I am currently at a community college and I am going to get my Associates degree in Women & Gender Studies. I will also be transferring to a 4-year university straight afterward that has a Bachelors degree program in Women & Gender studies. I am scared because I don’t really know if this will bring me to any jobs or what my future will look like. I am also interested in a degree program that they offer which is Environmental Sustainability. I feel like this will provide more job options but I know that I am not as passionate about the issues involved with that degree.
If any of you guys could just tell me your thoughts, it would be super helpful.
Thank you.
You can get jobs with any major; it’s just that the preparation you have to do is a little different. I know a women’s and gender studies major who works as a producer at my video game company
If you want to major in women’s and gender studies, go ahead and do that. But you should also take classes to develop skills in other areas of interest (writing? communication? coding? financial analysis? statistics?) and make sure that you line up internships for yourself, both during the summer and during the school year if you can swing it!
I agree you can get a job with any major. There are so many factors - who you know, luck, internships etc.
With that being said, I don’t think either major choice is a great one. In the environmental field your best bet for a strong job market would be Environmental Engineering. Women & Gender studies…JMHO but not a strong outlook for jobs. I will clarify when I think of a job, I think of a decent paying job where one can earn my definition of a good living. Personal for all I know.
See, I think that’s a common misconception - most people, when they think of stable career fields with lots of jobs in them, think narrowly about engineering and computer science. But there are a lot of other fields that are thriving and where one could make a middle-class salary.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics analyzes the projected job outlook for many occupational categories over a 10 year period (most recently, 2016-2026. They expect employment of environmental engineers to grow at 8%, about as quickly as the average. However, they also expect jobs for occupational health and safety specialists and technicians (8%) to grow about as fast as average. Jobs for geoscientists (14%), urban and regional planners (13%), atmospheric scientists (12%), and environmental scientists (12%) are all projected to grow faster than the average and faster than environmental engineers.
Also, the median wage for environmental engineers was a bit under $87K in 2016. Environmental scientists made less, at $69K. Occupational health and safety specialists and urban planners also made a good salaries, at about $72K per year. Geoscientists and atmospheric scientists average about $79K. All of those are good middle-class salaries in a place with an average cost of living (and wages usually vary with the area you live in and its cost of living). And the entry-level education for most of these careers is a bachelor’s degree.
Women’s and gender studies doesn’t slot super nicely into a specific career field or path, but there are lots of things that you can do with that background and degree depending on your training, the skills you build and your interests. Just off the top of my head, you could become a market research analyst (and put that WGS knowledge to bear in helping companies expand their product offerings and attract new customers; avg salary = $63K); you could become an HR or organizational training specialist (and help companies develop internal programs and training to increase their diversity and promote more inclusive atmospherses; average salary $60K). You could still go into urban planning (since WGS is based in sociology, your knowledge of how people move and act in groups would be useful for planning dense urban areas; average salary is above). You could become a geographer, who examines the political and cultural structures of cultures and regions (avg salary = $77K). And there are so many more that I can’t think of or maybe don’t even know about…or that don’t exist yet.
When people say a major doesn’t have a “strong outlook for jobs,” IMO they are trying to think of jobs that very neatly slot onto that major in a narrow way - so counseling or human services jobs for psychology majors; jobs that directly deal with women’s or gender issues for WGS; programming jobs for CS majors, etc. That’s not really the way college majors work. I work at a technology company, and the undergraduate majors of some of my coworkers (particularly the ones in semi-technical and non-technical roles…but even a lot of the ones in technical roles) would surprise you.
