Higher Education and Vocational Education Publications

Women at Thirtysomething:Paradoxes of Attainment

Published by the U.S. Department of Education
2nd Edition: July, 1992

A revised version of this monograph appears as Chapter 2 of Adelman, C. Lessons of a Generation: Education and Work in the Lives of the High School Class of 1972.
San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1994, pp. 36-82

[This study is one in a series, Archives of a Generation, and includes references to other studies in the series. Archives is based on the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class of 1972, an extraordinarily rich assembly of data from a national sample of 22,652 people who were high school seniors in the spring of that year. The surveys were conducted in 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976,1979, and 1986. The archive includes high school records and test scores, and, most importantly, the postsecondary transcripts of 12,599 individuals in the sample who attended any kind of vocational school or college at any time between 1972 and 1984. The second edition of this monograph is occasioned both by demand andminor errors in the first (June, 1991).]

This study describes the educational careers and labor market experience of women in the high school class of 1972 through the time they were 32 years old. The paradox of this story-that women's educational achievements were superior to those of men, but that their rewards in the labor market were thin by comparison-is set in the context of national economic development.

Women's academic performance in high school was far stgronger than that of men, and those who studied more than 2 years each of math and science performed just as well as men with the same curricular backgrounds on the SAT. At the same time, both their educational aspirations and plans were lower than those of men. Nonetheless, they continued their education after high school at the same rate as men, were rewarded more with scholarships for postsecondary education, and completed college degrees (both bachelor's and associate's) faster than did men.

Using actual college transcripts, this study tells a more complex story of curricular preference than we have ever heard. Yes, the "women's curriculum" is dominated by human services and humanities courses, the men's by business and core science and engineering courses. But there are different patterns of course-taking within fields, and some of the most interesting are in foreign languages, biological sciences, English, and mathematics.

Women's grade point averages in college were higher than men's no matter what field they studied. This pattern held in individual courses, particularly in mathematics, where women earned higher grades than men in both statistics and calculus. As a result of their undergraduate achievements, the educational aspirations of women changed considerably, with dramatic increases in the percentage aspiring to graduate degrees. And a higher percentage of women than men continued their education after the age of 30, whether or not they had previously earned a degree. Women's curricular preferences change, however, during this period of their lives, as more of them moved into fields such as accounting and computer science.

From age 18 to age 32, the women of the Class of '72 developed more positive attitudes toward education than did men, and came to believe that they truly benefitted from schooling.

These beliefs, however, did not hold up in the labor market, where the evidence of women's superior educational performance and commitment was discounted. Between age 25 and 32, for example, a much higher percentage of women than men experienced genuine unemployment, no matter what degree they had earned.

The analysis of such features of economic life as unemployment, occupation, and earnings in this story compares men to women who did not have children by age 32, as these two groups are more likely to have similar amounts of job experience.

In only 7 or 33 major occupations did women achieve pay equity with men. In five other occupations, four of them in business-related fields, women who took more than 8 credits in college-level mathematics achieved pay equity. Outside of these areas and these conditions, however, the men in the Class of '72 were paid more than the women without children no matter what unit of analysis is applied.

Despite the discouraging pattern of earnings differentials, more women than men found their educational relevant to their work, and, among bachelor's degree holders, more women than men came to work "a great deal"with ideas, the engines of an information economy. Women also took a more positive attitude than men toward working conditions, relationships on the job, and development of new skills. They were, in short, more enthusiastic and potentially productive workplace participants at the same time that they were under-rewarded.

Do women value traditional economic rewards? Yes. In fact, they came to value salary in occupational and job selection more than did men. At the same time, however, men's general life values tilted more toward materialism and self-centeredness than did those of women. The differences are confirmed by the patterns of involvement of men and women at age 32 in different kinds of organizations, clubs, and charities.

The study concludes that both women's knowledge and their willingness to share that knowledge in the workplace are critical to the Nation's future, and should be rewarded so that all of us may benefit.

This page last modified March 9, 2000 (kdj)