Study: The Culture of Some Colleges May Foster Gender Segregation by Major, Study Finds

From the Chronicle of Higher Education:

Certain colleges may have cultures that nudge female students into stereotypically female fields and men into stereotypically male ones, suggests a study whose findings are slated to be presented here on Tuesday at the annual conference of the American Sociological Association.

Colleges that have relatively few women among their tenured faculty members and exceptionally small numbers of men among their undergraduates generally have higher levels of gender segregation by major than do other institutions, the study found. So do colleges with football teams in Division III of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, suggesting that those with athletic programs that emphasize male-dominated sports are less likely to encourage the gender integration of various academic fields, according to a paper summarizing the study's results.

Colleges that promote study in the liberal arts, by contrast, tend to have more students go into fields traditionally associated with members of the opposite sex, the paper says.

..

The paper's authors are Jayne Baker, a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Toronto, and Ann L. Mullen, an associate professor of sociology there. They based their analysis on federal data on nearly 1.3 million students who earned bachelor's degrees from one of about 1,400 colleges in the United States during the 2004-5 academic year. The data were collected by the U.S. Education Department's National Center for Education Statistics as part of the Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System.

...