Last year, I reported a remarkable finding in census data: 70% of Seattle residents age 25 and older were college graduates, the highest share of any major U.S. city.
An even more remarkable finding was buried in that same data: among young Seattle women, the rate was around 80%. Of the 98,000 women ages 25 to 34 living in the city, 78,000 had a bachelor's degree or higher — 79.6%, to be precise.
The share for young men was lower but still impressive: 73,500 of 98,900, or about 74%.
Nationally, around 46% of young women ages 25 to 34 had a college degree, compared to 36% of young men.
Seattle's numbers are exceptionally high, but in another sense, they're entirely typical. Across the country, just as in Seattle, young women outperform young men in higher education.
In all 50 of the most populous U.S. cities, a higher share of women than men had degrees. The gap varied widely, though. Portland's was the largest, at almost 19 percentage points. At the other end of the spectrum, Miami showed near parity, though women were still slightly ahead.
Seattle's relatively small five-point gap is much closer to Miami's than to our southern neighbor's. That may be surprising, but it makes perfect sense given Seattle's corporate landscape. The city's tech industry actively recruits highly educated workers from all over the world, and most tech workers here are men — three out of four, according to census data. That steady pipeline of software engineers and developers has inflated the city's baseline of college-educated men. If it ever slows, Seattle's narrow gender gap could widen to look a lot more like Portland's.
But even with the tech industry drawing thousands of young, college-educated men to Seattle, young women still have the upper hand.
The roots of that degree divide take hold well before anyone applies to college. In K-12 classrooms, girls consistently earn higher grades and graduate high school at higher rates, aided by earlier development of skills like self-regulation and organization, research shows. At the same time, the economic payoff of higher education has surged for women, making a four-year degree their surest route to financial independence.
Meanwhile, young men have increasingly drifted away from the university pipeline. More are drawn to blue-collar trades that don't require a degree, motivated by factors like avoiding student debt, earning good wages, and finding job stability that's immune to AI automation.
While that blue-collar drift is reshaping the male workforce nationally, the trend is less visible in Seattle. Here, the local economy actively imports college-educated men to work in tech. So if the men are working on code, where are all these highly educated young women working?
Women may be a minority in tech jobs at local giants like Amazon, but they are prominent in other roles at these firms, such as marketing, project management, and human resources. Census data shows Seattle women slightly outnumbered men in business and financial occupations and were closing the gap in management, where they made up about 46%. Women represented nearly 70% of Seattle residents working in healthcare and related fields, such as physicians, nurses, and pharmacists, and they made up the majority in education, legal, and media occupations.
That said, when so many young adults — men and women — are college graduates, it stands to reason that a fair share must be working jobs that don't actually require a degree. The local labor market simply cannot provide enough specialized roles to match.
What happens when a bachelor's degree stops being a unique advantage and becomes the norm? I imagine many young people in Seattle are already living that reality.
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