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Educational choice and persistence in male- and female-dominated fields

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Abstract

Even though female students now make up more than half of all higher education students in many countries, the distribution of women across fields of study is still very uneven. This study examines the gendered nature of recruitment and dropout in higher education. Our results show that students who made gender traditional choices more often had an early preference for the study programme they enrolled in. Moreover, female students reported more often than male students that they had been encouraged by their parents and friends. However, unlike what we expected, there are no differences between students in gender traditional and non-traditional programmes with regard to encouragement from parents and students’ confidence that they had made the right choice. While male students’ dropout is unrelated to the gender composition of educational programmes, women drop out of female-dominated programmes to a lesser extent.

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Notes

  1. A reviewer raised the issue of whether institutional differences in culture might have biased the results. To address this issue, we have repeated all analyses using data from Oslo University College only. The results were substantively very similar. Complete results are available upon request.

  2. A reviewer suggested that it would be more appropriate to include only the female-dominated and male-dominated categories in the analyses. We believe it is more informative to analyze the entire sample. If the mid-category were omitted, we would not know, e.g. whether higher dropout in male- than in female-dominated fields were due to either (1) a particularly high dropout in male-dominated fields, (2) a particularly low dropout in female-dominated fields, or (3) both (1) and (2). (Actually, pattern (2) is what we find in the empirical analyses below, see Fig. 3.)

  3. Due to missing data on the attitudinal variables, the number of observations included is lower for Model 2 than for Model 1. The results for Model 1 are, however, almost identical if the analysis is restricted to observations with complete data on all variables in Model 2.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Centre for the Study of Professions, Oslo University College, P.O. Box 4, St. Olavs plass, Oslo, N-0130, Norway

    Arne Mastekaasa & Jens-Christian Smeby

  2. University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Arne Mastekaasa

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  1. Arne Mastekaasa
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  2. Jens-Christian Smeby
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Correspondence to Jens-Christian Smeby.

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Order of authorship is alphabetical to denote our equal contributions.

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Mastekaasa, A., Smeby, JC. Educational choice and persistence in male- and female-dominated fields. High Educ 55, 189–202 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-006-9042-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10734-006-9042-4

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