen to graduate, and so did most of the people I know, so I’m not sure how convincing that data would be.

Males do seem to score higher on the SAT (average of 500 for females and 534 for males) but I don’t know how much of the disparity it can explain.

Does anyone have any other ideas that might explain these data?

Bleg: Economists’ Judgments on Organ Policy

Hi! My name is Jon Diesel. I am an Econ student at George Mason, working on my MA. I am writing a paper entitled, “Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Organ Liberalization?,” for Econ Journal Watch. I am working with Professor Daniel Klein.

We created this bleg in the hope that people could provide us with citations to economists who have published a judgment on the issue of organ policy. Even judgments that are vague and half-hearted are of interest to us. We are interested in the issue as it pertains to both live and deceased organ donors.

The table below shows economists covered thus far. My research began with Econlit, and fanned out to references included in the papers found in Econlit.

My research has not tackled books, including textbooks. I would be especially grateful if you could contribute citations to economists who address the issue in books or any other form of publication. Especially if the economist you have in mind is not included in the table below.

Please leave your contribution in the comments field below. Partial information will be welcome, but full reference information would be greatly appreciated.

The author making a judgment must be an economist in at least one of the following senses: Holds a degree in econ; has an “economist” title; has been faculty/instructor of economics.

In the table below, “presumed consent” is the reform that would make cadaverous organs the property of the state/health system unless the deceased had explicitly chosen otherwise. “Mandated choice” is the reform that would mandate that individuals choose whether their organs may be used, in the event of death.

Many thanks! Jon Diesel jdiesel@gmu.edu