Introduction

Based on my own empirical observations, I've seen there is quite a push nowadays to get more women into "STEM" majors, full form for Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics, in colleges. STEM majors are generally considered tougher to pursue and also those majoring in STEM subjects tend to get jobs with higher median salaries.

A lot of this push also include exclusive scholarships for women, special clubs and organizations for women, and also benefits provided to female candidates through affirmative action.

I've often heard people say that even though women make up a majority in colleges, they are still a minority in STEM fields and their numbers need to be bolstered.

I decided to investigate whether this was true based on official statistics provided by the U.S. Government.

Data

The data I decided to use for the investigation was provided by the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) and it had the number of Bachelor's awarded in the years 2020-21 and 2021-22 to males and females across various majors, I decided to use data for 2021-22.

To decide what constitutes a "STEM" major, I decided to rely on two categorizations: The official categorization used by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and another one that I used were widely accepted ones based my own educated guesses.

Here is the result when it comes to the official designation used by the U.S. DHS:

https://preview.redd.it/hbqlifavqbpe1.png?width=1382&format=png&auto=webp&s=7a8aae254acc125dd75ccf5188ef7fc66ef35793

As one can see, women made up 60.71% of the graduates in STEM (based on official designation) fields for Bachelor's degree conferred in 2021-22.

I noticed that DHS's definition included fields like: "Homeland security, law enforcement, and firefighting", "Education", "Communication, journalism, and related programs", "Communications technologies", "Social Sciences", and "Multi/interdisciplinary studies", which I believe aren't generally considered as part of STEM, so I decided to do an analysis after removing them.

https://preview.redd.it/q2fuwsgkrbpe1.png?width=1556&format=png&auto=webp&s=8c658193958518edb86e7dfd32d02718912f4084

As can be seen, even after doing the analysis on what are considered the typical "STEM" majors, women still made up 59.37% of the graduates, which is still similar.

There was the field of "Parks, recreation, leisure, fitness, and kinesiology", which I believed did not truly fit STEM except for maybe kinesiology, but the number of graduates were pretty low (~25,000 each for men and women), so it would not have made much of a difference).

Here is a graphical representation so that once can get a better idea of the compositions for the different majors.

https://preview.redd.it/xyxi60frrbpe1.png?width=1146&format=png&auto=webp&s=36bc1f70fe30d4884271aef267dd640a053463bd

Conclusion

Based on the official data provided by the U.S. Government, it does appear that when it comes to "STEM" fields, females make up a majority of recipients of Bacherlor's degrees in these fields, this is valid even when categorizing "STEM" fields on the basis of the official US DHS definitions or based on the broadly accepted categorizations that I made.

In both cases women make up around 60% of the STEM graduates, and since this number was a couple years old, I believe the number must have increased by now. Therefore, a popular belief that "STEM" fields are dominated by males, is demonstratively false

The only fields were males still are in a significant majority are Engineering, Engineering technologies, Computer and Information Sciences and Support Services, Military technology and applied sciences, and Transportation and Materials moving. Therefore, men were more likely to be in the fields that paid more as was observed back in 2021, even though they are in a overall minority.

References

[1]“Bachelor’s degrees conferred to males by postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity and field of study: Academic years 2020-21 and 2021-22", National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_322.40.asp

[2]“Bachelor’s degrees conferred to females by postsecondary institutions, by race/ethnicity and field of study: Academic years 2020-21 and 2021-22", National Center for Education Statistics (NCES). https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d23/tables/dt23_322.50.asp

[3]"DHS STEM Designated Degree Program List", U.S. Department of Homeland Security, https://www.ice.gov/sites/default/files/documents/stem-list.pdf