Public defense: Sara Seehuus

This dissertation aims at identifying factors that promote or discourage gendered educational choices in an advanced gender equality context. 

Since the 1970s, the educational systems of post-industrial economies have been subject to two major gender-related changes. First, the proportion of women in higher education has increased dramatically, resulting in a reversal of the gender gap in educational attainment. Second, gender segregation in fields of study decreased substantially in the two decades following the start of the influx of women in higher education but has since slowed. Moreover, this desegregation has been a one-sided process, as it has mainly involved women moving into previously male-dominated fields of study without an equivalent increase in the proportion of men in female-dominated ones.

Much of the literature addressing gender segregation in education focuses on its persistency, and the theoretical explanations applied are thus limited in their ability to account for gender-atypical choices. Moreover, many studies have focused on the lack of women in certain male-dominated fields of study. In light of the increased share of women in many previously male-dominated fields of study within higher education, this dissertation also directs its attention towards the lack of men in female-dominated fields, and towards what might prompt gender-atypical choices for both men and women.

By utilizing data from Norwegian administrative registers and two factorial survey experiments carried out in Oslo, this dissertation examines how individual preferences, cultural beliefs, social background, and economic rewards influence gendered educational choices.

Findings

The results from this dissertation can be summarized in four key findings. First, regarding individual preferences, the results from one of the factorial survey experiments indicate that preferences for job attributes such as pay and working hours, that are often associated with gender typed occupations in the real world, cannot independently account for why boys and girls tend to have divergent occupational preferences. However, the findings also suggest that boys’ negative evaluations of some female-dominated occupations may be reduced if they were paid more.

Second, the findings from the other factorial survey experiment indicate stronger support for consensual status beliefs that devalue female-typed work than for gender essentialist notions. However, the results suggest that both gendered status beliefs and gender essentialist beliefs may deter boys from taking female-dominated vocational education.

Third, regarding social background, the results suggest that processes of gender segregation and social class reproduction are interlinked. This underscores the importance of taking other dimensions of inequality into account when studying gendered educational choices, and, conversely, the importance of taking gender into account when investigating the influence of social background on educational choices.

Fourth, the findings regarding economic rewards shed light on the overrepresentation of women in higher education. Consistent with previous research, they show that the relative returns to higher education are larger for women than for men. However, the analyses show that gender differences in absolute economic returns are smaller among those with master-level education.

Discussion

Theoretically, the dissertation draws on the notion of gender that underpins the works of Cecilia Ridgeway, which implies a focus on the social processes and institutional structures through which gender works. It also combines theoretical perspectives from the literature on gender segregation with perspectives from the sociology of education.

I suggest supplementing explanations of gender segregation with insights from theories that aim at explaining socioeconomic inequalities in education so that the opportunity structures individuals face are taken into account. I argue that this approach is better able to account for both gender-typical and gender-atypical choices and the way in which these choices are contingent on other dimensions of inequality.