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Unsurprisingly, the research showed that women are still more likely to major in education, social sciences and the arts, while men are more likely to choose majors generally associated with more lucrative career paths: business, math, natural sciences and engineering. But what Bobbitt-Zeher found was that, even as more women than ever are majoring in science and engineering, the traditionally female-oriented fields are becoming even more so -- i.e., as more women major in those subjects, men start avoiding them. And as people who work in the "caring professions" have long known, the more a field becomes "feminized," the less it's valued.Veronica I. Arreola, Director of the University of Illinois at Chicago Women in Science and Engineering Program, says it's not just a matter of humanities vs. science, or education vs. business, either. In an e-mail, Arreola told me, "The same gap is often seen within engineering itself. Bioengineering has been growing to the point where we could see a 50/50 split of women and men majoring, and there have been some reports of salary staying flat or going down. Engineering fields where women are less than 20 percent pay more." Arreola says more study is needed to conclusively determine a cause for this pattern, but the implication is chilling: Once women break into a field in noteworthy numbers, its value goes down.

Salon
June 10 2009