When I initially began this research, I wanted to look at post-graduation placement of women who acquired a doctorate degree in a science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (collectively known as STEM). Unfortunately, the data contained within the Woodrow Wilson Center’s portal was insufficient to answer this question. As a result, I broadened my research to see the rates unemployment (reported as a % of the total labor force) between women in general and women who achieved advanced degrees. Given that education is often touted as ‘the great equalizer,” it would follow that women who attained advanced degrees would have lower rates of unemployment than the women in the general population. In order to test this assumption, I pulled two reports covering women’s unemployment; the first was a 2014 report from the International Labor Organization (ILO) which contains unemployment data on women aged 15-64 from 88 countries, the second was a 2015 report from the World Bank which contains unemployment data for women with advanced degrees from 65 countries. Fortunately, both the ILO and World Bank use the same definition of unemployment which is as follows; “Individuals without work, seeking work in a recent past period, and currently available for work, including people who have lost their jobs or who have voluntarily left work. Persons who did not look for work but have an arrangement for a future job are also counted as unemployed.”  Advanced education was defined as, “…short-cycle tertiary education, a bachelor’s degree or equivalent education level, a master’s degree or equivalent education level, or doctoral degree or equivalent education level” according to the World Bank report. In order to clean up the data, countries that were not on both lists were removed leaving 56 countries for cross comparison. Of those 56 countries, 13 reported a higher unemployment rate for women with advanced degrees than would be expected given the employment rate of women in the general public.

Unfortunately, the reports and data provided by these large organizations tend to conglomerate data in a way that can mask confounding variables. In this case, when looking at general unemployment rates for women compared to those with advanced degrees I had no way of comparing the data by age group, this lead to the inclusion of young women (ages 15-22) who likely could not have finished an advanced degree in the comparison. Aside from differing sociocultural norms, it could be that these 13 countries with higher unemployment for women with advanced degrees merely had a large population of employed young women skewing the data. These unemployment estimates also often do not include forms of informal labor which include seasonal labor (like agricultural/pastoral labor) and household labor. Additionally, while unemployment rates are often used as indicators of economic stability, they can mask other economic issues like chronically low wages, wage inequality, and quality of life. Social scientists can use these reports to guide their inquiry to explore why women with advanced degrees may face higher rates of unemployment in different sociocultural contexts. However, considering this endeavor began as a way to look at post-graduation placement of women with STEM degrees, the limitations and biases baked into the reports makes any critical and contextualized analysis using these reports frustrating, if not impossible.