Encouraging more women to pursue careers in science, technology, education and math is a worthy goal, given the potential payoff for oureconomy and for women — the so-called STEM fields — who get jobs in these higher-paying fields. One surprising way to make it happen: Suffer through a recession.
New research has found that increased unemployment leads both genders to move toward fields associated with better earnings and job prospects, and that women are more likely to shift their majors in that direction than men. The switch to more math-intensive majors contradicts the argument that women are less capable of success in STEM fields, according to a paper published by Institute for the Study of Labor, a German research center. No one knows why women seem to be more sensitive to economic conditions than men, although previous research has shown women’s decisions to work and invest in higher education are more closely associated with economic conditions than are men’s labor market decisions. Still, policymakers should consider this sensitivity when trying to entice women to enter STEM fields. One way may be to focus on the economic payoff by framing education in STEM majors as an investment, the researchers say. The study used the American Community Survey, an ongoing Census Bureau study, to examine what fields people have chosen over the past 50 years. The sampled population represents about 5 percent of all college graduates over that period. Among women, business fields upticked the most when unemployment rose. Other large increases in the share of women occurred in nursing, accounting, technical health fields, computer-related fields, engineering and economics. Fields that lost the largest share of women included education, literature and languages, sociology, psychology and other liberal arts studies.
The study was not trying to show that business and STEM majors are “better” than liberal arts majors, researcher Benjamin Keys hastens to point out. Nor was it gauging which fields make people happier or more fulfilled, or which careers are best for society. But the study did find that increased income from switching to better-paying majors helped offset some of the lifetime loss of income that happens when people graduate in a recession. The offset made recessions “10 percent less painful” for recession-era graduates, the researchers found. “It is simply a fact that people taking a math-intensive course of study end up getting paid more down the line,” Keys says.
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