And from a University of Maryland 2009 study, Race and Gender Differences in College Major Choice
“The results demonstrate that significant differences by gender, race and ethnicity persist in initial college major choice even after controlling for the SAT score of the student and the high school class rank of the student. Gender differences in major choice are much larger than racial and ethnic disparities. Furthermore, women are significantly more likely to switch away from an initial major in engineering than are white men.”
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@Aragorn, I’ll move this here so I’m not threadjacking the other thread.
Here’s the link if you want to look at that study more closely. Honestly, I just skimmed through it, because I was curious about Bolt’s question. I’m not an expert on this by any stretch.
http://theop.princeton.edu/reports/forthcoming/ANNALS_07_Dickson_Manuscript_June2009.pdf
More food for thought on what’s happening for women in education. Perry currently writes for AEI, so certainly a conservative think tank.
Regarding major choice and decisions to choose lower paying fields, I don’t know the answer to that.
How much of these choices are based on biology vs culture is a good question. I’m talking about going back to fairly well accepted ideas like this. Men have evolved to be larger because they were competing with other men for mates. Men tended to be hunters, where women tended to be gatherers/ keepers of the hearth. Women evolved to be more choosy about mates, and to be smaller because they weren’t fighting for mates, it was the more promiscuous XYs were fighting each other. That kind of evolutionary theory.
I mentioned risk taking behavior in young men in our Education thread. We could hypothesize why that behavior might have a biological basis, but again we have culture laying over the top of every complex set of behavior patterns. Maybe as women have more opportunity to do risky stuff like ride dirt bikes, we’ll see the risk taking gap close. That kind of thing.
To my knowledge, we don’t know how much something like major choice is based in biology vs culture.
Certainly our culture is changing. If we go back and look at evolutionary roles of men and women in hunter gatherer societies, we’re only seeing a part of the picture, right? There is always an overlay of culture. Still, even in industrialized societies, we still see women doing more of the childcare/ domestic work than men. I believe this is still true in our most egalitarian cultures like Scandinavia, but we don’t know what that may look like in 300 years.
I do know that the Scandinavian countries have been trying to address the gender disparity in STEM fields for much longer than we have, and they continue to have a gender gap as more women seem to choose helping professions, etc…
Also of interest, my son tells me that countries like Finland are actually making an ideological shift with some recognition that children who grow up with stay-at-home mothers do better on some parameters. This is something many affluent Americans already do, and there is status in being able to do it. “My wife doesn’t need to work, syndrome.” The Scandinavian countries will have a very hard time making the shift to allow women to do that again if they decide it’s a good policy, because everyone has to work to pay the taxes.
Another one about gender and the wage gap linked to major.