Last year, for the first time ever, women earned more doctorates than men in every racial and ethnic group, according to a new National Science Foundation paper offering selected findings from the federal government’s annual Survey of Earned Doctorates.

The NSF typically releases the full results of the annual survey — sponsored by several federal agencies and conducted by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago — at this time of year. This year, however, the process has been delayed so much that the release of the full report has been postponed until May or June 2009.

The selected results that the NSF has chosen to release show that the number of doctorates granted by American institutions rose by 5.4 percent — to 48,079, the highest number ever reported — from 2006 to 2007.

All science fields except chemistry and psychology awarded record numbers of doctorates in 2007. The number of doctorates conferred in the humanities dropped by 4.6 percent from 2006 to 2007, while the number of doctorates in education rose by 5 percent, reversing a recent decline. —Peter Schmidt