Degrees of separation
Less than a month after Harvard professor Dr. Claudia Goldin became the third woman to be awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics for her research on the gender pay gap, a new Pew Research report has detailed just how far women have climbed the ranks of America’s most lucrative careers.
Since 1980, the proportion of women in the top 10 highest-paying occupations in the US — which, in 2021, meant median earnings equal to $136,000 on average — has increased some 22 percentage points to 35%. As several of these occupations require advanced degrees, it follows that a greater share of women have undertaken doctorates in Pharmacy (40% vs. 63%), Medicine (23% vs. 50%), and Dentistry (13% vs. 51%) from 1980 to 2021.
The relative presence of women has increased significantly in nearly all of these professions over the same period, with the proportion of women dentists more than quadrupling, and women physicians tripling, in the last 40 years. However, it’s the pharmacy industry where women have formed the greatest generality, as they now comprise 61% of pharmacists in the US in 2021 — with a family-friendly working model, and more egalitarian earnings within the industry, explaining at least some of the relative popularity of the pharmacist career path among women.
Even so, in all the other top 10 highest-paying jobs, women remain in the minority.
