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• Gender and Women's Studies is part of WMU's College of Arts and Sciences.

Fast Facts About Women –

Based on information taken from the U.S. Census Bureau - www.census.gov/Press- Release/www/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/009383.html

$32,168 - The median annual earnings of women 16 or older who worked year-round, full time, in 2005. Women earned 77 cents for every $1 earned by men.

32% - Percent of women 25 to 29 who had attained a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2005, which exceeded that of men in this age range (25 percent). Eighty-seven percent of women and 85 percent of men in this same age range had completed high school.

85.4% - Percent of women 25 or older who had completed high school as of 2005. High school graduation rates for women continued to exceed those of men (84.9 percent).

26.1 million - Number of women 25 or older with a bachelor’s degree or more education in 2005, more than double the number 20 years earlier.

59% - Percent of women 16 or older who participated in the labor force in 2005. This amounted to 69.3 million women. More than 35 million women in 2005 had worked year-round, full time, in the past 12 months. Men in this age range had a participation rate of 73 percent.

More than $939 billion - Revenue for women-owned businesses in 2002, up 15 percent from 1997. There were 116,985 women-owned firms with receipts of $1 million or more.

Nearly 6.5 million - The number of women-owned businesses in 2002, up 20 percent from 1997. (The increase was twice the national average for all businesses.) Women owned 28 percent of all non-farm businesses.

More than 7.1 million - Number of people employed by women-owned businesses. There were 7,231 women-owned firms with 100 or more employees, generating $274 billion in gross receipts.

• Nearly one in three women-owned firms operated in health care and social assistance, and other services such as personal services, and repair and maintenance. Women owned 72 percent of social assistance businesses and just over half of nursing and residential care facilities. Wholesale and retail trade accounted for 38.2 percent of women-owned business revenue.

65% - Percentage of women citizens who reported voting in the 2004 presidential election, higher than the 62 percent of their male counterparts who cast a ballot.

In 2007, Nancy Pelosi became the first female Speaker of the House. In the 110 th Congress, 70 women and 365 men were members of the United States House of Representatives and 16 women and 84 men were members of the Senate. One woman, The Honorable Ruth Bader Ginsburg, serves as a Justice on the United States Supreme Court.

203,000 - Total number of active duty women in the military, as of Sept. 30, 2005. Of that total, 35,000 women were officers, and 168,000 were enlisted.

15% - Proportion of members of the armed forces who were women, as of Sept. 30, 2005. In 1950, women comprised less than 2 percent.

1.7 million - The number of military veterans who are women.

63 million - Number of married women (including those who are separated or have an absent spouse) in 2005. There are 55 million unmarried (widowed, divorced or never married) women.

17% - Percentage of married couples in which the wife earns at least $5,000 more than the husband in 2005. Among 22 percent of married couples, the wife has more education than the husband.

5.6 million - Number of stay-at-home mothers nationwide in 2005, up from 4.4 million a decade earlier.

84% - Proportion of women who used a computer at home in 2003, 2 percentage points higher than the corresponding proportion for men. This reverses the computer use “gender gap” exhibited during the 1980s and 1990s.

2.9 million - Number of girls who participated in high school athletic programs in the 2004-05 school year. In the 1973-74 school year, only 1.3 million girls were members of a high school athletic team.

166,728 - Number of women who participated in an NCAA sport in 2004-05.