Skills pay off in the labor market and rising returns to educational attainment suggest growing demand by employers for workers with higher skills. However, skills are hierarchically organized by other attributes as well—for example, jobs skills can be gender essentialized. Work that involves caring for others requires feminine-essentialized skills whereas work that requires engineering skills is essentialized as masculine. Our study investigates the intersection of these dimensions by examining whether a college degree can offset the wage penalties associated with gender-essentialized jobs skills across a continuum from feminine to masculine. The analyses use the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth in 1997 (NLSY-97) combined with detailed information from the O*NET database of occupational characteristics and growth curve models. Our results show that a college degree can close and even reverse gender wage gaps for job skills that are essentialized feminine but not those essentialized as masculine.