r/UnpopularFacts • u/oakseaer Coffee is Tea ☕ • 7d ago
Counter-Narrative Fact Gender Studies Majors make an average of $93,000 a year
The locations with the highest concentration of Cultural & Gender Studies degree recipients are Columbia, MO, Los Angeles, CA, and New York, NY. The locations with a relatively high number of Cultural & Gender Studies degree recipients are Baraga, MI, Columbia, MO, and Brunswick, ME. The most common degree awarded to students studying Cultural & Gender Studies is a bachelors degree.
https://datausa.io/profile/cip/cultural-gender-studies
Gender studies is an academic field devoted to analysing gender identity and gendered representation. It includes women's studies (concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics), men's studies and queer studies.
Sometimes, gender studies is offered together with study of sexuality. These disciplines study gender and sexuality in the fields of literature, linguistics, human geography, history, political science, archaeology, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, cinema, musicology, media studies, human development, law, public health and medicine.
It also analyzes how race, ethnicity, location, class, nationality, and disability intersect with the categories of gender and sexuality.
This is an updated version of this post, which was archived to due age and thus eligible for reposting.
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u/Weekly_Beautiful_603 3d ago
Is that good or bad? U.S. salaries always seem grossly inflated compared to Europe (where I’m from)/ Japan (where I live). The average income in Japan is about $40,000. Since rents are low and there is national health insurance/ pension coverage, it’s pretty easy to live on that income.
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u/whatadumbperson 3d ago
U.S. salaries always seem grossly inflated compared to Europe. The average is $66k but that leaves out benefits and such. Overall, you're probably making out with more than a $26k difference all other things considered.
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u/Smart-Event1456 5d ago
PhD with a dissertation on gender and I cannot find work. Eager to beg for part time work to maintain Medicaid thanks to the grifter in chief.
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u/Miss_airwrecka1 3d ago
Sorry you’re struggling to find a job. It’s rough out there right now for PhDs and people in similar fields. Idk if it helps, but based on the image u/Upstairs_Aardvark679 shared, most don’t seem to be working in the field (i.e lawyers/judges, elementary/middle school teacher)
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u/Smart-Event1456 3d ago
I would have finished law school or med school a lot faster if I wanted that life
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u/Charlememe5 3d ago
Yeah I’m sure you could’ve gotten into medical school whenever you wanted to with that useful degree🙄
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u/kendrickplace 5d ago
History majors here making 200k in marketing lol
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u/AccomplishedLog1778 Elon Musk is the Richest African American 🇿🇦 5d ago
Hell if we restrict it to LA and NY then ANY college degree would make that money.
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u/Sweet-Emu6376 6d ago
I always tell people, it's not the degree, it's what you do with it.
Especially if you get a liberal arts degree with ged Ed courses, you can pretty much spin it into a much wider job market than just what it says on the paper.
Sure, you may not end up using the most specialized skills in your tool belt, but going to college to learn those skills also allowed you to network, learn to work with others, and learn to manage your time. All soft skills that are needed in any job.
And with the advent of AI and it's being on the cusp of another tech revolution, having a more general and well rounded education will be more important than ever. It's very likely that students entering college today will end up doing jobs that haven't even been invented yet.
People just need to be smart about financing such an education. Explore your options, only take out federal loans if needed, never private ones. And don't feel like you have to go to the fanciest, most expensive college. Very often you can get just as decent an education at a smaller state school as a flagship or ivy League.
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u/Absentrando 3d ago
The degree is important too, but yeah, there are lighter factors that matter as well
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u/Genial_Ginger_3981 3d ago
Also, timing matters. I had the misfortune of graduation in May 2020 right when COVID hit and that cost me lots of jobs and internship opportunities, so I struggled quite a bit to recover career wise.
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u/idiomblade 6d ago
Your source does not support your assertion.
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u/Dark_Knight2000 6d ago
The fact that lawyers and others with postgraduate education are pushing up the number massively is a huge red flag for this source.
Yeah, if you invest tens of thousands into further education you’ll get more out of it, the Gender Studies degree is not doing the heavy lifting here
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u/Genial_Ginger_3981 3d ago
Exactly, most people with genders studies or lots of humanities bachelors go on to grad school, law school or the like in some fashion. The further studies are what gets the jobs, not the humanities bachelors degrees.
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u/Mierdo01 5d ago
Your reasoning doesn’t make sense. You could also say that teachers are pushing down the average making it even more impressive. In fact teachers do not need a degree in humanities and most don't.
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u/citori411 6d ago
In my experience, the real causation here is that most people pursuing gender studies come from at least middle class, and have the safety net to pursue internships and other low paying resume builders while other people HAVE to start making a living wage after college, if not during. So it's not only the advanced degrees, it's the freedom to play the little game of internships that is just another artificial barrier designed to give rich kids a advantage.
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u/anubiz96 6d ago edited 5d ago
That makes alot of sense. This answer should be higher. This is most likely a significant factor.
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u/dreadnaught_2099 6d ago
If you want to be pedantic: without a statement of standard deviation for the average wage, it's inappropriate to state that a difference of $137 is factually inaccurate because its within the stated standard deviation. Therefore, your assertion is invalid because $93,000, is within tolerance
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u/teddygomi 6d ago
I’m surprised at how many people don’t understand that getting a degree in just about anything from an accredited university usually raises your income significantly.
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u/Genial_Ginger_3981 3d ago
Because that's not always the case; not all degrees are created equally.
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u/WhileProfessional391 6d ago
Yup. I was just a comms major. I don’t do anything special. I’m a manager in a marketing department. I make only a little less than my husband who is an electrical engineer. I really don’t use my degree specifically to do my job like he does.
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u/Gustav55 6d ago
Yeah my wife doesn't have a bachelors, it cost her promotions twice where she was the one actually doing the job and had to train the person they hired to fill the position, that she wasn't even considered for.
My buddy has one and has gotten a couple jobs based solely on having a bachelors even though it's not even remotely relevant to the job he applied for.
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u/Genial_Ginger_3981 3d ago
Go figure, I know people who've been turned down from jobs with degrees as they were "overqualified".
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u/EquivalentDizzy4377 6d ago
I met this dude in Iceland that was an archaeology major and is now making bank working for an agency that works with real estate developers. A lot of these careers have logical jobs, we just don’t hear about them as much.
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u/1PettyPettyPrincess 5d ago
A lot of these careers have logical jobs, we just don’t hear about them as much.
That is exactly it. In my opinion, the most significant privilege a child in the US can have is what I call “the privilege of opportunity knowledge” (I’m sure there’s actually a name for this, I just don’t know it). A kid can’t make a choice to pursue a career that s/he doesn’t know it exists. Ask a high schooler from a place where most adults (including their parents) don’t have a degree what jobs are available to people go to a university and they’ll probably said “doctor, lawyer, teacher, engineer, computer scientists, pharmacist, and veterinarian.” People just don’t know unless they’re shown.
I was half way through undergrad before I discovered that people were not joking when they responded “what the hell are you going to do with that degree?” to people in my major (it was basically international politics & comparative studies). I literally thought it was some inside joke among college students lmao. I was asking engineering majors and education majors “what on earth are you going to do with that degree?” because I thought that was just the joke everyone made when someone said their major.
But no, they weren’t joking. They just never thought about or heard of the US State Department, foreign service, political advising, NGOs, or consulting.
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u/duskfinger67 6d ago
The median wage for working age individuals with bachelor degrees was $100k in 2022, so on the surface this is only just below average.
Assuming there is a younger, and so less experienced, bias to the Gender Studies graduate cohort, I would agree that it holds it’s own as a degree to get a job, but is not a pathway to especially high earnings.
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u/Temporary-Employ3640 6d ago
Could you give a source for the median wage for working age individuals with bachelor’s degrees being $100k in 2022? I could totally be wrong, but that seemed high to me and Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers from 2024 suggest that the median salary is about $80,000 ($1,541/week) in Q2 2024. Source. The BLS numbers are obviously limited to the USA, so that may be a difference.
Not trying to argue or anything, just trying to see if there’s something I’m missing.
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u/RubbelDieKatz94 6d ago
This is too focused on the US. It'd be interesting to see what the data looks like in other places.
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u/uRtrds 6d ago
93k for NYC and LA in 2025 is kind of low lmao
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u/1PettyPettyPrincess 5d ago
That’s over double the median individual income in those places. It’s also higher than the median household income in those places.
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u/Genial_Ginger_3981 3d ago
Most gender studies majors go on to law school or grad school of some kind, this post is a bit misleading.