gender, social background, and the choice of college major in a liberal arts context

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GENDER, SOCIAL BACKGROUND, AND THE CHOICE OF COLLEGE MAJOR IN A

LIBERAL ARTS CONTEXT

ANN L. MULLENUniversity of Toronto, Canada

Enduring disparities in choice of college major constitute one of the most significant forms of gender inequality among undergraduate students. The existing literature gener-ally equates major choice with career choice and overlooks possible variation across student populations. This is a significant limitation because gender differences in major choice among liberal arts students, who attend college less for specific career training and more for broader learning objectives, are just as great as among those choosing pre-professional majors. This study addresses this gap by examining how privileged men and women at an elite, liberal arts university select their fields of study. Drawing on in-depth interviews, findings contradict the prevailing assumption of a unitary model of major choice as career choice by revealing a plurality of gendered meanings around choosing a field of study. Majors may play an important part in the construction of an intellectual identity as much as a means of career preparation. How students approach the choice relates to both gender and social background. For privileged students, traditional gen-dered associations with bodies of knowledge hold salience in their decision making as well as expectations of reproducing future elite family roles. This research also illumi-nates how gendered processes of choosing fields of study take place in relationship to particular institutional contexts.

Keywords: gender; higher education; college major; social class; college students

AUTHOR’S NOTE: I would like to thank Joya Misra and the three anonymous reviewers for their insightful and thorough comments, Hae Yeon Choo and Joseph Soares for timely assistance during the revision process, and Monica Boyd, Cynthia Cranford, Jane Gaskell, Anna Korteweg, and the members of the Sociology Gender Group at the University of Toronto for helpful comments on an early draft of this paper. This research was funded in part by the National Academy of Education and the National Academy of Education/Spencer Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Ann L. Mullen, University of Toronto, 725 Spadina Ave., Toronto, Ontario M5S 2J4, Canada; e-mail: [email protected].

GENDER & SOCIETY, Vol. 28 No. 2, April 2014 289-312DOI: 10.1177/0891243213512721© 2013 by The Author(s)

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290 GENDER & SOCIETY / April 2014

While women in the United States have been graduating from college at higher rates than men since 1982 and currently earn 57 percent

of all bachelor’s degrees, major fields of study remain sharply divided by gender. In 2011, women earned 85 percent of the degrees in nursing and health professions, 80 percent in education, and 77 percent in psychology, but only 30 percent in economics, 29 percent in philosophy, and 19 per-cent in physics and engineering (Snyder and Dillow 2012). Further, a trend toward the narrowing of the gender gap slowed dramatically in the mid-1980s (Jacobs 1995; Turner and Bowen 1999), and there has been little movement toward the gender integration of majors since then (England and Li 2006). These entrenched patterns cause concern because the gender segregation of fields of study contributes both to occupational segregation of men and women and to the gender gap in earnings (Bradley 2000; Shauman 2006).

In spite of these consequences, the topic of gender and choice of under-graduate field of study has received relatively little scholarly attention. Further, the existing literature has been dominated by quantitative studies that track aggregate levels of gender segregation over time and across countries, or use statistical analyses to predict students’ selection of par-ticular fields. These studies largely conceptualize the choice of major as an expression of early career preference based on the assumption that students select majors in order to prepare for their chosen careers. However, not all students attend university with the primary objective of career preparation. While students from lower socioeconomic origins do tend to perceive a college education chiefly as a route to improved employment opportunities, students from more affluent backgrounds are more likely to regard their undergraduate education not simply as a train-ing ground for jobs but as a time for learning and personal growth and to select liberal arts over applied fields of study (Beattie 2002; Christie and Munro 2003; Goyette and Mullen 2006; Mullen 2010; Pryor et al. 2011). The current theoretical models, premised on only one type of student, neither account for this variation nor adequately explain the choices of this latter group of students.

Further, limiting the conceptualization of major choice to career prefer-ences restricts our ability to understand gendered choices. Current expla-nations link gender differences in major choice to differences in occupational preferences and aspirations, expected labor market commit-ment, and gendered labor market opportunities (Davies and Guppy 1997; Eide and Waehrer 1998; Leppel, Williams, and Waldauer 2001; Ma 2009; Polachek 1978; Wilson and Boldizar 1990). But gender differences

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Mullen / CHOICE OF COLLEGE MAJOR 291

among liberal arts students are just as great as those among pre-profes-sional students, even though liberal arts students are ostensibly less likely to select a major for career preparation (Goyette and Mullen 2006). What, then, explains gender differences among liberal arts students?

This study explores this question and addresses the limitations in the conceptualization of major choice by drawing on in-depth, qualitative interviews to examine gender and the choice of major among undergradu-ate students at an elite, liberal arts university. This methodological approach, in contrast to quantitative studies of the correlates or outcomes of choice, allows for an analysis of the process of choosing majors and reveals how and why students select fields. The findings contradict the prevailing assumption of a unitary model of major choice as career choice by revealing a plurality of meanings around choosing a field of study. Selecting a major may play an important part in the construction of an intellectual identity as much as a means of career preparation. Many stu-dents choose majors for a combination of reasons, and some manage competing objectives in their choice of major. The degree to and manner in which students connect their college major to their future occupational plans vary, from explicit and direct connections, to less direct links, to a lack of consideration of possible careers to which a major might lead altogether. How students approach the choice of major relates to both gender and social background.

This research also illuminates how gendered processes of choosing fields of study take place in relationship to particular institutional con-texts. Current studies conceptualize major choice as a strictly individual decision and neglect the institutional contexts in which students make their choices. However, universities create frameworks for how students approach the choice of major by communicating a set of understandings about the aims of higher education and the place of the college major within those understandings. My findings suggest that these institutional contexts shape students’ decision making and may create opportunities for specific gendered processes to emerge.

GENDER, CLASS, AND MAJOR CHOICE

Over the past 30 years, scholars tracking the gender segregation of col-lege majors consistently find that about one-third of all men (or all women) would have to change majors in order for the distribution of men and women across all fields to be the same (England and Li 2006; Jacobs




1995, 1996). England and Li (2006) find that women more than men have contributed to changes in segregation through their decisions to enter male-dominated fields of study, while men have made few inroads into female-dominated fields. Further, when women do enter previously male-dominated fields, men begin to leave those fields, a finding they attribute to the cultural devaluation of the feminine.

In a second line of quantitative analysis, researchers have attempted to predict field of study through regressing major choice on gender and other independent variables, such as academic preparation, math skills, expecta-tions, aspirations, and attitudes. For these studies, major choice has gener-ally been characterized in one of three ways: as the choice of a math, science, or engineering (MSE) field (Leslie and Oaxaca 1997), the choice of a field with high income potential (Davies and Guppy 1997; Eide and Waehrer 1998; Ma 2009; Wilson and Boldizar 1990), or a choice among five or six broad groups of fields (Leppel, Williams, and Waldauer 2001; Turner and Bowen 1999). These studies consistently find that men are more likely than women to major in engineering, the physical sciences, and fields that lead to jobs with high incomes and prestige, and have suc-ceeded in isolating some of the student characteristics that influence field of study. For example, regarding math and science as useful and valuable predicts their selection (Leslie and Oaxaca 1997), while pre-collegiate academic achievement does little to explain gender differences in the choice of MSE fields (Turner and Bowen 1999) or of fields with high income potential (Davies and Guppy 1997).

In each case, major choice is conceptualized as an indicator of students’ career preference or left unspecified. Leppel, Williams, and Waldauer exemplify the former approach in their assertion that “educational choices and career choices are essentially linked. It is therefore appropriate to consider educational decisions as steps towards implementing career deci-sions” (Leppel, Williams, and Waldauer 2001, 373). However, because the survey data these studies draw on do not include questions about how or why students select fields, they are not able to verify the assumption that career considerations drive major choice. In addition, not all students select majors that provide specific career training. Currently, about 60 percent of students enter vocational or preprofessional majors, but 40 percent choose liberal arts fields (Brint et al. 2005), most of which have only indirect links, if any, to specific occupations. Further, qualitative and survey research finds that students’ motivations for attending college vary. Some students do perceive a college education primarily as career prepa-ration, but many students, particularly at more selective institutions, go to college not to receive training for a specific job but for broader learning




objectives (Christie and Munro 2003; Mullen 2010; Pryor et al. 2011). For example, when asked what reasons were very important in deciding to go to college, 82 percent of students in the least selective public universities listed getting training for a specific career (Pryor et al. 2011). At the most selective, private, nonsectarian colleges, however, only 52 percent listed this as a very important reason. These students were far more likely to list learning more about things that interest them (89 percent), gaining a gen-eral education and appreciation of ideas (83 percent), and becoming a more cultured person (66 percent).

These findings call into question the assumption that all students equate major choice with career choice and point to variation related to social class background. Students from higher socioeconomic backgrounds are more likely to study liberal arts and sciences and to attend selective insti-tutions where learning goals outweigh immediate career goals (Astin and Oseguera 2004; Goyette and Mullen 2006; Pryor et al. 2011). Thus, the current conceptualization of major choice may be appropriate for those students attending college primarily to prepare for a specific career but may be less suitable for their privileged peers attending university for a broader set of reasons. Because of the paucity of research on the actual process of selecting majors, it is not known on what basis these latter students choose majors. Consequently, the current models impede our ability to understand the gendered choices among this segment of the student population. This is a significant limitation because gender differ-ences at selective institutions and across liberal arts majors are just as strong as at relatively unselective institutions and across vocational fields of study (Goyette and Mullen 2006; Mullen and Baker, forthcoming).

Not only does the existing literature assume a unitary model of voca-tionalistic choosing, it also conceives of choice as an individual decision and has neglected to take into account the specific institutional contexts in which gendered choices occur. To be sure, researchers have examined how particular features of institutions may encourage women to choose less gender-typical major fields of study or to enter or remain in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. For example, stud-ies have examined major choices between co-ed and all-women’s colleges (Solnick 1995), the impact of programs designed to encourage women to go into science (Atkin, Green, and McLaughlin 2002), and the influence of the gender composition of faculty (Robst, Keil, and Russo 1998). While these studies find correlations between particular institutional fea-tures and women’s choice of majors, they do not consider the influence of the broad institutional context on the choice process.




By institutional context, I mean both the type of curriculum the institu-tion offers and the shared cultural meanings or understandings, promoted and adopted by the institution itself and its students, that together circum-scribe and influence the choice process. A student’s range of choices will necessarily be constrained by the kinds of fields an institution offers. Further, an institution’s prioritization of liberal arts versus pre-profes-sional fields reflects its understanding of the purpose of higher education. Liberal arts institutions advocate an undergraduate education for the pur-pose of broad intellectual growth rather than as specific career training. Institutions offering primarily pre-professional education, on the other hand, emphasize providing students with the knowledge and skills required for entry into particular occupations. The degree to which a uni-versity prioritizes and promotes learning for the sake of knowledge versus learning for career preparation will shape to some extent the way its stu-dents approach their major choices. Further, as gendered organizations, we would expect universities to have meanings patterned around gender (Acker 1990), creating different institutional contexts in which processes and outcomes of gendered choosing occur.

Barbara Bank (2003) argues that college culture reflects a set of tensions and contradictions that characterize higher education for women. Both gen-der traditional and emancipatory themes were institutionalized in the col-lege she studied. She found that liberal arts and careerist visions for education both promote elements of gender traditionalism and consequently carry different implications for men and women. While students enter col-lege with their own goals and views for their education, the institution also shapes them. Bank contends that the college climate may influence men and women to change majors prior to graduation by framing the under-standing of major choices and making some choices more or less supported.

Historically, the liberal arts, with its emphasis on character develop-ment, meant preparation for careers and the public life of a citizen for men, while for women, it entailed training to be school teachers and then later “polished and intelligent” companions to their husbands (Bank 2003, 62). Besides these gender differences in the intention of liberal arts educa-tion, academic fields themselves are gendered. As branches of knowledge, liberal arts fields can be characterized by their degrees of objectivity and subjectivity, difficulty and ease, which are in turn associated with mascu-linity and femininity (Harding 1986; Keller 1995). Math and science fields, for example, are regarded as more objective than the arts, and their high status depends on the association with masculinity and with the related values of objectivity and impersonality. Conversely, the arts are perceived to be related to a lack of rigor, effeminacy, and unimportance.




For example, English is associated with the qualities of emotional response and subjectivity, both regarded as feminine (Thomas 1990). Within this set of distinctions, fields traditionally dominated by women have the lowest status. In her study on English and physics students, Thomas (1990) finds that the perceived qualities of fields, shaped by notions of masculinity and femininity, influence students’ choice of sub-ject, and that students form gendered identifications with their field of study. These bodies of research suggest that institutional contexts will be gendered in different ways and will shape the gendered dynamics of the major choice process. By considering students’ choices independently of the institutional contexts in which they take place, the existing research overemphasizes the individuality of choice.

To address these limitations in the existing literature and extend our understanding of gender and choice of college major, this study addresses four questions. First, how do liberal arts students from privileged social backgrounds choose majors, and what is the degree and variation with which students regard major choice as a preference for learning a body of knowledge versus the selection of a career direction? Second, what explains gender differences in choice of major? Third, do explanations for gender differences work the same across students of different social class backgrounds? Finally, this study considers the salience of a particular institutional context—how does it frame or shape students’ choices and the meanings through which they understand and define those choices? To answer these questions, this research looks closely at how students describe the process of selecting a field, what the choice of a field means to them, and on what bases they may consider and then reject or commit to a particular field.

METHODS

The data for this study come from fifty in-depth, semi-structured inter-views conducted with a random sample of junior and senior college stu-dents attending a private, highly selective liberal arts university, which I will call “Ivy University.” The sample was drawn, using a random num-bers table, from a list provided by the university. Sixty-two students were contacted, with a response rate of 81 percent. The interviews (conducted as part of a larger study) took a comprehensive history of each student’s schooling from high school through college. A written survey instrument was employed to collect demographic and family background information. A particular focus of the interview was choice of major. Students were




asked to tell the whole story of how they had come to select their field of study, including fields they had originally considered and later rejected, the range of factors linked to their final choice of major, their current views on the decision, and what they most liked and disliked in their field. All inter-views were taped and transcribed verbatim. In addition to multiple read-ings of the transcribed interviews, the data were also analyzed, using the software program NVivo. Adopting methods outlined by Strauss (1987), the author and two research assistants coded the interview data by section, with new codes allowed to emerge throughout the data analysis. In order to ensure and verify interrater reliability, the three coders met regularly to discuss emerging codes, finalize coding schemes, and simultaneously code the same sections and compare the results.

The students at Ivy University largely come from exceptionally privi-leged social backgrounds. More than half the students in the sample reported annual family incomes in excess of $135,000, placing them in the top 15 percent of the income scale (see Table 1). Nearly 80 percent have parents with at least a bachelor’s degree and two-thirds have parents with some form of graduate education. Almost half listed their parents’ occupa-tion as doctor, lawyer, scientist, or professor. However, there is some social class diversity; 21 percent of the students in the sample would be the first in their family to graduate from college. In terms of race and ethnicity, 68 percent of the students in the sample were white, 14 percent black, 10 percent Asian, and 8 percent Hispanic. Not surprisingly, the low-income and first-generation students were the most racially and ethnically

TABLE 1: Sample Students’ Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Social Background, by Number of Students and Percentages (in Parentheses)

Gender Men 25 (50%) Women 25 (50%)Race and ethnicity Asian 5 (10%) Black 7 (14%) Hispanic 4 (8%) White 34 (68%)Parents’ highest level of education Less than a bachelor’s degree 10 (21%) Bachelor’s degree 5 (11%) Graduate degree 32 (68%)Annual family income Less than $54,000 6 (15%) $54,000 to $134,999 13 (33%) $135,000 or higher 21 (53%)

Note: N = 50; 3 missing cases for parents’ education, 10 missing cases for family income.




diverse, while the most privileged students came from predominantly white families. Of the students from families in the highest income and education groups, 81 and 84 percent, respectively, were white.

Although almost all of the students major in the liberal arts, there are strong gender divisions across these fields. In the social sciences, women tend to select psychology, sociology, and anthropology, while men prefer economics and political science. In the humanities, men concentrate in philosophy and history, while women more often opt for English, religion, area studies, and visual and performing arts. And in the sciences, women prefer biology, while men enter the physical sciences, math, computer science, and engineering.1 The interviews revealed two influences on these gendered choices. The first has to do with the salience of gendered associations with bodies of knowledge in the context of choosing fields of study as part of the construction of an intellectual identity. Second, expec-tations of future elite family roles also work to shape gendered choices. Analyses focus primarily on the choices of the affluent, largely white students in my sample, using comparisons with the small group of stu-dents from lower socioeconomic backgrounds to shed light on the par-ticularity of the privileged students.

GENDERED PROCESSES OF CHOOSING MAJORS IN A LIBERAL ARTS CONTEXT

In terms of the way the institutional context mediates students’ choices, a crucial characteristic of Ivy University is that it offers a single applied field, engineering, which accounts for less than 2 percent of all degrees awarded. Consequently, 98 percent of all students necessarily select a major in the liberal arts and sciences, compared to only about 40 percent nationwide (Brint et al. 2005). Moreover, Ivy University has a long tradi-tion of explicitly advocating a liberal arts education, conveyed in a range of university reports, promotional materials, and student handbooks. In these documents, the university consistently rejects the notion of providing specific career training and instead embraces and celebrates the idea of education as a means for cultivating the mind and providing broad intel-lectual training. For example, the course catalog advises students that the education offered by the university is not intended to train students in the “particulars” of a specific career but, rather, to broadly develop students’ intellects without specifying in advance how those abilities will be utilized. A second intention of the liberal arts education is an emphasis on the devel-opment of the whole person, in terms of character, qualities of mind, and moral capacity. The university, by not offering degrees in pre-professional




fields and by endorsing liberal arts ideals of education, encourages students to consider majors not solely as career lines but as bodies of knowledge, and to regard the acquisition of knowledge and new ways of thinking as one component of their personal development during college.2 In so doing, a context is created for gendered processes to occur in the selection among types of knowledge as they contribute toward self-development.

The educational positioning of the study participants within this par-ticular institutional context primed them to be sensitive to the gendering of bodies of knowledge. In line with the mission of the university, Ivy students, particularly those from privileged backgrounds, came to college in order to effect a change on the self, premised on a liberal arts under-standing of the value of higher education. By and large, these students approached college as an “experience” intended to enhance their own self-development through a broad range of social and extracurricular activities alongside their formal course work. The students endeavored to build personal qualities, such as maturity and confidence, and relational qualities, such as the ability to understand and communicate with others. They expected that what they learned—in the classroom and through their friendships, social events, and other activities—would contribute not just to what they knew but to who they were, as well as to their “intel-lectual maturity,” as they sometimes referred to it. They believed that a successful college experience culminates in all-embracing growth and change. As one man stated, “You know, I’ve learned a lot academically, but I’ve just . . . I was a very different person when I came here three and a half years ago. I mean, I think I’ve matured a lot, just socially as well as intellectually” (R42, math major) (Table 2).3

While many components of the “college experience” contributed to students’ planned transformation, one central aspect was the acquisition of particular types of knowledge. In line with the liberal arts ideal, students typically discussed major fields of study as bodies of knowledge rather than as career preparation. In choosing fields of study, students identified with their qualities of knowledge, taking their acquisition as components of their own identity. For example, one woman explained how she switched out of engineering because it would not make her into the “type of person” she wanted to be:

I didn’t feel that I got as much out of it [engineering], out of the study in itself. I felt that I would be a wonderfully practical, competent person after it, but I just didn’t feel that the curriculum would make me into the type of person that I wanted to be eventually. (R15, religious studies major)




TABLE 2: Gender, Race, Ethnicity, and Social Background of Quoted Respondents

Respondent No. Gender

Race and Ethnicity

Parents’ Highest Level of Education

Annual Family Income

R7 Woman Hispanic Some college n/aR8 Woman White n/a n/aR11 Man White Graduate degree $135,000 or aboveR12 Woman White Bachelor’s degree $54,000 to $134,999R15 Woman White Graduate degree $54,000 to $134,999R16 Man White Graduate degree $135,000 or aboveR17 Man White Graduate degree $54,000 to $134,999R21 Man White Graduate degree $135,000 or aboveR24 Woman Black Some college $54,000 to $134,999R27 Man White High school $135,000 or aboveR31 Man White Graduate degree n/aR34 Woman Hispanic High school Less than $54,000R36 Man Black Graduate degree $135,000 or aboveR37 Man Asian Bachelor’s degree $135,000 or aboveR38 Woman Black High school n/aR42 Man White Graduate degree $135,000 or aboveR44 Woman Asian Bachelor’s degree $54,000 to $134,999R46 Man White Graduate degree $135,000 or aboveR49 Man White Graduate degree n/a

In the following passage, a male student casts his choice of major partly as the selection of an “intellectual identity.” He recounts how his friend commented that he seems “like” a literature or philosophy major but not “like” an anthropology major, underscoring how students drew connec-tions between their identities and the qualities of a particular field of study:

[My friend] said to me one day—you know, we were sitting talking about some Hegel or something like that—she said, “You don’t seem like an anthro major, you seem like a lit major or a philosophy major.” And I thought about it and I thought maybe she was right. But it was also partially a social choice, [about] what intellectual identity I wanted at the time. (R17, comparative literature major)

These comments show how students connected the kinds of knowledge they were acquiring to the kinds of people they hoped to become. For these stu-dents, their chosen field of study became part of their intellectual identity—a part of who they were, not just what they knew or what they could do.

Within this framework of major choice as an important step in the creation of an intellectual identity, two types of gendered dynamics were evident. First, the students drew distinctions among the intrinsic qualities




of knowledge associated with major fields, using criteria such as rigor, objectivity, explanatory value, theoretical depth, and centrality to funda-mental or essential truths. The most common negative assessment of knowledge centered on fields’ subjectivity or lack of rigor, qualities shown in prior literature to be associated with femininity (Bourdieu 2001; Thomas 1990), and students levied these critiques primarily at fields dis-proportionately selected by women (at both Ivy University and nation-wide), such as art history, anthropology, and English. Second, while men and women were about equally likely to put forth evaluations of the knowledge associated with major fields of study, women more often spoke about why they chose a field on the basis of its qualities of knowl-edge, while men more frequently rejected fields of study because of their supposed inferior qualities.

In several cases, men described considering but then dismissing female-dominated fields on the basis of those fields’ perceived subjectiv-ity or lack of rigor. One student recounted, “Art history I loved. It was just too flaky, though. It was so much fun, but I couldn’t face myself in the mirror. I had friends who were art history majors, and I was just, like, ‘No, I need something more challenging than that’” (R46, history major). This student related his love for art history, but his critical appraisal of the field led him to decide against it. His use of the powerful image of not being able to “face himself in the mirror” suggests how studying art history would not only diminish his own value but cause him to feel shame. This image illustrates how the nature of academic disciplines becomes intrinsi-cally associated with those who study them, and points to how men may perceive themselves as devalued or even stigmatized by selecting femi-nine-typed fields of study. This pattern is in line with the devaluation of the feminine perspective, in which men face a stronger stigma for entering devalued spheres of things associated with women or femininity (England and Li 2006).

In sum, because these students studied in a liberal arts context that involved an emphasis on the enrichment of the whole person (as opposed to acquiring career training), along with the development of intellectual capacities, choosing majors became part of defining one’s identity. For these reasons, though these data do not allow for an assessment of the strength of this effect, gendered associations with bodies of knowledge held salience in these students’ decision making, often resulting in men rejecting female-dominated fields because of their perceived subjectivity or lack of rigor.

These dynamics did not influence all students at Ivy University. Even in this one institution, students varied in the degree to which they aligned




themselves with the liberal arts ideal. Indeed, about a third of the students (mostly lower-SES or first-generation students) chose majors almost entirely for career-related reasons and did not make either evaluations or identifications with bodies of knowledge. Rather than perceiving majors as academic disciplines, these students regarded majors as pathways to occupations, and consequently chose fields not because of what they wanted to study but as a way to attain their career goals. As two first-generation students explained

I kind of feel that I have to do something that has, for me . . . I have to do something that’s either kind of a set, not necessarily a profession, but some-thing that’s kind of set, you know? Coming into college, I was saying, “Well, what do I want to be? Do I want to be a doctor or a lawyer?” (R27, male, political science major)

Like, I would never have done, like, art history or, like, French, or just something like that that you never know, or either that you know you’re not gonna make a lot of money in it no matter what, or it’s very unclear what job you can get after it. (R34, female, economics and international studies major)

While the emphasis on careers provided these students some immunity from the influence of gendered associations with bodies of knowledge, it is possible that the gendered occupational structure and gender-typed notions of appropriate work guided their choices. In addition to these lower-SES students, there were also several pre-med students (from all SES backgrounds) who came to college with the goal of becoming a phy-sician. Finally, some of the student athletes, who planned on becoming professional athletes, chose majors based on perceived ease.

REPRODUCING ELITE FAMILIES

A second contributing influence on gender differences in major choice came from the anticipated future family roles specific to the elite positions most of these students expected to occupy. Women, much more so than men, chose majors primarily on the basis of their academic interests, giv-ing little thought to future career opportunities. In recounting their choices, the women focused almost exclusively on their enjoyment of a field. As one woman put it, “If I’m gonna major in something, I’m gonna major in something that I’m gonna enjoy taking” (R44, psychology major). The women often spoke about their deep interest or even passion




for their fields. In a typical response, one woman explained choosing to major in religious studies because “I’ve always been drawn to other cul-tures. . . . I’ve always liked folklore. And I love the classes, I really love the classes, I love the reading” (R15, religious studies major).

When describing their plans for the future, the women (with the excep-tion of those entering medicine) generally had only very loosely defined ideas about the kinds of work they saw themselves doing. The only points of consistency across their accounts were their desires to find fulfilling work that connected in some way to their major field of study. For exam-ple, two women described their plans like this:

I’m not really one of these people who wants to be rich, or famous, or any-thing. If it happens, that’s fine, but I want to find something that I’m happy doing . . . someday I want to be in a place where I want to do something that I’m happy and fulfilled doing. I’ve pursued, like I said, history and American studies because I’ve always loved it, and if I end up teaching it, if I end up using it in any way, that will be a positive. (R38, American stud-ies major)

All I kind of think of is that it would be some combination of being with kids somehow and probably painting. So maybe painting kids . . . no, I would rather do something with kids than paint them, but it would involve painting somehow, and kids, and philosophy somehow, if that were possi-ble. (R8, philosophy major)

These women largely built their ideas about future careers on a con-tinuation of their academic interests, rather than on concerns about job availability or salary. Indeed, for about two thirds, considerations of salary were rarely even a factor, much less a priority, in their decisions:

I’ve never wanted to be rich, I just want to work hard and earn what I have. That’s always been my goal. So if that’s $40,000 a year, if it’s $50,000, if it’s $200,000, I mean, I don’t care, but I want to be happy with what I’m doing. (R38, American studies major)

Well, as long as I make enough to live on then I’m okay. I mean, I don’t see success in terms of how much money a person makes. . . . I mean, as long as I’m happy in my job, that’s really important, so that’s, yeah, being happy is more important than the amount of salary. (R12, archaeology major)

Echoing many other accounts, these women emphasized the importance of being happy with the kind of work they would be doing over the salary.

In spite of their lack of concern about the financial rewards of their future work, almost all the women planned to have children, and most




planned on taking a few years off to raise them. Few women expressed concerns about the financial feasibility of this plan, or about how it might conflict with their vision of working for self-fulfillment with little regard for earnings. Instead, underlying these imagined plans was the assumption of a financially successful husband prepared to support the woman and her future children, as typified in the following exchange:

Money to me is not that important. I mean, enough for me to be able to feed myself, I guess. I’m much more interested in being happy with what I’m doing than how much money I’m making.

Have you given any thought to having a family down the line?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that’s, like, something that I haven’t really thought about that much. But, I would love to have kids.

Have you thought about the money you’ll need to raise a family?

Yeah, but I don’t know, I think that hopefully I’ll be married, and he’ll be making some money, too, and together we’ll be able to raise a family. (R7, political science major)

Only a few women differed from these general tendencies, and almost all of them came from lower-SES backgrounds. These women did prior-itize both salary and self-sufficiency and tended to discuss the importance of salary in the context of the financial struggles they experienced in their own families:

I would not take a low-paying job, in no way, shape or form. . . . I would never, like, teach and, like, make $16,000, like, that would not be an alter-native. (R34, economics and international studies major)

I’d say on a scale of 1 to 10, salary would be about a good 9, maybe, and it’s not just that I want to be this rich famous doctor, it’s that I really want to be able to financially take care of my kids, of my children, and granted, my husband I want to be up there also, but in the event that something ever happened to him, or . . . I want to be able to not have a lot of the financial concerns that I had to have growing up, so it is important. (R24, anthropol-ogy and pre-med major)

While the privileged Ivy women’s male counterparts shared their levels of intellectual engagement, when it came to choosing majors men tended to be pulled away from their interests by two considerations not shared with women. First, some men concerned themselves with status within the




university in terms of professors and departments, and in their future lines of work. These men were alert to the renown of their professors, often remarking on their public achievements and stature. They also revealed an awareness of the status of different academic departments (as distinct from disciplines), sometimes citing these as factors influencing their choice of major. In a few cases, a strong department reputation made stu-dents more likely to consider a major; more often, the standing of a department discouraged them. Two different men elected not to major in philosophy, regarded as a weak department within the university, because of its low stature. As one explained, “I love philosophy, and I [thought] philosophy would be a great major, but it’s such a bad department, [and] I need a major that’s impressive” (R16, Chinese and political science major).

The men’s concern with the status of academic departments also car-ried over into their ideas about the kinds of work they considered doing in the future, supporting the findings from earlier research. While many men, like the women, were still unclear about the specifics of their careers, unlike most women their future plans often included quests for positions of status and power:

As far as ten years, well, I’d like to see myself financially sound, and able to take exotic trips. I see myself very successful, regardless of where I am, and I see myself in a position of leadership . . . I really . . . I always see myself as making a huge impact somehow on this planet. (R36, economics major)

And so poli-sci. [political science] seemed like a very nice go-between because there’s a lot of respect for being a politician. Like if you have aspi-rations for being, like, a president or an ambassador, then that’s the right thing to be in. (R16, Chinese and political science major)

In addition to their concerns about status, most of the men also experi-enced an onus to find the kinds of jobs that would allow them to re-create the wealthy lives of their childhoods. In contrast to the privileged wom-en’s nonchalance about their future economic prospects, the men gener-ally distinguished the importance of income in two separate periods in their lives. Money would not matter while they were single, but it would certainly matter in the future, once they married and had a family. At that point, they anticipated shouldering the financial burden of their future families and wanted to provide the same kinds of material advantages, opportunities, and experiences they themselves had had:




I don’t think about money now, to be honest with you. But I think if I have a family, and I want to take them skiing, and I want them to have a nice life . . . I want them to be able to do some of the things that I did. You need money to be able to do that. If you want to show them some sort of cultural experience, you need money. That’s important. So, while I’m single and independent, I don’t think it’s much of an issue, but when you have a rela-tionship and a family it’s a much different incentive. (R31, economics and pre-med major)

Prominent among their imagined economic responsibilities were their children’s educational expenses. They wanted to give their chil-dren the same kinds of education they had had, at private schools and top universities:

I’m hoping I have a family, and yeah, you have to pay for college. And that’s what I mean, you know, I wouldn’t want my children to have less than I had. (R11, comparative literature and international studies major)

I mean, I figure that when I’m young, it’s less important that I make money and it’s more important that I have fun and enjoy myself . . . but on the other hand, once I get older, I’ll want to have enough money to send my kids to private school and to put them through college without any debts or any-thing. (R49, economics major)

These men’s expectations for the future lives they planned to create clearly had their roots in their own privileged family backgrounds. Several men explicitly referenced their own childhoods as the standard guiding their plans:

I’ve grown up pretty wealthy and it would . . . I think it would be a shame if my standard of living were lower than I’d grown up with.

A shame in that . . . ?

Well, I mean, I guess from one point of view it’s some sort of regression . . . I guess the other thing is that I may, later in life, if I’m married with kids, maybe want a more steady, you know, suburban, like, wealthy life. (R21, humanities major)

I’ve grown up with a pretty decent life, like my dad is a very successful corporate lawyer. He doesn’t pull in bazillions, but he pulls in enough that all of our needs are taken care of and that we don’t have to make major sacrifices for me to go to school . . . I went to public school through sixth




grade, but after that I went to a private school and my parents are able to handle that and law school and it’s pretty much all okay. That’s something that I’d like to be able to provide for a kid. And that’s my most major con-sideration in terms of salary. (R46, history major)

The gender differences in regard to these expectations were profound. While not one of the most privileged women noted supporting their future families, two-thirds of the men did. Only two men claimed that money was not important, and three said that it wasn’t a priority, but then explained that was because the kinds of jobs they hoped to attain were high paying anyway. Only one man mentioned the possibility that his wife might earn as much or more than he did and that, if she did, it would free him to pursue other career options. There was less variation by social background among the men, with the lower-SES men in my sample also anticipating filling the primary breadwinner role in their future families. The differences came in the scale of their aspirations. Rather than re-cre-ating an elite family status, the less privileged men sought to arrive at a point of freedom from the financial struggles they had experienced in their own childhoods.

The imperative felt by men to find high-status and lucrative work com-plicated their career considerations and sometimes created discontinuities between their intellectual interests, their choice of a major, and their plans for the future. Instead of simply following their passions, as most women did, men confronted the challenge of finding meaningful and profitable work, described by one as the “trick” of finding “something you love where you make a lot of money” (R37, political science major). As another lamented, “I’m sure there are things that I could do that would be both financially and intellectually rewarding, but I don’t know what they are. If I knew that, I’d have a much easier time of it” (R11, comparative literature and international studies major). Again, for many of these men, their expectations stemmed from a “certain standard” of living they expe-rienced in their own families. As the comparative literature/international studies major above reflected:

Part of my problem is that, the family that I grew up in, I’ve been kind of a little bit spoiled. I went to boarding school, and my life has never been that hard, but I kind of have been used to living at a certain standard and you don’t want to, or at least I don’t really want to, abandon that. Which definitely pushes me towards something that I can make money doing. But at the same time, I don’t really find a lot of that work kind of gratifying or satisfying. (R11)




Some men avoided this conflict by choosing not to major in their true areas of intellectual interest, but bypassing them at an early stage for majors they perceived as more clearly linked to lucrative career paths. Other men did select majors based solely on their interests, but then turned away from them when considering future careers. For example, one student described with enthusiasm his love for history, the wonderful seminars he had, and the absorbing reading he’d done. He then related his plan to enter law school instead of pursuing history, a decision that made sense in the context of the economic pressures he felt (R46, history major).

In sum, men and women differed little in terms of their levels of intel-lectual engagement with their studies. Differences emerged, however, in the extent to which students felt free to plan careers, however vague, around those interests. Women, particularly the most privileged women, tended to choose fields and then imagine future careers based on their academic interests. Many men also hoped to find meaningful, gratifying work, but were often drawn away from their intellectual interests either at the point of selecting a major or of entering a career or graduate program because of their need to start on a pathway toward a profitable career. Their expectation of assuming economic responsibility for their future families meant that they did not experience the same liberty as women, confronting instead the task of reproducing their elite family status.

CONCLUSION

This research illuminates how gendered processes of choosing fields of study take place in relationship to particular institutional contexts. In this case, the institution’s liberal arts focus encourages students to view their education as a means toward self-development and the choice of a major becomes, in part, the choice of an intellectual identity. Within this frame-work, privileged women pursue their intellectual passions while men tend to construct their identities in opposition to femininity, avoiding those fields traditionally associated with feminine qualities even when they might find them intrinsically interesting (Connell 1987).

At another level, this elite institution serves as an arena for the repro-duction of class dynamics (Bourdieu and Passeron 1977). Bringing with them expectations based on their own childhood experiences, privileged men view their education as a means to re-create their families’ affluent class status and begin to gravitate toward lucrative fields (even those less




appealing to them) in anticipation of taking on the responsibility for sup-porting their future families. In aligning their choices with these mascu-line, heterosexual ideals, men manage a more complex set of considerations and a more constrained range of options than do most women, often experiencing tensions between what they would like to study and what they feel they need to study. (This is not to negate the complex identity issues women may encounter when choosing to enter male-dominated fields [Ong 2005].) The kinds of gendered choosing that emerge here are made possible by this specific institutional context, including the range of majors offered, the emphasis on the liberal arts ideal, and the longstand-ing, elite status of the university.

Even within this one institution, however, there is variation by students’ social background. The small number of lower-SES students seemed impervious to the influence of traditionally gendered associations with fields of study because they did not view majors in the same way as their upper-class peers. Rather than choosing intellectual identities, they were choosing future lines of work and focused on the goal of finding a secure job, suggesting that the institutional culture does not influence all students in the same ways. These results also suggest that family social background may have asymmetrical effects on men and women, particularly in the ways that students define their choice of college major (Ma 2009). Upper-class men, for example, share with upper-class women an interest in the intellectual content of a college major; they differ in that they share with lower-SES men and women a concern for the career options associated with their degrees. In this study, only the most privileged women chose majors without practical concerns. Low-SES women’s approaches to choosing majors more closely resemble those of low-SES men than those of high-SES women.

The findings from this study provide a window into the complexity of the major choice process and show how that choice means different things to different kinds of students. Students may perceive college majors as primarily intellectual choices, career choices, or a balance of the two. In regards to intellectual choices, students may further prioritize among sev-eral objectives, including crafting a particular kind of intellectual identity or doing that in relation to high-status academic departments or forms of knowledge. In terms of career choices, students may prioritize having certainty about the kind of work a major will lead to, needing to secure lucrative, high-status work, or finding enjoyable and satisfying work. How a student ranks each of these alternatives relates to both gender and




social background. Finally, many students strive to reconcile multiple, competing, and even contradictory influences on their choices.

This research demonstrates the importance of taking into account the institutional context and the collective meanings around choice of major and suggests how the gendering of the college major selection process may happen differently across institutions. An important direction for future research will be to more carefully examine major choice within varied types of institutions, including institutions offering primarily pre-professional fields, two-year institutions, all women’s colleges, and insti-tutions with a primary focus on science and engineering. While this study focused on curricular offerings and the educational philosophy of the institution, it is possible that other institutional characteristics (e.g., the presence of fraternities and sororities, the focus on male-dominated organized athletics) may also contribute to specific college cultures in ways that shape the choice of field of study. The findings in this article suggest that much can be gained by considering universities as gendered organizations. As Acker argues (1990), organizations are not gender neu-tral, but are inherently gendered in a number of ways, such as in their divisions and the symbols and images of those divisions. We might better understand the gendered associations around fields of study by following Acker’s call for paying particular attention to the practices through which advantage and disadvantage are patterned in terms of a distinction between male and female, masculine and feminine. Relatedly, these find-ings illuminate the insights of Ridgeway (2009), who asserts that the background effects of the gender frame vary by the contexts of different organizational and institutional structures, and that these need to be taken into account in order to understand the shape that the structure of gender inequality and gender difference takes in particular institutional contexts. A fruitful avenue for future research will be to identify the institutional contexts in which the gender frame holds greater salience.

By increasing our understanding of the choice process at different kinds of institutions, the institutional features that relate to students’ understanding of major choice, and the degree of independent social back-ground effects, faculty and administrators will be better able to tailor policies supporting the gender integration of fields of study. Successfully increasing integration would result in lower levels of occupational segre-gation and gender disparities in earnings, as well as decreasing the loss to the broader society of the talents of students whose choices are con-strained by their gender and social class background.




NOTES

1. Based on author’s analysis of Ivy University institutional data.2. This influence is further intensified because most of these students plan to

follow their bachelor’s studies with a graduate degree, allowing them to postpone more applied career training.

3. Each respondent quoted in this paper is assigned an identification number. Gender, race, ethnicity, and social background information can be found for respondents in Table 2.

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Ann L. Mullen is an Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Toronto, Scarborough. Her work examines social inequality and higher education. She is the author of Degrees of Inequality: Culture, Class and Gender in American Higher Education.



gender, social background, and the choice of college major in a liberal arts context

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