During the 2012-2013 school year, women earned 57% of bachelor’s degrees, 60% of master’s degrees and 51% of doctorate degrees. Despite being better-educated than men, women with professional and graduate degrees still earn less than their male counterparts, and sometimes even less than men who are less educated than they are.
The report says that this discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that women tend to pursue fields that pay less than fields pursued by men. College majors that have high reported median earnings, like those in the STEM fields, consist of far more men than women, based on data taken from the National Center for Education Statistics and the US Census Bureau.
By contrast, jobs in fields like education, social work, and nursing are largely female-dominated and pay substantially less than fields that are male-dominated.
"Women earn more than 60 percent of degrees in nine of the 10 lowest-paying fields of study, but less than 30 percent of degrees in seven of the 10 highest-paying fields," the report says.