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180 chapter 8 Gender, college Major, and postgraduate education o ur focus to this point has been on the growing advantage that women have over men in attaining bachelor’s degrees and on the determinants of this advantage in the environment and earlier life course. it is striking that the rise of the female advantage in fouryear college completion has occurred without a steady convergence in the fields of study undertaken by females and males. Fields of study in college have a strong effect on postgraduate education, on the occupational trajectories of men and women, and on the gender gap in earnings (Brown and corcoran 1997; Blau and Kahn 2000). understanding the full character of gender stratification in education requires attention to both the content of postsecondary education and educational and occupational trajectories beyond completion of a bachelor’s degree. This chapter compares trends in rates of college completion with trends in the distribution of college majors and trends in rates of postgraduate degrees. Much of the gender difference in college majors concerns science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STeM) fields, in terms of both the fraction of males and females who major in STeM fields and gender differences in the specific fields of study within STeM. Throughout this book, we have developed the argument that gender differences in educational performance in elementary and secondary school have their basis in the global environment and the local environment that encompass families, peers, and schools. Similarly, we maintain that gender differences in field of study in college are also linked to the environment , including both the global environment and the local environment defined by family, peers, and school. Gender segregation in fields of study Not long ago, women college students were concentrated in a very narrow range of fields of study. in the early 1960s, more than 70 percent of Gender, college Major, and postgraduate education 181 female undergraduates majored in education, english, fine arts, nursing, history, or home economics (Jacobs 1996). The degree of gender segregation across majors can be measured by the index of dissimilarity, which captures the percentage of women who would have to change majors in order for there to be parity for men and women in the distributions; 100 percent indicates complete segregation, and 0 percent indicates identical distributions. in 1965 the dissimilarity index calculated across all fields of study indicated that 40 percent of women would have had to change major fields in order to achieve gender parity. Gender segregation of major fields declined most dramatically during the 1970s. Sarah Turner and william Bowen (1999) show that a substantial movement of women out of education, coupled with a large influx of women into business programs, accounted for much of this reduction in the total dissimilarity index. as we noted in chapter 2, there has been very little change in the overall index of dissimilarity since the early 1980s (see figure 2.9). Mann and diprete (2012) found that the dissimilarity had dropped to 23 as of 1984 for college sophomores from the high School and Beyond study. Since then, the level of dissimilarity has remained about the same: for the college sophomores in 1994 from NelS, the index was 24, and for the college sophomores in 2006 from elS, the index remained at 24. Summary measures sometimes hide change that is occurring within specific fields of study. The most salient example concerns the life sciences . using data from the National Science Foundation caSpaR database , Mann and diprete (2012) found a small continual increase in the fraction of science majors who are female; this change has been driven partly by the trend for women to make up a greater share of all college students and partly by the increase in the popularity of life sciences majors for women. as shown in figure 8.1, the number of undergraduate female science and engineering majors has increased consistently since 1966, such that by 2001 women had garnered slightly more than half of all bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering. inspection of specific fields within the broad category of science and engineering reveals great variation in women’s representation. The majority of students in the biological and social sciences, with the exception of economics, are now women. They are approaching parity in chemistry, but they remain the minority in nearly all other sciences. Their underrepresentation in all fields within engineering is particularly striking. analysis of graduate degrees provides further evidence of both substantial change and persisting gender-specific patterns of...

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