Ochsenfeld, Fabian
Researchers: Fabian Ochsenfeld
University Affiliation: Goethe University
Email: ochsenfeld@soz.uni-frankfurt.de
Research Question:
- To test whether certain fields are perceived as less hospitable to women and avoided by them for that reason.
- To test whether women and men anticipate the demands imposed by gender-specific parenthood roles and eschew majors that are incompatible with these either because majors do not provide the desired work-family balance, or not the earnings level necessary to fulfill the breadwinner role.
- To test whether women's and men's choices are constrained by friends' and parents' potential disapproval for sex-atypical choices.
Published: Yes
Journal Name or Institutional Affiliation: Social Science Research
Journal Entry: Vol. 56, Pp. 117-132
Year: 2015
Findings:
- Internalized vocational interests better explain gendered major choices than conformance with friends’ and parents’ expectations does.
- The author found no evidence whether segregation results from women’s anticipation of gendered family roles or from their anticipation of sex-based discrimination.
- Differences in mathematics achievement fail to explain gendered patterns of selection into college majors.
- People with better math than German literature grades are more likely to select math-intensive majors than those with a relative disadvantage in math.
- For certain majors, social approval rates indeed differ substantively by gender, in particular with regards to approval from friends. The authors decomposition analysis revealed, however, that the explanatory power of such differences for horizontal segregation is small- a hitherto untested assumption that underlies nearly all essentialist interpretation.
- In sum, theories that conceive of major choices as resulting from the anticipation of a future that still lies a few years away receive no support from the analysis.
- The results suggest that the high degree of sex segregation in college is rooted in the highly presentist fashion in which young individuals appear to choose between majors: They mostly seem to act on the vocational interests they hold at the time of entering college and to a much lesser extent, respond to expectations in their peer group.
- This picture is perfectly consonant with the claim that an essentialist gender culture conspires with liberal individualism to bring about a high degree of sex segregation in higher education and, later on, the labor market, too.