Exploring Different Patterns of Gender Ideology across College Majors

ABSTRACT Research shows that college education and college major are related to attitudes about gender. However, little research has focused on within-major gender differences, and studies that do frequently rely on small, college-specific samples. Larger, national datasets frequently do not include information on college major and are often cross-sectional, making it difficult to account for selection processes. Using the General Social Survey and several advanced statistical analyses that partially address selection effects, we ask: “Do patterns of gender ideology vary among those who have completed different college majors?” We find that men with degrees in education are more egalitarian than other men, while women with degrees in primarily male-dominated fields like mathematics and engineering have more egalitarian views than other women. Conditioning on college major selection, we find that women with degrees in professional areas, health, humanities, and technology, engineering, and mathematics (TEM) fields are more egalitarian than men with the same degree, while men with degrees in education have more egalitarian gender ideologies than women with the same degree.