A story published today by the Sun Sentinel reports that while women have been the majority of college students for about two decades, recent Census figures show that nationally, their numbers have risen to 56 percent. In some South Florida colleges, two of every three students are women.

In the past few years, more women than men received bachelor degrees in science-related fields. Even in traditionally male-dominated fields such as engineering, architecture and mathematics, women cut the gap by as much as 20 percent from a decade ago.

The reasons for the phenomenon are many, said Lynn Appleton, a sociologist at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton. But the more fundamental reasons, she said, focus on the changing family.

For example, she said, because many contemporary families feel the need for two incomes, "many women who may not have prepared themselves for the workforce 30 years ago now assume they will have to hold a job."

Beginning in the 1970s, she said, "the opening of no-fault divorce meant Americans could end emotionally unsatisfying marriages, which created a couple of generations of divorced American women who descended into near poverty because they held no credentials to work. Their daughters have vowed this will not happen to them."

Tom Mortenson, a public policy analyst for the Center for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington, attributes the shift to the country's century-long evolution from an industrial to a service economy, which, he said, favors women.

The beginning of the decline in male participation in college goes back to the late 19th century, when men dominated all aspects of higher education. What stopped the rates from going down even faster were what Mortenson calls "two artificial spikes," the 1944 GI Bill, which financially encouraged returning World War II veterans to go to school, and the Vietnam-era law that exempted male college students from the draft.

In South Florida today, Appleton said, "lots of our working-class male students are going straight into the workforce and their sisters are saying, `What kind of job can I get? Checkout line? Maid?' They're not good options, so they go to the community college, then on to the university."

The cause of South Florida's higher female-male ratio may be because "the majority of our universities are non-residential schools," Appleton said. "Some portion of the families whose daughters are going to our schools may be sending their sons away to residential schools. Perhaps they're not comfortable with sending their daughters away to school as undergraduates."

That may help explain why the farther north one gets in Florida -- toward the larger residential universities -- women constitute much less of a majority.

Even so, the number of women entering the system has increased 138 percent since 1989.

The one thing that seems to have stayed the same, however, is the vast difference in pay between men and women. Mean income for women college graduates is nearly half the income of their male counterparts.

The prospects for salaries rising remains grim, said William Dorfman, a professor of psychology at NSU, who has seen women increasingly dominate the graduate student body at the college.

The reasons focus on the number of roles women try to fulfill, and the law of supply and demand, he said.

"The `feminization' of those professions leads to lower pay across the board," Dorfman said.

Historically, he said, female-dominated fields such as teaching and nursing pay comparatively low. As more women enter professions such as psychology and medicine, expect the salaries to go down and more men leave those professions.

"A lot of women graduate from our program," Dorfman said, "get married, work in the profession for a year or two, then leave the full-time career to have a baby. They may come back into it down the road, but the demands of family, marriage and children put them at a disadvantage for negotiation for higher salaries --- and schools and [law] firms can take advantage of it."

Men go into fields such as engineering, computers, even accounting, because the salaries are still high, he said.