Women Surpass Men To Comprise Majority Of The College-Educated Labor Force

U.S. women crossed a historic milestone this year. The Wall Street Journal reports that while men still make up a slim majority (53.4 percent) of the overall workforce, 2019 marks the first year women represent a majority of the college-educated labor force. This is a remarkable achievement.

Several factors contributed to U.S. women’s historical rise at this moment. For one thing, women have received 57 percent of bachelor’s degrees for the last two decades. With more women getting college degrees, naturally their share of the college-educated labor force has been steadily rising. According to the Journal, “Since 2013, the female share of college-educated workers has been around the 49% mark.” It took another six years for U.S. women to become a slight majority in this category.

Another contributing factor is the structural change of the U.S. economy, moving away from manufacturing-based business to service- and knowledge-based business, which has opened many more employment opportunities in fields that attract women, such as education and health care. The U.S. unemployment rate is at a historical low, and many employers have to increase wages in order to attract qualified workers.

With rising wages and more career opportunities, women’s labor participation rate is rising faster than men’s. From entry-level positions to C-suite, female workers have shown significant growth since 2015 at every level of employment in corporate America.

Your Choice of College Degree Affects Your Earning Power

Of course, when we talk about women in the workforce, one of the left’s favorite topics is the pay gap between the sexes. We’ve all heard the famous statistic that “a woman makes 77 cents for every dollar a man earns.” They’ve used this number as evidence that the United States is a patriarchal society that discriminates against women or, even worse, that there is a war on women going on in America.

Yet this number is misleading. It compares an average of men and women’s earnings across all careers, without taking into account many factors affecting people’s earning power, such as what they studied in college, types of employment, hours worked, and time spent away from work.

A study by Professor Marianne Bertrand of the University of Chicago shows that women’s education choices will affect their earning power long term. It examined a group of people born in 1950 and found that “women in this group studied subjects that produced mean earnings about 14 percent below those in the subjects chosen by men.” It looked at another group of people born in 1985 and found that while the situation improved some, “women still chose degrees that resulted in 6 percent lower mean earnings.”

While more women attend and graduate college than men, many young women tend to choose majors in child development and psychology, work and family studies, social work, and education. These majors are known for some of the lowest starting salaries. Men tend to pursue degrees leading to higher pay, such as those related to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM).

How much money one makes should not be the only factor for what one finds fulfilling in life, but if maximizing women’s earning power is the goal, we should have honest conversations with young women about how their education choices today will affect their future earnings.

The Choice Gap Gives Women What They Want

Bertrand also points out women generally prioritize family and prefer flexible work arrangements more than male employees do. But flexibility and taking a long time away from work comes with costs, usually in the forms of lower pay and limited career advancement opportunities. This choice gap is responsible for at least a quarter of the early-career pay gap between men and women. 

Bertrand didn’t find any evidence to support the left’s insistence that an institutional bias holds women back and prevents them from making equal pay to their male colleagues for doing equal work. On the contrary, when men and women work for the same number of hours and do the same type of work, women often make more than men do.

Time magazine reported young women who work full time out-earn men in their peer group by 8 percent on average. This reverse pay gap between the sexes is even bigger in major metropolitan areas: “Young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego make 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively.”

More women in the labor force means more women are creating wealth. It is estimated that by 2030, women will control more aggregate wealth in the United States than men. So far, no activists, no politicians, and certainly no male workers are complaining about this reverse pay gap.

Women are not only creating more wealth these days, but they are also getting the kind of benefits they desire from eager employers. The Journal reports that U.S. companies are changing their benefit plans in order to attract female workers. More U.S. employers already offer paid family leave — the percentage has increased from 24 percent in 2015 to 40 percent in 2018.

One survey shows 17 percent of U.S. employers offered to cover the cost of egg freezing for their employees in 2018, and 66 percent of employers plan to offer a variety of fertility benefits by 2019. More and more companies also increase flexibility of their work arrangements to cater to women’s preferences.

The more women in the workforce, the more companies will increase pay and offer benefits that are clearly attractive to women. The more companies do so, the more women will join the labor force. If politicians and government agencies really want to help women, they should stop imposing unnecessary regulatory burdens on employers and focus on how to help our economy grow instead. In a growing economy, employers will step up to the plate to attract and keep their talented female workers.

Time-Tested Advice for a Successful Career

This is the best time to be an American woman. There’s no systematic discrimination or other external dark forces preventing you from being who you are and having a fulfilling life and a rewarding career. Success comes from within.

That’s what I learned from Heidi Ganahl, who overcame extraordinary adversity in life and founded Camp Bow Wow, a $100 million leader in the pet industry. Ganahl just wrote a new book, titled “SheFactor: Present Power — Future Fierce,” hoping to help young women “determine their goals and enjoy the journey they undertake to achieve them.”

Below are a few pieces of time-tested advice from her:

Tenacity — I’m stubborn and focused when I am passionate about something. I live, eat, and breathe my vision. I stay the course.
Support — My folks were married at 18/20, worked so hard to give my brother and I what we needed to succeed. They instilled in us an appreciation for how blessed we were to be born in this country, and to get an education and get out there and have fun accomplishing great things, including giving back.
Not Making it About Being a Woman — It was more about being a good leader, learning all I could from other successful folks, and working so hard to make my dream come to reality. It didn’t occur to me while building a $100 million brand that I was a woman and at a disadvantage. I just wanted to see my vision come to fruition.
Do What You Love — If you don’t do something you are passionate about, you won’t have that edge that keeps you working when you want to quit, you won’t have that love of what you do that drives you to get the job done.
I have no doubt any young woman who follows these pearls of wisdom will have a successful career and fulfilling life.

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Democrats Broke Higher Ed. Now They Want a Bailout

Higher education in America today should come with the disclaimer, caveat emptor. The cost of tuition has more than doubled in the last two decades, with the value of a four-year college degree heading in the opposite direction.

The “fix” championed by Democratic Party leaders – a bailout for those already graduated, and “free” tuition for those entering the pipeline – will only make matters worse.

A part of this long-developing problem is simply supply and demand; the overabundance of bachelor’s degrees in the market means they are worth less in the eyes of employers. There also is more talent in the marketplace for specialized jobs, meaning graduates with narrowly tailored degrees in obscure fields are less likely to find employment regardless of how much they spent on those degrees. Moreover, employers cannot be sure about the quality of graduates; are they getting someone who is smart and capable in the workplace, or a lite snowflake who melts outside the “safe space” sanctuary of college.

It is a badly broken system, and cannot be remedied by the Democratic Party’s much-ballyhooed “bailout” proposals. 

The $1.6 trillion student loan crisis is not to be ignored or overlooked. The massive amount of debt shouldered by mostly young Americans has been shown to have a sweeping economic and social impact -- from delaying marriages and having children, to stunting small business entrepreneurship. Yet, a bailout of student loans, in the form of cancellation or forgiveness such as supported by almost all of the 2020 Democratic presidential hopefuls, absolves from responsibility those whose policies caused the problem, while doing nothing to address the root cause. In other words, the standard Democratic strategy.

No one really believes that the quality of education has risen in proportion to its cost. In fact, the value of a degree in 2019 is far less than it was in 1999. Students may enjoy more lavish dorms, massive student centers, and cushy classrooms, but nothing of substance that translates to value in the working world. Students who arrive on campus for a classical education, end up paying for liberal vanity projects with zero real-world value -- expensive administrators tasked with “social justice” and leading “bias response teams,” along with liberal arts programs that pay inflated faculty salaries for teaching “courses” on Brazilian transgender prostitutes, and riffing on Twitter about Republicans being serial rapists.

The Democrats' drive to define college education a “human right” has helped to make student loans as easy to get as sub-prime lending in the mid-2000s.  This, of course, virtually ensures colleges and universities can continue to charge whatever they want, because students (and their parents) will somehow secure the dollars demanded. This warped arrangement carries virtually no risk for the lenders, since student loans are difficult, if not impossible to discharge in bankruptcy; with many guaranteed by Uncle Sam himself.

Why should the rest of America shoulder this burden, especially those generations who worked hard to repay what they owed? Why is an expensive education at a northern school (the top seven states for highest average student loan debt are in the north), for a degree the student should have known had no marketable value, but was simply something he or she “wanted to learn,” suddenly the responsibility of American taxpayers generally?

A bailout of student loans is a great marketing ploy by Democratic presidential candidates, but it represents nothing other than another higher education scam; one that rewards the perpetrators and punishes everyone else. Colleges will continue to charge astronomical tuition. Lenders will continue handing out money at zero-risk to them. And, irresponsible students will rest easy knowing that someone else will be picking up the tab for a four-year luxury vacation to study a field that only they care about.

The crisis in higher education is the product of liberal hubris and government meddling, and has produced an educational system designed more for the personal and political vanity of edu-crats, than for the benefit of our nation’s young people.

A bailout of this broken and corrupt system will greatly harm America’s global competitiveness in the decades to come. In fact, it already has.

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Australia: World class education needn’t cost the world

This year's educational testing isn’t cold yet, but we already have more evidence that we are doing it wrong when it comes to schooling.

For those who swallowed the Gonski hoax, an apparent lack of funding is the culprit for our educational malaise.

But the OECD’s annual Education at a Glance report released this week conclusively shows we spend considerably more per student than the OECD average — even after taking into account differences in costs and teacher wages between countries. Many nations that achieve better than us spend less than we do.

By any measure, there is no denying Australia is a big spender, despite having little to show for it.

However, there is one exception — we spend the least in the OECD on vocational education. This makes it all the more disappointing that COAG last month decided to kick the VET can to 2020, rather than get to work now on the fix. According to Australian data released last week, the number of students taking VET in schools decreased by 7% since 2014, and school-based apprenticeships have declined by 13%. Despite schooling being awash with cash, it would seem that VET is being left behind.

We are also spending more time in class than our OECD peers, but appear to have the wrong priorities. We spend relatively less time on reading, writing, literature, and science — while we are dedicating more time to technology. At secondary level, we also spend less time on mathematics. Little wonder Australian students have performed poorly in the international PISA tests covering reading, mathematical, and scientific literacy.

To right the ship, we might heed the OECD’s Education Director, Andreas Schleicher’s, advice on what makes school systems ‘world class’. He includes: spending money wisely (rather than spending more); setting and delivering high expectations; recruiting and retaining high-quality teachers; aligning incentives; school autonomy; and developing capable school leaders.

If we are to take an honest look at ourselves against these traits, we are tracking well off course from the world class trajectory.

However, Australia can — and arguably should — have a world class education system. High performing countries that spend considerably less than us have shown it doesn’t have to cost the world.

Yet, this goes against the grain of our discourse — which foolishly assumes that the level of funding is the benchmark for educational success. Shifting the mindset from inputs to outcomes is a place to start if we genuinely aspire to be world class.

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