Women who Major Vs. Double Major

Visualization Research Project, First Year Seminar: Everything is a Network 

Authors: Nia Johnson & Priscilla Ramos Rico

Research Question. Our group wanted to see all the data pertaining to women. Specifically, we wanted to focus on women who have jobs across the United States that studied at the College of Wooster. In addition, we wanted to see if there were any conclusions that could be formed about the women who double major vs. women who only had one major. Our thought process was that women who have double-majors may have more job prospects and opportunities than women who do not. We wanted to see if double majoring, instead of having one major, would affect their lives after college. These possible findings can be seen through a change over time. Over a period of time, before the year 2000 and after, will women who double major have more job opportunities than women who do not?

Hypothesis. Our hypothesis is that women, especially those who double major, will start to enter more job fields than women who only had one major. These jobs are specific, detailed jobs. Also, more women will begin to double major than single major in college. We expect that women who have more knowledge and gain a broader spectrum of skills, will be superior to those who only had one major.  In addition, we expect the ongoing gender-equality movements will encourage women to take on more, aim for gaining a wider range of specialized skills and combinations. Doing so will cause women to enter more competitive fields. Also, it would not only set them apart from other employees, but it would encourage women to try to double major and to go into more specialized fields to get a specific job that they want to work in. This gives them an advantage in being able to have more options when it comes to choosing a job. Especially with the fact that after the 2000’s women were able to have more choices in the work field since women were starting to take jobs that men would dominate in.

Approach. The point of this network is to compare women who double major versus women at the College of Wooster that do not. Along the way, we hope these comparisons will support our hypothesis. In order to test whether more women graduate with double majors after 2000 than before, we decided to show two networks. The first network is before 2000 and the second is after the year two 2000 to show the change over time. Then we put all double majors that connected to a job on one side and all those who had a single major on the other side. Prior to creating our network on Cytoscape, we created a data table. The table showed all double-majoring women connected to one woman with the same year, same major (one of the 2), and located in same employment state. In our networks, there was no way to distinguish double major links from single major links due to their connection in the table. There was no way to separate them because our table data read the nodes of one job major connection to a double and vise versa. To show this, we attached source and target arrows on either side. Cytoscape reads this transfer of information (showing the connection) as one link. The link type is called “Double_Single” not “Double” and Single”. The lower half of our network are the jobs closest to each side( Double Majors vs Single Majors), showing the jobs that only connect to that group. The jobs in the middle connect to both Double Majors and Single Majors. The links represent the number of alumni who had those specific jobs to it’s major. The thickness of our links is increased significantly through different values. Few links in our network have a lot of weight, so, we increased the thickness. For example, an alumnus of 6 has a link width of 77. Also, since we have a lot of links with alumni of 1, we increased it to a width of 10. This makes the heavily weighted links stand out. Also, we organized jobs in a hierarchy of broad jobs in a light blue color and their detailed links in a turquoise color. Then we highlighted and changed the names of all the links of the double majors to “MAJOR_JOB1” in order change the links’ color and link type. For example, in regards to the links connected to double majors, the color is purple and the line type is “Dash”.

Link to poster

Findings. We found that women from after 2000’s compared to women before 2000’s at the College of Wooster are starting to double major more than women would before. Indicating that women after 2000’s are taking jobs that are way more detailed and specific than they were in the past. Before the year 2000, there was an abundance of education occupations there were only other teachers and educators, and other educational instructors. After 2000’s, in addition to those two jobs from before 2000’s, there are more jobs women had in communications, history and humanities teachers, postsecondary teachers, pre-kindergarten-12 grade teachers, and special education teachers. Another example is before 2000’s for legal occupations women would only be lawyers, judges, and related workers. After 2000’s, in addition to getting these jobs before 2000’s, women also went in to become legal support workers. This is seen when both networks are placed next to each other. This is a clear indication that the more women decide to double major, the more specific jobs they will take within their field. In our findings, we found that we had to hide many of our single majors because they could have just graduated and were coming out of college. They might not necessarily have had a job at that time. Unlike the women who had one major, those who double majored seemed to have more job opportunities, no matter just coming out of college. This is due to having a broader spectrum of knowledge. We did not have to hide any double majors because all had jobs after college.

Conclusion. Overall, we found that overtime women will start to double major over single majoring. Women are choosing more detailed jobs within an overall job field, grasping jobs they truly want to occupy instead of the job norms and stereotypes women were given before 2000’s. This clearly shows that our hypothesis is true. In the network, the women, over time, will end up majoring in things that are more specific because there are more detailed and specific jobs that are taken. If an increase in detailed jobs not just in Wooster, become the new norm. Since more people are double majoring, broader job occupations will be limited. This will cause minority groups who have less knowledge and opportunities to struggle when finding jobs.