The Most Lucrative Major for Women

Lately, there has been a lot of buzz surrounding the predictive qualities of college majors.

First there were the majors that gave you the highest chance of entering the 1%, then the majors shown to provide your best chance at steady work and high earnings, and now the newest, particularly resonant data: the college majors that put women on equal footing with men.

This is in terms of money only, measured by the gap in salary between men and women in the same fields.

The New York Times reports on the data, assembled by PayScale, and points out that the overall male/female wage gap still holds, at 81 cents for women to every dollar earned by a man. It turns out that among the college majors analyzed, women who enter the workforce with a bachelor’s degree are subject to smaller salary gaps in certain majors.

In fact, information technology is the only college major where the gap is reversed: Women make 1% more than the men in the field. The largest gaps listed are in education, criminal justice and architecture, which show a 5% gap between the men and women in the field.

(See the entire chart of college majors here.)