The Last Boys’ Club? A Cross-National Analysis of Women’s and Men’s Enrollment in ICT, 1999-2017

• In Event: Sociology of Education Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (60 minute): Table 30. Gender, Schooling, and Society pt. 2

Abstract

Women’s access to higher education has expanded dramatically worldwide since the 1970s (Lerch et al. 2021; Ramirez and Wotipka 2001). This expansion has extended even into science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, historically viewed as male-dominated. Yet these gains become more uneven when STEM is disaggregated. In particular, women’s enrollment in Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) has stagnated in many countries, even as men continue to enroll. This pattern stands in sharp contrast to women’s steady gains in higher education and raises a question: why has ICT remained so persistently male-dominated despite the global expansion of women’s education? I build upon literature on occupational stratification and gendered educational choice (Charles and Bradley 2002, 2009; England 2010; England and Li 2006; Kwak and Ramirez 2019; Lee et al. 2021, 2024) to develop a theoretical framework that links global institutional changes to the cultural construction of gendered sorting in ICT. I use panel data from 82 countries spanning 1999 to 2017 to examine cross-national variation in tertiary ICT enrollment among women and men. This paper argues that two institutional mechanisms sustain gendered patterns in ICT: (1) ICT is institutionalized as a high-status, male-coded professional pathway, and (2) liberal individualism amplifies gendered sorting in gender-egalitarian contexts.

Author

• Risako Ninomiya, University of California-Irvine