It's been a mantra that more money has to be spent on outreach for women in academia, or even quotas implemented.  Why?   Women PhDs are now the majority, at least in the US.   This was an obvious trend since there were more underclass and graduate program females (60%).

But like any sort of cultural agenda, it is perpetual, so now it will be the case that not enough department heads are female.  This was the same in the NBA, where after it became 70% black there were no calls to recruit more whites or latinos, but rather calls to have 70% of the coaches be black.



Culture wars never end.   

Some still have less women, and that will be an action item (engineering, math) yet biology is now majority women and social sciences and humanities are ridiculously overstocked gender-wise.   But the trend is there for women across the board. 

Another reversal of a long-term trend occurred among doctoral degrees. While women have long earned the majority of master’s degrees awarded in the U.S., the 2008-09 academic year was the first year ever that women earned the majority (50.4%) of doctorates as well. The one-year increase in doctorates was substantially stronger for women than for men, 6.3% vs. 1.0%.

At InsideHigherEd, they quote Richard Whitmire, the author of "Why Boys Fail: Saving Our Sons from an Educational System That's Leaving Them Behind" and who writes the Why Boys Fail blog, and who

said that he is not surprised by the results, given the trends he has been writing about in high schools and undergraduate colleges. He said that the development with doctorates points to the need for colleges to take seriously not only the issue of falling male enrollments, but also that of the correlations between gender and course of study. "We should care that men and women major in different things," he said, not because there is anything wrong with women pursuing social science or men engineering but because "we are not fielding our best team" if some groups aren't part of the equation.

One interesting trend regardless of gender statistics - graduate school applications related to a recessionary economy.   People do not just go to graduate school to improve their job chances or for academic research, sometimes they go as a stall tactic to wait out the economy.  The most popular fields in total number of applicants are business, engineering, and the social and behavioral sciences, all of which do not look good in 2010.