Gender Distribution of Advanced Degrees in the Humanities
- As of 2022, women earned 63% of all master’s and professional-practice degrees in the humanities and 56% of doctoral degrees in the field. Both values were a modest increase from the previous year and the highest levels on record (Indicator II-26a and Indicator II-26b).
- In the earliest available data (from 1966), women earned a somewhat smaller share of master’s degrees in the humanities than men. By 1970, however, women were earning a majority of humanities master’s degrees, surpassing 60% of degree recipients in the field by 1997. Women’s share has remained within a three percentage point range since then.
- From the 1960s to the early 1970s, the share of humanities master’s degrees awarded to women was substantially larger than the share for all fields combined (by almost 60%). By 1997, however, this difference had narrowed, with women’s share of humanities degrees only 10% larger than their share of all degrees. By 2022, as women’s share of humanities degrees stabilized and their share of degrees in other fields increased, the proportion of women earning humanities master’s and professional degrees was nearly identical to the proportion of women earning such degrees in higher education overall.
- In 2022, women earned approximately three-quarters of the master’s and professional degrees in the fields of education and the health/medical sciences. Conversely, women earned half of the comparable degrees in business and less than a third of engineering degrees.
- In the mid-1960s, the humanities, like all other academic fields, awarded only a small minority of doctoral degrees to women. Although women accounted for only 19% of humanities doctorates in 1966, their representation in the humanities that year was greater than in every other field except education. Throughout the last third of the 20th century, however, women’s share of humanities degrees increased steadily, and by the late 1990s, the majority of all new humanities doctoral degree recipients were women. Ever since, a slightly larger share of doctoral degrees in the field has gone to women than to men.
- In every year from 1966 to 2022, the humanities awarded a larger share of doctorates to women than did higher education as a whole, but the gap decreased steadily over this period. By 2021, the humanities were almost indistinguishable from all doctoral programs combined with respect to the share of degrees going to women. But in 2022, the disparity returned, with the humanities conferring a slightly larger share of its doctoral degrees on women than did higher education generally.
- From 1987 to 2022, most of the humanities disciplines examined here saw an increase in the share of women earning master’s and professional-practice degrees (Indicator II-26c). The largest increases (all more than 30%) occurred in classical studies; ethnic, gender, and cultural studies; and philosophy. Only in languages and literatures other than English and the academic study of the arts was the share of degrees earned by women smaller in 2022 than in the late 1980s, and only by a small amount.
- All but two humanities disciplines had a larger share of women earning doctoral degrees in 2022 than in 1987 (Indicator II-26d). The exceptions were in languages and literatures other than English (where the share fell from 59.1% to 57.1%) and linguistics (falling from 56.7% to 55.7%). The largest increases occurred in cultural/ethnic/gender studies (120%) and Philosophy (89%).
- As of 2022, only three of the 11 humanities disciplines examined here were still awarding a majority of their doctoral degrees to men: history, philosophy, and religion.
Source: Office of Education/U.S. Department of Education, Survey of Earned Degrees, Higher Education General Information System (HEGIS), and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
Source: Office of Education/U.S. Department of Education, Survey of Earned Degrees, Higher Education General Information System (HEGIS), and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
Source: Office of Education/U.S. Department of Education, Survey of Earned Degrees, Higher Education General Information System (HEGIS), and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
Source: Office of Education/U.S. Department of Education, Survey of Earned Degrees, Higher Education General Information System (HEGIS), and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS). Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
