This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Despite efforts to encourage broader participation, women earn about 25% of undergraduate engineering degrees and 18% of undergraduate computer science degrees—and men remain a small minority among people earning nursing and education degrees. Shedding new light on these discrepancies, a study—published in Nature Human Behaviour and examining two U.S.
Department of Education datasets—finds that these long-standing patterns tend to be most pronounced among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores, although prior academic performance alone does not explain who stays in a major and who leaves. The researchers found that in male-majority majors such as physics, engineering, computer science, business and economics, straight cisgender men with lower-than-average high school grades and test scores were substantially overrepresented compared with straight cisgender women with similar levels of academic performance. That gap narrowed considerably among the highest-achieving students.
LGBTQ+ men were also underrepresented in these fields. In female-majority fields, evidence for a parallel pattern of overrepresentation for straight cisgender women was mixed. However, some models showed that LGBTQ+ women tend to be overrepresented in female-majority fields among students with the highest pre-college achievement—suggesting that LGBTQ+ women may need stronger academic credentials to gain a foothold even in seemingly welcoming fields.
For the study, the researchers used two large, nationally representative datasets collected by the U.S. Department of Education to analyze patterns of high school performance and college major selection and persistence for straight cisgender men and women, and LGBTQ+ men and women. The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 provided demographic information, including sex and LGBTQ+ identity, as well as academic preparation, interests and outcomes for 6,340 students from their first year of high school in 2009–10 through their junior year of college.
The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2016 provided academic and demographic data for 12,950 students who obtained a bachelor's degree in 2016. "Across both datasets, we found evidence that when there was a representation gap that varied across the achievement distribution, that gap tended to be more in favor of the major's historically dominant demographic group among the students with lower pre-college grades and test scores—and less so at other points in the distribution," says lead author Joseph Cimpian, professor of economics and education policy at NYU Steinhardt and NYU Wagner. "Those gaps tend to narrow considerably among the students with the strongest pre-college performance, highlighting the importance of looking more closely at how these gaps differ by achievement level rather than just overall representation to better understand who is entering these different fields." The researchers suggest these more pronounced gaps among students with lower pre-college grades and test scores may be due to social norms and institutional environments that subtly favor a field's historically dominant demographic group.
Because the study is correlational, the authors are careful to note that it cannot establish that these norms directly cause these gaps—only that individual academic and demographic factors on their own do not fully account for the observed patterns. The study is among the first to use nationally representative data to examine how LGBTQ+ students sort across the full range of college majors, not just STEM. LGBTQ+ students—regardless of sex—were underrepresented in male-majority fields like engineering, computer science and business.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
