Unemployment Rates of Women by Bachelor’s Degree Field

A new report from the U.S. Census Bureau shows the percentage of women with bachelor’s degrees in specific fields who are unemployed. Overall, the percentage of women with a bachelor’s degree who were unemployed in 2012 was 3.5 percent.

But for women with bachelor’s degree in some fields, the unemployment rate was much higher. For example, women who graduated from a four-year college with a degree in either the visual or performing arts had an unemployment rate of 4.7 percent. The unemployment rate for women with bachelor’s degrees in communication, history, psychology, and the social sciences was 4 percent or more. Even women with bachelor’s degrees in computer science had a higher unemployment rate than college-educated women generally.

Disciplines where college-education women had unemployment rates lower than the national average for all women with bachelor’s degrees included biological sciences, science and engineering, and education.