Abstract

This article examines how girls and boys choose their tertiary field of study and how the different factors driving their choices contribute to gender segregation in higher education (GSHE) in France. We present seven theoretical explanations for GSHE, review the relevant literature and discuss their applicability to the French context. Using rich longitudinal data combining administrative sources, students, parents and school head questionnaires, we assess the heuristic value of these explanations. We employ multinomial logit models as well as decomposition techniques for categorical outcome variables. Our results refute explanations arguing that GSHE reflects gender differences in skills or girls’ lower career ambitions. We conclude that curricular differentiation and occupational plans are key drivers of GSHE, even when controlling for ability selection into secondary curricula and for parental and teachers’ gender-stereotypical influences.

Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2021.1875199.

摘要

本文研究了男孩和女孩如何选择他们的高等教育领域，以及驱动他们选择的不同因素如何促进法国高等教育中的性别隔离。我们为GSHE提供了七个理论解释，回顾了相关文献并讨论了它们在法国环境中的适用性。我们使用丰富的纵向数据，结合行政资源，学生，家长和校长问卷，评估了这些解释的启发性价值。我们采用多项式logit模型以及分类结果变量的分解技术。我们的结果反驳了认为GSHE反映了技能上的性别差异或女孩的职业野心较低的解释。我们得出结论，课程差异化和职业计划是GSHE的关键驱动力，

本文的补充数据可从https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2021.1875199在线获得。