40 MUSLIMS IN THE UNITED STATES
Table 3.
Muslim Males and Females in Professions*
Profession
M F Total
N % N % N %
Engineering, Electronics 866 28 744 24 1,610 52
Computer Sc. Data Processing 435 14 371 12 806 26
Medicine, Doctors, and Others 122 4 126 4 248 8
Business and Finance 125 4 92 3 217 7
Self-employed 94 3 60 2 154 5
Professor/Teacher, Imam 19 .6 12 .4 31 1
Lawyer/Police/Politics 13 .4 6 .2 19 .6
Other 9 .3 6 .2 15 .5
Total 1,683 54 1,417 46 3,100 100
*percentages are rounded to the nearest whole
either. If so, we think we found these invisible data, for in our subsample we
found a total of 3,100 of our respondents were working full-time (see table 3).
As is evident, professional distribution of Muslims betrays their high level of
education and income also. Most of them (86 percent) are concentrated in
three professions: engineering and electronics, computer science and data pro-
cessing, and medical doctors and various related professions. Teaching and law
are not the most favored professions yet. On the other hand, there are substan-
tial numbers in business and finance professions (7 percent), as there are a few
who are self-employed (5 percent). The category   other  includes such profes-
sions as journalism, social work, taxi driver, and auto sales.
What is significant is the relative visibility of the females in the full-time
work force, especially so in elite professions (40 percent). Still the work force
sex ratio (119 males for every 100 females) favors the male worker. Presum-
ably, even here in the United States, quite a few Muslim females enjoy being
homemakers.
Growth
Our efforts to find historic correspondence lists from several Islamic centers
proved to be unreliable or too few from which to draw conclusions. Also
because we did not have specific data on birth, death, migration, and conver-
sion rates, we had to estimate growth of the Muslim population mainly through
our respondents in our sample. However, in our sample, we could not get reli-
able information on these households beyond five years in the past. Table 4
shows that thirty-two of these one thousand households in the year 2000 did
not exist in 1999. Likewise, there were only 855 households in 1995 giving us
an overall 30 percent increase in the five-year period. It is also evident from
this table that as the number of the Muslim households increased, so did their
population. Eight hundred and fifty-five households that existed in 1995 had a
total population of 4,260 with five members per household. Their number has