Desegregation Stalled:
The Changing Sex Composition of College Majors, 1971-1998
Since 1970, the employment rates and career orientation of women who get college
degrees has increased dramatically. In the 1960s and before, women getting a college degree
often saw their choices as confined to a few traditionally female fields such as nursing, teaching,
social work, and librarianship. Early work by Jacobs on the 1970s and 1980s shows that the sex
segregation of college majors decreased during this period. In this paper, we use more detailed
categories (over 200) than used by Jacobs, and extend the analysis as far up to the present as the
data allow. (Note to organizer: Our current data base goes to 1998, but we hope to add the few
additional years for which the data are now available to our analyses before the ASA meetings.)
We consider trends in segregation using three distinct measures, since there have been debates
about the adequacy of the index of dissimilarity, its size-standardized counterpart, and a new log-
linear-based association index proposed by Charles and Grusky. They tell a common story that
segregation has declined steadily, but much faster in the first half than the second half of the
period. We then do detailed examination of trend lines for specific fields, and regression analyses
to probe several hypotheses about what is driving the changes. In particular we are interested in
how much integration is proceeding from women entering traditionally male fields versus men
entering traditionally female fields. We are also interested in whether some fields are “tipping”—
starting to increase their % female and then losing popularity with men increasingly until they
stabilize at mostly female. If so, this could explain the decline in desegregation. The alternate
possibility is that desegregation stalls because the rate at which women are entering traditionally
male fields stalls. This is more what we find.
PAST RESEARCH ON GENDER SEGREGATION OF ACADEMIC FIELDS
Men used to receive a preponderance of bachelor’s, master’s, professional, and doctoral
degrees in the U.S. But, women have increased their representation. In 2001, 57% of Bachelor’s
Convention