Philosophy More Popular as a Second Than a First Major -- Especially Among Women

I was working through the NCES IPEDS database (yet again) for a new article on race and gender diversity in philosophy in the United States (yes, more fun data soon!), when I was struck by something: Among students whose second major is Philosophy, 43% are women.  Among students whose first major is philosophy, 36% are women.  (IPEDS has an approximately complete database of Bachelor's degree recipients at accredited U.S. colleges and universities.)

The difference between 36% and 43% might not seem large, but I've spent over a decade looking at percentages of women in philosophy, and anything over 40% is rare.  For decades, until a recent uptick, the percentage of women majoring in philosophy stayed consistently in a band between 30% and 34%.  So that 43% pops out.  (And yes, it's statistically significantly different from 36%: 4353/12238 vs. 1496/3507, p < .001, aggregating the most recent two years' data from 2017-2018 and 2018-2019.)

So I decided to take a closer look, aggregating over the past ten years.  I limited my analysis by excluding universities with no Philosophy Bachelor's completions, universities with no second majors, and University of Washington-Bothell (which seems to have erroneous or at least unrepresentative data).  I found, as I have found before, that Philosophy is substantially more popular as a second major than as a first major.  In this group of universities, only 0.29% of women complete Philosophy as a first major, while 1.3% of women who complete a second major choose Philosophy.  Among men, it's 0.78% and 3.1%, respectively.

If you're curious about the relative popularity of Philosophy as first major, the earlier post has a bunch of analyses.  Today I'll just add a couple correlational analyses, looking only at the subset of schools with at least 100 Bachelor's degrees in Philosophy over the 10 year period, to reduce noise.

School by school, the correlation between the percentage of students who complete a second major (of any sort) and the percentage of students who complete a Philosophy major (either as 1st or 2nd major) is 0.44 (p < .001).  In other words, schools with lots of second majors tend to also have relatively high numbers of Philosophy majors -- just as you'd expect, if Philosophy is much more popular as a second major than as a first major.  The correlation between the percentage of students who complete a second major (of any sort) and the percentage of those who complete a Philosophy major (either as 1st or 2nd major) who are women is 0.18 (p = .004).  In other words, schools in which a second major is common also tend to have Philosophy majors that are more evenly divided between men and women.

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