Gary Becker on Women in College

Gary Becker had a post on women in college yesterday:

A report released last Tuesday by the American Council on Education, and discussed in various media articles this week, indicates that over 55% of college students are women. This reflects a continuing upward trend in women's share of enrollments for the past 30 years.

On pretty much all objective measures, women deserve to have greater college representation than men because they study harder, get better grades, are more likely to graduate from high school, complete their school work in a more timely fashion, write better, and in other ways outperform young men. Schools competing in trying to get the best students naturally respond to this, and end up selecting larger numbers of young women than young men. Women still remain a minority, however, in the sciences, engineering, business, and economics ...

... gender pay convergence slowed during the 1990's even though the education of women in the labor force continued to grow relative to that of men. This slowdown in convergence is consistent with my belief that earnings of the average women in the labor force will not rise above that of the average man, although an increasing fraction of women in the labor force will have higher hourly earnings than men. While the gap between the education of women and men in the labor force will continue to
grow, the commitment of women to careers will remain below that of men, despite the claims about their career ambitions from the selected college women in the media stories on the enrollment gap.

Although I do not support much of Becker's work, I agree with most his analysis here. I believe that an increasing number of women will break through the "glass ceiling" to obtain top corporate jobs, but that men will maintain the pay advantage. However, unlike Becker, I believe that there will be a further narrowing of the pay gap, especially as US fertility rates fall for most educated women (there is a negative correlation between female education and fertility rates). Educated women are also more likely to demand that their less educated husbands bear more of the child rearing costs, especially if women have a greater opportunity cost of staying at home. For an economist, it is preferrable to have the more productive women at work.

In the end, gender relations change slowly, so there will not be a sudden on rush of stay-at-home dads. However, don't be surprised if women begin earning equal pay with men: in most cases, they deserve it.