Gender Typicality, College Major, and Postsecondary Educational Attainment

• In Event: Gendered Pathways Through Postsecondary Education and Into Work

Abstract

While women have outpaced men in the completion of bachelor’s degrees since the 1980s, more complex stratification persists within the fields studied in pursuit of these degrees, with men remaining overrepresented in engineering, mathematics, and physical and computer sciences. Students’ college fields of study have significant consequences for their post-graduation options and income in the labor market, and gender imbalances in degree completion become gender imbalances in occupational and research communities, potentially shaping the cultural and knowledge outputs of those communities. Prior research suggests that both patterns are partially due to different relationships of gender-typical behavior to these outcomes. While hegemonic forms of masculinity promote behaviors which are detrimental to general academic success, femininity is culturally stereotyped to be incompatible with STEM specifically. We build on this research by directly studying associations between students’ gender typicality and postsecondary educational outcomes, including student undergraduate major and postsecondary educational attainment. We use data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health and apply LASSO regression to construct gender typicality scores for individual respondents using Add Health’s rich set of behavioral covariates. We then compare distributions of these scores across educational attainment outcomes and declared majors within the subset of students attending college. We hypothesize that, for both men and women, more-feminine gender typicality scores will predict higher educational attainment, while students in majors with higher proportions of men will have on average more-masculine gender typicality scores.

Authors

• Garrett McArthur Ruley, Princeton University

• Jennifer L. Jennings, Princeton University