Women. You have men by the balls.(...)

[TaraJo]

Yeah, 60% of the degrees, but don't celebrate too soon. A lot of degrees are just very expensive toilet paper, more of a burden than a boon, especially when you hear about these people paying 100k for a degree.

Now, what is the gender breakdown of men/women getting valuable degrees, and men/women getting degrees in basket weaving? How many women are in STEM degrees (as well as medicine I suppose...)? I'm under the impression there is a rather large shortage of women there (though it's improving slowly), but that's from memory.

Edit: Ah-ha! A Department of commerce report:
http://www.esa.doc.gov/Reports/women-ste...innovation

Much of this is correct, but it can be a bit misleading. Time magazine actually had a story on the wage gap a year or so ago and it had some interesting insights and studies on the topic. I may have to see if I can look it up sometime.

Yes, women have had a history of avoiding science fields. Sort of. When it comes to medicine, women have been getting more degrees. In fact, the researcher who compiled the ifo predicted that women will soon dominate the medical and law fields. I do wonder, when she said women will have the medicine jobs, do they mean more women are becoming doctors than men or is the title 'medicine' including nurses as well as doctors? I ask that because I know enough about nursing to know that in that field, it wouldn't surprise me to see women out number men by a 5-to-1 ratio. If they mean 'big-tent-medicine,' then it's entirely possible that nurses are the reason women are taking over medicine.

But, science fields are kinda not that important as far as the wage gap goes. As much as I feel like this career path is inhabited by money-grubbing psychopaths, the money jobs are in business. Look at the brokers on Wall Street, look at the bankers, look at the corporate executives. My grandfather was an accountant for Tyson chicken and he was loaded. That's where the money is, that's probably playing a huge role towards the wage gap and there isn't even an especially strong push to get women into business careers. I guess you could argue that these are math careers, especially accounting, but the social push seems to be to get women into science fields. Science is good and admirable and everything, but it won't close the wage gap.

But I also think there's one other important thing that needs to be done to close the wage gap: pay attention to the men! Men don't feel comfortable with being a house husband because it's so socially unacceptable to be one. Men feel like they have to go out and earn good money because society judges men based largely on how much they make. Fact is, if women want to close that wage gap, we need the men to stay home and take care of the house and kids while we do it. Thing is, unless things change on their side of the war of the sexes, they aren't going to do it.