Worldwide, there are more men than women working within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) across all industries. In utilities, for instance, almost 40 percent of men were working with STEM, compared to just above 20 percent of women. Worldwide, only five countries had half or more of their female population working in STEM.

In 2023, Mongolia had the highest share of women employed in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, with ** percent of all those employed in STEM fields being women. Belarus, Lesotho, the United States, and Barbados rounded out the top five countries employing the highest share of women in STEM fields.

In an impressive increase from years past, 39 percent of women in the United States had completed four years or more of college in 2022. This figure is up from 3.8 percent of women in 1940. A significant increase can also be seen in males, with 36.2 percent of the U.S. male population having completed four years or more of college in 2022, up from 5.5 percent in 1940.

4- and 2-year colleges

In the United States, college students are able to choose between attending a 2-year postsecondary program and a 4-year postsecondary program. Generally, attending a 2-year program results in an Associate’s Degree, and 4-year programs result in a Bachelor’s Degree.

Many 2-year programs are designed so that attendees can transfer to a college or university offering a 4-year program upon completing their Associate’s. Completion of a 4-year program is the generally accepted standard for entry-level positions when looking for a job.

Earnings after college

Factors such as gender, degree achieved, and the level of postsecondary education can have an impact on employment and earnings later in life. Some Bachelor’s degrees continue to attract more male students than female, particularly in STEM fields, while liberal arts degrees such as education, languages and literatures, and communication tend to see higher female attendance.

All of these factors have an impact on earnings after college, and despite nearly the same rate of attendance within the American population between males and females, men with a Bachelor’s Degree continue to have higher weekly earnings on average than their female counterparts.

The act of identifying interest in scholarly articles and research papers has long been difficult to quantify, let alone gather. In the past few years, altmetric data has allowed both researchers and the general public to access a wealth of information that was once difficult to collect. The ability to analyze public interest on scholarly articles and research papers allows for the writers themselves to identify general interest in a quantifiable manner. With such a large wealth of accessible information, general trends in regards to viewership can be extrapolated. Through social media, research articles are discussed, and their popularity is recorded into Altmetric’s database. A major disparity plaguing most STEM fields currently is the lack of women in comparison to men in the STEM workforce. Thus, this study attempts to identify what scientific fields most interest each gender. To accomplish this, names and subjects were pulled from altmetric data. The names were input into a script to identify the gender of each name. The articles that a person has commented on has that person’s name associated with its related scientific fields. The resulting data was combined and placed into various graphs to clearly visualize the disparity between different subjects and views by gender. The information was then analyzed. It was discovered that in terms of social media, more females viewed scholarly articles compared to men in most fields. However, it was found that papers relating to social sciences were viewed by more females compared to articles relating to material sciences, which garnered more male viewers.

From 2016 to 2019, the percentage of women working in a STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) field in the United Kingdom (UK) has increased from ** to ** percent, a total of ******* more women according to the source. While this is a significant increase in women within the STEM workforce, the percentage still remains disproportionately low, highlighting the gender gap in the STEM field.

Over the past decades, more and more women have entered the labor market around the world. Today, over 40 percent of the global workforce are women. However, only one third are in senior roles, and less than 30 percent work within science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). The Global Gender Index benchmarks national gender gaps on economic, political, education, and health-based criteria. In 2025, the leading country was Iceland .