In many countries women have been increasing their participation in higher education, but fields of study and occupation continue to be segregated by gender. Men dominate the technical fields, whereas women tend to engage in areas that have a social and caring dimension. Gender segregation in higher education has important consequences for the labour market. Not only does such segregation generate labour market disparities by gender, but it also has a considerable influence on the gender gap in salaries.
Although gender differences in educational and occupational choices are shaped by multifarious influences, the role of parents might be particularly worth attention because parents are the primary and one of the most influential socialising agents in childhood and adolescence. One possible source of students’ knowledge about and interest in a particular field of study and career early on stems from parental education and occupations. The impact of parents’ occupational fields and its gender typicality, however, has received less attention. In the first sub-project, we analyse data from the German Socio-Economic Panel (SOEP) to examine whether parental occupations have a direct effect on students’ occupational aspirations among the recent cohorts of German youth.
Another question that receives less attention is how single-sex schools as a feature of educational systems might affect longer-term gender differences in field of study choices. The potential benefits of single-sex schooling are not easy to disentangle from other school effects, and Australia is a case in point here, because most of its sex-segregated secondary education is not provided by the government but by Catholic or independent schools. These schools charge tuition fees and are typically inaccessible to families with moderate material resources. Therefore, it is not clear to what extent the previously reported advantages in the uptake of specific fields of study are attributable to single-sex learning environments, teacher quality or student admission policies that favour advantageous socioeconomic background and prior academic achievement.
To contribute an insight about longer-term effects, in the second sub-project we explore how single-sex secondary education facilitates the pursuit of specific science majors at university. We use data from the 2003 cohort of the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth (LSAY). Given that men and women dominate physical sciences and life sciences respectively, we ask whether single-sex secondary schooling reduces gender differences in the pursuit of physical sciences or life sciences at university.
Prior field experiments have shown that certain information intervention was successful in promoting interest, performance and enrolment in science. Nevertheless, the relevance of information intervention for reducing gender inequalities in field of study choices has not yet been investigated in other welfare states than Italy. Therefore, in the third sub-project, we use primary data of high school students from Berlin to examine whether providing students with information on wages, career prospects and unemployment risks affects their field of study choices at university. We aim to find out whether such information interventions can be used to narrow the gender gap in field of study choices.
