A Great Education Can Hurt a Woman‘s Salary

The report, released Thursday by salary-tracking website PayScale, looked at wages for around 1.4 million full-time workers and found that women with postgraduate degrees were at a bigger compensation disadvantage than those with a bachelor‘s, associate‘s, or a high school degree.

Women with Ph.D.s make 5.1 percent less in total cash compensation than men with the same credential, the biggest wage disparity of any degree type. PayScale arrived at that number after controlling for a host of factors that could affect pay, including workers‘ experience, education, and skill levels, the size of their company, and how much management responsibility they had (taking all that into account, women as a group made 2.7 percent less than men). MBA-holders had the second-highest gender pay gap among degree types, at 4.7 percent, followed by M.D.s, at 4.6 percent.