Women have achieved equality with men when it comes to college degrees, according to U.S. Census Bureau data released on Tuesday.
Now, the challenge is making similar gains in the work world.
In 2015, women and men ages 25 and older held bachelor degrees at about the same rate, according to the data: 33 percent of women, compared to 32 percent of men. The 1-percent difference is not really statistically significant, the census notes. Still, it's cool to see women kinda edging out the guys, right?
Women have spent decades catching up to men in the educational arena. In 1967 -- a time when girls were often told to go to college to get their "Mrs. degrees" and find husbands -- 13 percent of men ages 25 years and up had a bachelor's degree, compared to just 8 percent of women. But by 2010, the college degree gap had narrowed to just 1 percentage point.
Young women ages 25-29 started to earn more college degrees than men in the 1990s, but it took a while for that trend to counteract the education gap that existed for their moms and grandmothers.
In fact, younger women are really killing it when it comes to college. Check out this chart, from a different slice of census data released last year:
Yet for all this advancement in the educational arena, we're still seeing massive inequality in the work world: Women make 78 cents, on average, for every dollar a man earns. And while women make up 45 percent of employees at S&P 500 firms, their numbers diminish rapidly higher up the corporate ladder. Only one-quarter of senior-level executives are women and just 4 percent of CEOs are, according to this analysis from Catalyst.
Let's hope it doesn't take decades to close this gap, too.
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