Is the Science and Engineering Workforce Drawn from the Far Upper Tail of the Math Ability Distribution?

Low representation in the extreme upper tail of the mathematics test score distribution is often assumed to explain the small numbers of women in engineering, mathematics, computer science and physical science (EMS) college majors and careers. However, this study finds that fewer than one-third of the college-educated white men in the EMS workforce had SAT-Math scores above the threshold previously presumed in the literature. The lower-scoring male EMS college graduates have more than an empty credential; they enjoy the same earnings advantage, relative to other college graduates with the same scores, as high scoring EMS majors. This study also finds that white women enter EMS fields at no more than half the rate of men with the same mathematics test scores. Both the large gender gap and the low ability threshold for EMS entry are robust to modeling mathematics test scores as a noisy measure of ability. The early stages of this research were supported by a grant from the American Educational Research Association which receives funds for its "AERA Grants Program" from the National Science Foundation and the National Center for Education Statistics (U.S. Department of Education) under NSF Grant #RED-9255347. This paper was completed while the author was a National Academy of Education Spencer Postdoctoral Fellow. Opinions reflect those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of the granting agencies. I would like to thank seminars participants at the NBER Conference on Diversity in the Science and Engineering Workforce, U Mass Amherst Department of Economics, and UCSB Department of Sociology, Lee Badgett, Bill Bielby and, especially, Peter Kuhn, for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper.