Another Educational Milestone for Women: They Now Hold More Total Graduate Degrees Than Men

The Census Bureau released its annual report today on educational attainment in the United States for 2010 (here's the press release, here are the tables). In another educational milestone for women, they now hold more advanced degrees (Master's, Professional [medical, law and dental] and Doctoral) than men for the first time in history (see chart above).  

A decade ago, 55.4% of all advanced degrees were held by men and 45.6% by women, meaning that there were 124 men with advanced degrees for every 100 women.  But over the last ten years, the number of advanced degrees earned by women increased by 58%, or more than twice the 26% increase for men.  That disproportionately large increase in women earning graduate degrees since 2000 brought the total number of female advanced degree holders in 2010 to 10,685,000 surpassing the number of men holding graduate degrees (10,562,000) for the first time ever.  

Here's an AP story on today's Census Bureau release, and I'll have another post shortly about some other highlights of the report.  

Update: The numbers quoted in the original post were off by 1,000, and those errors have been corrected and appear in bold above.