Elsevier

Social Science Research

Volume 42, Issue 6, November 2013, Pages 1519-1541
Social Science Research

Trends in gender segregation in the choice of science and engineering majors

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ssresearch.2013.07.002Get rights and content

Highlights

  • This trend study tests prominent theories for the gender gap in STEM fields.

  • Gender differences in test scores explain little of the gender gap in STEM fields.

  • Gender differences in life goals and self-concepts also explain little of the gap.

  • These factors also fail to account for the gender-specific trends in STEM majors.

  • Women and men link college majors to jobs and curricular goals in different ways.

Abstract

Numerous theories have been put forward for the high and continuing levels of gender segregation in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields, but research has not systematically examined the extent to which these theories for the gender gap are consistent with actual trends. Using both administrative data and four separate longitudinal studies sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), we evaluate several prominent explanations for the persisting gender gap in STEM fields related to mathematics performance and background and general life goals, and find that none of them are empirically satisfactory. Instead, we suggest that the structure of majors and their linkages to professional training and careers may combine with gender differences in educational goals to influence the persisting gender gap in STEM fields. An analysis of gendered career aspirations, course-taking patterns, and pathways to medical and law school supports this explanation.

Introduction

Women now surpass men in college completion (Buchmann and DiPrete, 2006, DiPrete and Buchmann, 2013) and attain bachelors, masters and doctoral degrees at rates that exceed those of men (Snyder and Dillow, 2010). Yet horizontal gender segregation in fields of study, which had decreased somewhat in the 1970s and 1980s, has been stagnant for the past 20 years (Alon and Gelbgiser, 2011, Charles and Bradley, 2002). In particular, the literature has emphasized the slow gender integration in the pursuit of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) majors (Turner and Bowen, 1999, Xie and Shauman, 2003). Given concerns about an undersupply of STEM graduates and a continuing gap in wages between male and female college graduates, the female shortfall in the pursuit of STEM majors is an important social policy issue (U.S. Department of Commerce, 2012, Xie and Killewald, 2012).

Recent evidence could support an impression that the gender gap in the attainment of STEM bachelor’s degrees is narrowing. Although only 25% of STEM bachelor’s degrees were awarded to women in 1977, women received 40% of STEM bachelor’s degrees as of 2000 and, as Fig. 1 shows, they continue to receive STEM bachelor’s degrees in increasing numbers.

Aggregate data about the share of STEM degrees by gender, however, conceal several related trends. First, more women than men enroll in higher education and receive bachelor’s degrees, and the female lead has increased since women achieved parity in the number of bachelor’s degrees in 1982. Yet, women continue to prefer non-STEM degrees to STEM degrees; the increased share of STEM degrees awarded to women coexists with a continuing disproportionate female preference for non-STEM majors.1 Second, the number of male students receiving STEM degrees has oscillated since 1980; the number of male STEM degrees decreased noticeably in the late 1980s before rising again in the 2000s.2 The male trend suggests that there are external factors bearing on the attractiveness of STEM majors. Third, the biological sciences became more popular in the early 1990s for both males and females.3 During the past two decades, women who choose STEM majors disproportionately pursue biological science degrees. The combined consequence of these trends is that the share of biological science degrees awarded to women has increased from 40% to 60% over the last 30 years. At the same time, however, the shares of physical science and engineering degrees awarded to women have fallen in the last decade. The gender disparity is sharpest in engineering, where the share of degrees awarded to women has never reached 25%. In other words, any female advantage in STEM degrees is confined to the biological sciences; the male advantage persists in the physical sciences and engineering (at least in aggregate) (Fig. 1).4

Numerous theories have been proposed for the high and continuing levels of gender segregation, but research has not systematically examined the extent to which these theories for the gender gap are consistent with actual trends. The question that motivates our study is how the gender gap in STEM fields of study has remained relatively stable in the face of both the changing gender distribution in higher education enrollment and trends in gender-specific factors that bear directly on the attractiveness of STEM fields of study, including especially test scores, life goals, expectations about work–family compatibility, and desires for extrinsic or intrinsic satisfaction. To address this question, we revisit arguments from prior research to see how they hold up to different analytical strategies with better and more recent data. Turner and Bowen (1999) analyzed the College and Beyond data (which are drawn from 12 elite colleges and universities), and attributed between one-third and one-half of the gender gap in STEM majors in 1989 to a gender discrepancy in SAT test scores, with even larger effects in preceding years. Using nationally representative data, a more inclusive set of test score measures, as well as a more robust set of math performance measures, we find, in contrast, that gender differences in math performance explain only a small fraction of the gap and play even less of a role in accounting for gender-specific trends in the pursuit of STEM majors. Second, using survey questions about twelfth graders’ life goals, we find that gender differences in life goals contribute little to understanding the disparity in fields of study (Hakim, 2002, Shu and Marini, 1998). We then present a set of counterfactual analyses to demonstrate the continuing and substantial role of preferences (net of test scores) in predicting the major choices of women and men and how these changing preferences are greatly increasing the number of women in STEM fields but in the direction of biological sciences, not physical sciences or engineering. Finally, we develop a relatively unexplored and potentially promising explanation for the continuing gender gap in STEM majors, namely, that women and men in 4-year colleges differ in the way they link college majors to post-bachelor training, occupations, and their broader educational goals while in school. We find support for our hypothesis by examining gender differences in career aspirations, in course-taking patterns, and in the distribution of majors among the set of students who apply to law school or medical school. These results suggest that there are important consequences for choices of major in the constraints associated with majors such as engineering that limit curricular flexibility during the undergraduate years.

Section snippets

Trends in gender segregation in fields of study

The literature on gender and higher education has documented a substantial decline in gender segregation in fields of study through the 1970s, followed by a period in the 1980s in which the declines subsided (Barone, 2011, Bradley, 2000, England and Li, 2006, Jacobs, 1989b, Jacobs, 1995, Jacobs, 1996, Turner and Bowen, 1999). Much of the decrease in gender segregation was attributed to progress during the 1960s and 1970s toward gender parity in the fields of education and business. The reasons

Explanations for gender segregation in fields of study

Much of the earlier decrease in gender segregation (shown in Fig. 2) has been attributed to improved opportunities for women in the labor market and consequent changes in the attractiveness of particular majors. The growing opportunities for women in the labor market would suggest comparable progress in gender integration in fields of study. Thus, even in engineering, which is the most segregated STEM field, women made steady progress until recently: the number of engineering and computer

Data and methods

To evaluate the contributions that mathematics performance and life goals have made to the persisting gender gap in STEM fields over the past 40 years, we use data from four NCES (National Center for Education Statistics) longitudinal surveys conducted since 1972. Collectively, the studies permit us to analyze and compare the educational pathways of high school students who graduated in the spring of 1972, 1982, 1992, and 2004. The oldest, the National Longitudinal Study of the High School Class

Decomposition of the gender gap in STEM majors

A widely discussed determinant of college field of study is math ability. While gender differences in average math test scores have always been small and have converged in recent decades (Hyde et al., 2008, National Center for Education Statistics, 2010), males at all relevant times have received a disproportionate share of the very best math scores. Yet if the relative scarcity of women with high math achievement were the primary cause of the gender gap in the STEM fields, we would expect the

Competition among majors and the gender gap

Taken together, the preceding analyses establish that preferences (what we earlier referred to as “preferences, all things considered”) are important – both in the form of preference for biological sciences compared with physical sciences and engineering, and preferences for STEM majors compared to non-STEM majors. One obvious possibility – though difficult to assess empirically – is that the female preference for non-STEM majors or non-physical science majors within the STEM group arises not

Discussion

Although women have closed much of the gender gap in the pursuit of STEM majors in the last 30 years, their progress has been uneven outside of the biological sciences. Despite some moderate success in chemistry and mathematics, the share of women obtaining math and physical science degrees is not markedly higher than it was 30 years ago. Moreover, women have made virtually no progress in engineering fields since the mid 1990s, and they earn fewer degrees in engineering than they do in the

Acknowledgments

We acknowledge helpful comments by Jill Bowdon, Claudia Buchmann, Joscha Legewie, and Anne McDaniel. This project was supported by Award Number R01EB010584 from the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not reflect the official views of the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering or the National Institutes of Health.

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