Not by Choice Alone: Organizational Field Diversity and Undergraduate Sex Segregation after Title IX

• In Event: 497 - Regular Session. Horizontal Stratification and Fields of Study in Higher Education

Abstract

Do systems of higher education that offer students a greater variety of credentialing opportunities facilitate sorting along gender lines? While “optimists” view such structural diversification as part of a modern egalitarian shift, “pessimists” see diversification as creating countervailing effects that stall integration by appealing to enduring gender-based preferences. This article outlines and tests a contingent, “neutralist” position based upon the premise that high diversity environments alone neither facilitate nor hinder integration, but rather interact with a complex set of existing cultural and structural constraints on individual choice. For periods and processes with higher levels of segregation, field diversity has relatively more segregative effects, because of greater opportunities to create and sustain female “ghettoes;” however, as broader institutional constraints on gender norms weaken, field diversity affords more students opportunities to “discover” and pursue preferences for gender atypical areas of study. Random growth curve models of overall and area-specific undergraduate sex segregation in earned degrees prior to and following the passage of Title IX legislation in public four-year institutions find national trends are strongly moderated in the proposed manner by state-level differences in the exposure of students to diverse sets of programs. Further insights into these processes come from analyzing state-level differences in trends for freshman aspirations and undergraduate cohort re-sorting.

Author

• Craig M. Rawlings, University of California-Santa Barbara