Women top men in earning Ph.D.s as college dynamics change in U.S.

PROVO — Marjan Javadi's father died when she was young, her mother never went to college, and her three sisters all got married or engaged instead of earning doctorate degrees. But that's not why Javadi is sitting at a computer in a lab at BYU on a Friday night.

The room smells like soap and chemicals, and there are beakers and little glass vials strewn all over the countertops. Javadi's pink cell phone keeps ringing — her friends are at a party and they wonder if she's coming — but she ignores it, concentrating instead on the particle size analyzer in front of her eyes.

Her experiment isn't working.

"I'm trying to get them small, like 100 nanometers, but they are 300," Javadi says disappointedly about the invisible particles in the vial of murky blue liquid that's been in the analyzer for the last three minutes. "Chemotherapy affects all of the body, so we're trying to attack just the cancerous cells so it won't kill or hurt other healthy cells."

This is the reason Javadi, a doctoral student in chemical engineering at BYU, comes to school at 8 in the morning and stays until 9 or 10 at night. It's the reason she won't see her family in Iran for the next four to eight years, and the reason the 28-year-old has sworn off marriage until she's at least earned her Ph.D. Education is her passion, her "No. 1 priority" — and, maybe some day, she can help cure cancer, too.

Javadi is a part of a growing trend that is changing the makeup of colleges and universities across the country and the face of America's work force. Women have outpaced men in receiving bachelor's and master's degrees since the late 1980s, but in the 2008-09 school year, for the first time, more women than men earned doctorate degrees, according to a recent study by the U.S. Council of Graduate Schools. According to the study, 50.4 percent of doctorate degrees — and 60 percent of master's degrees — awarded in 2008-09 were given to women.

The margin of women earning Ph.D.s over men may be slim, but it is significant. Besides raising the eyebrows of a long-established, male-dominated faction of higher education, the shift also raises questions — and hopes, for some — about how a better-educated population of women might affect families, the economy and ultimately, all of society.