The first doctorate was awarded in Paris around 1150, as a license to teach.
The word "doctor" comes from the Latin docere, meaning to teach. In medieval Europe, the title was not a mark of research ability. It was permission to lecture. The University of Paris awarded the first known doctoral degree around 1150, granting recipients the right to teach at the highest level within the university system.1
For the next several centuries, doctorates were conferred in three fields: theology, law, and medicine. The title "doctor" and the title "master" were used interchangeably; both indicated that someone had demonstrated sufficient knowledge of an existing body of work to pass it on.2
The doctorate as we recognize it today was invented at the University of Berlin. In 1810, Wilhelm von Humboldt founded the university on the principle that teaching and research were inseparable.3 The philosophy faculty began requiring doctoral candidates to produce a dissertation demonstrating an original contribution to knowledge. Knowing a field was no longer enough. Candidates had to discover something new within it.
The German model spread. American students traveled to Germany in large numbers to earn their doctorates, and in 1861, Yale University became the first American institution to award the PhD, conferring it on three recipients: Arthur W. Wright in physics, James M. Whiton in classics, and Eugene Schuyler in an unrecorded field.4
The PhD reached Canada in 1900 and Britain in 1917. British universities had resisted the degree for decades, but the First World War created urgency. Canadian and American students had been traveling to Germany for doctoral study because British universities offered no equivalent qualification. The Allied Colonial Universities Conference of 1903 recommended introducing a research doctorate, and by 1917 the University of Oxford had established the DPhil.5
The National Science Foundation reported that American universities awarded more than 1.3 million doctoral degrees between 1920 and 1999. Women earned fifteen percent of those degrees in the 1920s and forty-one percent by the late 1990s.6