COLUMBUS – Despite a nationwide shortage of women working in technology-related fields, a study from Ohio State suggests learning does not equal earning for those who do.
Using data not previously available, the researchers found that, one year after they graduate, women with Ph.D.’s in science and engineering fields earn 31 percent less than do men, said Bruce Weinberg, co-author of the study and professor of economics at OSU.
The pay gap dwindled, however, as the study factored in the fields in which the women took their degrees and whether they had children.
“We can get a sense of some of the reasons behind the pay gap, but our study can’t speak to whether any of the gap is due to discrimination. Our results do suggest some lack of family-friendliness for women in these careers,” said Weinberg.
The pay gap dropped to 11 percent when researchers took into account that women tended to graduate with degrees in fields that generally pay less and disappeared altogether when they looked at whether whether women were married and had children. Single and childless women tended to have less of a pay gap than those who were married and those who had children.
“We can’t tell from our data what’s going on there,” Weinberg said. “There’s probably a combination of factors. Some women may consciously choose to be primary caregivers and pull back from work. But there may also be some employers putting women on a ‘mommy track’ where they get paid less.”
About equal percentages of men and women were married or partnered and more men than women had children but Weinberg says married women with children saw the lower pay.
The study, which Weinberg conducted the study with Catherine Buffington and Benjamin Cerf of the U.S. Census Bureau and Christina Jones of the American Institutes for Research appears in the May issue of the American Economic Review: Papers and Proceedings.
They were able to use data from federal programs, not previously available, on the fields studied by more than 1,000 students and U.S. Census data on where they worked, how much they earned one year after graduation and their marital and childbearing status.
Weinberg and the other researchers found that 59 percent of women completed dissertations in the lower-paying fields of biology, chemistry and health, compared to only 27 percent of men.
Men were more than twice as likely to complete dissertations in more financially lucrative fields like engineering and were one and a half times more likely to study computer science, math or physics.
While industry tends to pay the largest salaries, women are more likely than men to work in government and academic settings and, when they worked in industry, women still did not have equal pay with men.