Gender Distribution of Bachelor’s Degrees in the Humanities
- Women received 62% of the humanities bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2022, a share four percentage points larger than women’s share of all degrees (Indicator II-08a). From 1987 to 2022, the share of bachelor’s degrees in the humanities earned by women remained relatively stable, staying within a range of four percentage points—from a low of 58% (in 1995) to a high of 62% (in the early 2000s and again from 2018 to 2022).
- The fine and performing arts were most like the humanities in the share of bachelor’s degrees going to women in 2022 (also 64%). The health and medical sciences (with 85%), education (74%), and social sciences (67%) each had a greater share of women completing degrees in the field than the humanities, while engineering (24%) and business and management (47%) had substantially smaller shares.
- Among the humanities disciplines that can be tracked back to the mid-1960s (designated “Historical Categories” in the figure and consisting of English language and literature, history, languages and literatures other than English, linguistics, classical studies, and philosophy), the share of bachelor’s degrees earned by women increased from 54% in 1966 to a high of almost 61% in 2022.
- Among the “Historical Categories,” disciplines in languages and literatures had the largest share of women completing degrees in almost every year for which data exist (with linguistics, English, and languages and literatures other than English all awarding 68–73% of their degrees to women in 2022; Indicator II-08b). Philosophy, although consistently the humanities field with the lowest share of women earning degrees (41% in 2022), has recently seen a sharp increase in the share of women earning degrees—rising 10 percentage points in a decade. As a result, philosophy was approaching history, which has also lingered well below the average for the field as a whole (42% of history degrees were earned by women in 2022). Among humanities disciplines awarding more than 10 degrees, cultural, ethnic, and gender studies granted the largest share of degrees to women in 2022 (81%).
- In almost every humanities discipline, the share of degrees earned by women was at least somewhat larger in 2022 than in the first year for which data are available. The notable exception was the study of the arts, where women accounted for 68% of degree recipients in 1987 but only 55% of the degrees awarded in 2022, and languages/literatures other than English, which reached a peak in 1975 (76%) and then gradually declined back to the 1966 levels (71%) by 2022.
- Another perspective on gender and degree completions in the humanities is to “flip the denominator” and ask what share of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to women were in the humanities. In the late-1960s, more than one in five degrees earned by women were in the historical humanities categories—second only to education among degrees awarded to women at the time (Indicator II-08c). The share of degrees earned by women in these historical humanities disciplines then contracted sharply—from 22% of the degrees earned in 1966 to 3.8% of the degrees awarded in 2022. Even using the broader set of humanities subjects tabulated since the late 1980s, only 9.4% of the 2022 degrees earned by women were awarded in the humanities, as women’s pattern of degree-earning becomes increasingly similar to their male counterparts. (The humanities accounted for 8% of the degrees earned by men.) As of 2022, women most frequently earned bachelor’s degrees in the health and medical sciences (accounting for 19% of all bachelor’s degrees earned by women), followed by the behavioral/social sciences (16%) and business (15%).
- While the post-1966 shrinkage in the humanities’ share of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women was dramatic, the contraction for the education field was even more dramatic. Education accounted for 40% of the bachelor’s degrees awarded to women in 1966 but then shrank to less than 7% of the degrees awarded after 2016. The field of business and management experienced the largest growth in the share of women earning degrees after 1966, increasing from less than 3% of the degrees earned by women in 1966 to over 22% in 1987 before decreasing to 15% in 2022. The health and medical fields nearly quadrupled their share over the same time period, increasing from 5% to 19% of the bachelor’s degrees earned by women.
* The “Historical Categories” are the limited set of humanities disciplines that have been tracked by the federal government since 1949. These disciplines include English language and literature, history, languages and literatures other than English (including linguistics and classical studies), and philosophy. Please see the Note on the Data Used to Calculate Humanities Degree Counts and Shares for further explanation of the differences between the two trend lines.
Source: Office of Education/U.S. Department of Education: Survey of Earned Degrees; Higher Education General Information System; and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. 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; and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
*The “Historical Categories” are the limited set of humanities disciplines that have been tracked by the federal government since 1949. These disciplines include English language and literature, history, languages and literatures other than English (including linguistics and classical studies), and philosophy. Please see the Note on the Data Used to Calculate Humanities Degree Counts and Shares for further explanation of the differences between the two trend lines.
Source: Office of Education/U.S. Department of Education: Survey of Earned Degrees; Higher Education General Information System; and Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System. Data analyzed and presented by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators (www.humanitiesindicators.org).
