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Majority Rules: Gender Composition and Sexual Norms and Behavior in High Schools

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Abstract

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health, we examine the relationship between the gender composition of high schools and sexual ideals, attitudes, and behaviors reported by 12,617 students. Theory predicts that a surplus of females in a dating market gives males greater bargaining power to achieve their underlying preference for avoiding committed relationships and engaging in casual sex. We find relationships between the gender composition of a high school and sexual norms and behaviors that depart from this theoretical prediction: In high schools in which girls outnumber boys, students report a less sexually permissive normative climate and girls report less casual sex compared with their counterparts at schools in which boys outnumber girls. Our results inform predictions about social consequences following from the feminization of school institutions.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Pennsylvania, 3718 Locust Walk, 271 McNeil Building, Philadelphia, USA

    Kristen Harknett

  2. Baylor University, Waco, USA

    Stephen Cranney

Authors
  1. Kristen Harknett
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  2. Stephen Cranney
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Correspondence to Kristen Harknett.

Appendices

Appendix 1: Predictors of High School Gender Composition

We ran a series of regressions in which percent female in a school is regressed on a variety of other school characteristics and the 75 high schools are the unit of analysis. These results are summarized in Appendix Table 6. Our school-level predictors include urbanicity, region, public or private school, school size, proportion of teachers that are female, proportion of student body living in two-parent families, proportion of students with college-educated mothers, and proportion of students from immigrant families. To avoid model overfitting and collinearity among predictors, we limit the number of school-level predictors to four or fewer. Each panel in the Appendix represents a separate regression. As shown, none of the school-level predictors are statistically significant predictors of percent female.

Table 6 Regress percent female on select school characteristics (N = 75 high schools)
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Appendix 2

See Tables 7, 8 and 9.

Table 7 Robustness of relationship ideals results to alternative specifications
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Table 8 Robustness of sexual attitudes results to alternative specifications
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Table 9 Robustness of relationship and sexual behavior results to alternative specifications
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Harknett, K., Cranney, S. Majority Rules: Gender Composition and Sexual Norms and Behavior in High Schools. Popul Res Policy Rev 36, 469–500 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-017-9436-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11113-017-9436-2

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