Female Supremacy Articles - Page 8

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She was sprinting to get the check before any of the men there could.

Higher Education meets Girl Power

November 10, 2003 (Chicago Sun-Times)

BY DAVE NEWBART

Maybe women are smarter than men. This year, for the first time ever, more women than men have applied to go to medical school, dramatizing a decades-long trend that has women dominating nearly all areas of higher education. Female college students make up 56 percent of the nation's 15.3 million collegians, outnumbering men by 1.87 million students. They earned almost 400,000 more bachelor's degrees in 2001-2002 and appear to be within reach of overtaking men in earning professional degrees and doctorates. They already surpass men in such schools as optometry, pharmacology and veterinary medicine.

Women still lag far behind men in certain traditionally male-dominated professional schools, such as engineering and computer science, but even in some of these fields, women have made significant gains. While men still earn more MBAs, for example, women outnumber them in undergraduate accounting and business classes. And women fall just short of the majority (49 percent) in law schools -- a stunning jump from just 8 percent in 1970. "In every state, in every racial and ethnic group, and in every economic class, the women are on a tear,'' said Tom Mortenson, a higher-education policy analyst who publishes a newsletter called Postsecondary Education OPPORTUNITY. "It's just a matter of time before all the fields flip over.''