Major Matters: A Comparison of the Within-Major Gender Pay Gap across College Majors for Early-Career Graduates

I use data from the 1993 National Survey of College Graduates and appended 1990 Census on about 11,000 men and women college graduates (8400 with bachelor’s degrees only, and 2800 with graduate degrees) who earned degrees in a 5-year period (1984–1988), to address questions regarding the link between college major and early-career gender pay differentials. I look at within-major gender pay differentials for two groups of college graduates: those whose highest degrees are bachelor’s and those who hold graduate degrees. Among those whose highest degrees are bachelor’s, I find that within-major gender pay penalties are virtually zero for professional majors. Gender pay penalties are large for general studies majors: social sciences, history, and humanities, and business administration (except accounting). For these, jobs account for a large portion of the unexplained gap. Among individuals who hold graduate degrees, I find that within-major gender pay penalties are zero for all fields. My findings suggest that pay penalties to women in the aggregate can be traced to relatively large penalties in a couple of key fields (bachelor’s degree–level general studies fields): social sciences and humanities, and business administration (except accounting). These findings are important, as they contradict the prevailing view. Existing empirical research suggests that women are uniformly disadvantaged compared to men regardless of field of study and, thus, field of study explains little or none of the gender gap in pay. I conclude that supply-side mechanisms are important factors in producing gender inequality among college graduates, and suggest that we further focus our attention on the “supply side” in understanding segregation and gender pay inequality.