Women made impressive inroads into higher education after the passage of Title IX (Charles & Bradley 2002). Women now make up the majority of college students, they earn 58 percent of all bachelor‘s degrees, and finish their degrees more quickly than men (Buchmann et al. 2008). Similarly, sex segregation in higher education has
decreased substantially since the 1950s and 1960s: the dissimilarity index across fields of study fell from 40 percent in 1965 to 19 percent in 1995 (Gerber & Cheung 2008). As with many other dimensions of gender inequality, however, desegregation of college majors stalled in the 1990s (Cotter et al. 2011). There remains substantial segregation across fields of study and men crowd in academic majors that are most likely to translate into high-paying, prestigious occupations (male-dominated) occupations (Gerber &
Cheung 2008). I briefly review the existing social science explanations for this enduring segregation and situate my approach within them.
Economic approaches argue that this sex segregation emerges out of men‘s and women‘s rational choices to maximize their lifetime earnings. I reviewed these human capital explanations in the introduction for occupational sex segregation in general, but there has been an influential literature on the choice of academic majors in particular.
First, Polachek (1981), Becker (1993) and others argue that women, guided by ―cost-benefit‖ calculations, prefer college majors that will be connected to occupations with high earnings right out of college (presumably before women have children), and have flatter earnings profiles that will minimize the cost of interruptions to employment in order to care for children. As discussed in the introduction, these human capital
explanations have come under strong criticism (see D‘Amico 1987; England 1984, 1982).
Secondly, a ―comparative advantage‖ theory suggests that because women out-perform men in female-dominated majors, women choose such majors to maximize their possibility of having a positive outcome to their investment in higher education (Barone 2011). However, even with middle-range grade point averages, women have more opportunities to attain highly-paid occupations with a male-dominated degree than a female-dominated degree (Gerber & Cheung 2008).
A third assumption is that women do not have the high school preparation in math and science and thus do not choose male-dominated college majors. This may have been the case several decades ago, when women‘s math scores and preparation lagged men‘s, but men and women now take equally-demanding math classes in high school, they are more likely to have taken biology and chemistry classes than men, and earn better grades on average in these classes than their male peers (Buchmann et al. 2008). Secondly, while women‘s math and science preparation may be on par with men‘s, women assess
their own abilities lower than men do. These biased self-assessments, net of math ability, preparation, and performance, lead women to be less likely than men to enter college with math and science majors (Correll 2004).
Rejecting rational actor explanations, sociologists and social psychologists have argued that structural and cultural processes lead to the perpetuation of sex segregation in higher education. First, the combination of diversified higher education systems,
increasingly more elaborate educational niches, and high female employment rates in recent decades exacerbates sex segregation in higher education (Charles & Bradley 2002). When students are given greater latitude to choose their field, they tend to
reproduce this segregation. Others have argued that desegregation happens most often in the most prestigious institutions, meaning that the effects of such desegregation are unlikely to make widespread change (Gerber & Cheung 2008). I see this in the data I use here: women are more highly represented in male-dominated fields at MIT and Olin than at UMass.
From a cultural perspective, boys and girls are encouraged to pursue different interests and develop different skills (Ridgeway & Smith-Lovin 1999): girls tend to read more often than boys, and boys have more practice with formal reasoning than girls.
This socialization is believed to influence the types of interests that young men and women develop in high school and the college majors they eventually intend to select (Watt & Eccles 2008). Similarly, the role expectations literature (reviewed in the Introduction) argues that women and men are socialized to expect to take on different roles, and thus make career decisions based on their beliefs about how best to balance those roles. Women who are socialized to expect that they will take on childcare and
spousal support roles will choose majors they believe will lead to more flexible or family-friendly occupations. This theory, however, suffers from the same problems as rational choice explanations.
The socialization literature is problematic because the college majors that men and women choose are often far afield from their interests as children. Jacobs (1989) argues that such socialized preferences are only effective to the extent that they are sustained by external discriminatory and sanctioning mechanisms of social control.
Mechanisms that sustain gendered interests and preferences do not necessarily have to be external, however. Sociologists have recently argued that the resilience of sex segregation of college majors is due in part to individual-level cultural processes. Charles and Bradley (2009) argue that many men and women make college major decisions along still-popular essentialist notions of gendered tasks. Men and women may ―indulge their gendered selves‖ in their choice of academic majors, seeking self-fulfillment and to be part of fields that are extensions of themselves (Charles & Bradley 2009). I examine the extent to which perceptions of self influence the individual-level reproduction of sex segregation by attending to respondents‘ decisions about college majors. In particular, I am interested in how these beliefs predict college sex segregation scores (i.e. the percent women in each respondents‘ majors) as an outcome variable.
As discussed in chapter 1, there are forceful normative trends of choosing majors for self-expressive reasons. If selves are gendered, self-expressive major selection should be gendered as well. College presents relative freedom to align one‘s career goals with one‘s personal interests in ways that are much less costly than when they have entered the labor market. A student can be an aspiring chemist one semester, a musician the next,
and end up graduating with a degree in political science. Making such rapid changes in one‘s career trajectory once in the workforce would be difficult, if not impossible. This flexibility, unparalleled in other parts of the career path, should provide the best
conditions for making career decisions along self-expressive lines. This makes it an ideal location to study how gendered self-conceptions influence men‘s and women‘s career decisions.
As demonstrated in the last chapter, self-conceptions are deeply interwoven with cultural beliefs about gender. These gendered self-conceptions do not necessarily appear gendered to the individuals who hold them, however; they may simply appear
individualistic. The expression of these self-conceptions in academic major selection can reproduce sex segregation in higher education but this self-expression might not seem gendered to those enacting it.