Gender Stereotypes, Gendered Self-Expression, and Gender Segregation in Fields of Study: A Q&A with Professor Maria Charles
The observation that patterns of occupational and gender segregation do not easily map onto other common gender equality measures is nothing new to gender scholars. In fact, there is a wealth of research on the subject, including on the specific topic of gender segregation in STEM fields in higher education.
To help situate Stoet and Geary’s “Gender Equality Paradox in STEM” in this wider field of inquiry, we called on Professor Maria Charles, Professor of Sociology, Director of the Broom Center for Demography, and Feminist Studies affiliate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Professor Charles’ 2009 article, “Indulging our Gendered Selves? Sex Segregation by Field of Study in 44 Countries” (coauthored with Karen Bradley) presents a powerful analysis of the question of why postindustrial countries have greater segregation in STEM fields.
Professor Charles generously agreed to answer 10 questions posed by the GenderSci Lab, drawing on her broad expertise on the persistence of gender inequalities in gender-progressive societies and global variation in gender equality.
1. GSL: Thanks for taking the time to chat with the GenderSci Lab. You’re an expert on gender segregation in higher education, with a more recent focus on the STEM fields. How did you become interested in this, and what methods do you use in your research?
After completing my undergraduate studies, I had the opportunity to live and work in Europe. I noticed that understandings of women’s work and family roles differed a great deal across European countries that Americans regard as relatively similar. This variability seemed important because it challenges beliefs about the naturalness of social structures and practices that we often take for granted. By the time I enrolled in Stanford’s Sociology PhD program, it was pretty clear to me that my research would explore differences in the gender structure across time and space. Once I dug into the available cross-national data on occupational distributions, I found that patterns were not what we would expect based on typical depictions of more and less “modern” societies. For example, my dissertation and subsequent article in the American Sociological Review (1992) showed that some forms of occupational gender segregation were considerably stronger in Sweden than in Italy and Japan, which are regarded as much more gender-traditional. My research involves historical and cross-country comparisons using individual survey data and various global statistical sources.
2. GSL: Briefly, in what ways are higher education fields sex-segregated today?
This depends on the country. In rich, postindustrial societies, women are strongly underrepresented in some scientific and technical fields, especially in engineering, computer programming, and other physical sciences, and they are overrepresented in the social sciences and education. In the United States, some fields, including computer science, have become increasingly gender segregated in recent decades – despite women’s growing share of college degrees.
3. GSL: How do these patterns of segregation vary over time and across nations and cultures?
The gender composition of occupations varies a lot historically and cross-nationally. For example, computer programming and quantitative social science have transitioned from feminine- to masculine-typed fields in the U.S. since their founding. The image of computing work varies across countries as well. In contrast to the male-hacker caricature in the United States, programing in India and Malaysia is understood to be an especially women-friendly professional career path that offers a good salary and safe, indoor working conditions. About 45% of computing degrees go to women in these countries, compared to just over 20% in the U.S. Many people are also surprised to learn that women’s representation among science graduates is nearly 50 percentage points higher in some Muslim-majority countries than in the Netherlands. Within the United States, STEM gender gaps also vary in size across groups defined by race, class, and immigration status.
4. GSL: A recent paper, Stoet and Geary (2018), reports a larger gender gap in STEM tertiary degrees in more gender-equal countries. Headlines implied that this was a startling new discovery. From your perspective, was this finding new or unexpected?
As mentioned above, my collaborators and I have been researching “counterintuitive” global patterns of gender segregation for nearly 30 years – first across occupations, then across fields of study. The work on occupational segregation, completed in the 1990s and 2000s, is described in my book with David Grusky, Occupational Ghettos: The Worldwide Segregation of Women and Men. In the early 2000s, Karen Bradley and I wrote a series of articles that pointed to similar patterns within higher education.
5. GSL: We are struck by the characterization of the finding of greater sex segregation in STEM in societies ranking high on the Global Gender Gap Index as a “paradox." After all, gender theory predicts that gender is pervasive and multidimensional, such that relative equality in one domain does not predict equality in other domains. It also argues that gender beliefs and stereotypes are maintained at the individual, interactional, and institutional levels in ways that make them powerfully resistant to social changes. Is the finding of greater sex segregation in STEM in more gender-equal societies accurately characterized as a paradox?
The so-called paradox is more evidence of what feminist scholars have been saying for decades: that gender is a multidimensional structure. The observed negative correlation seems paradoxical because gender equality is so often conceptualized as if it varied on a unidimensional continuum. Even among social scientists, “the status of women” is frequently represented as a single quantity that rises or falls depending upon a society’s level of patriarchy or modernity. This sort of unidimensional, evolutionary understanding is also reflected in researchers’ reliance on summary indices, such as Stoet and Geary’s use of the Global Gender Gap Index (GGGI), to compare levels of gender equality.
“The so-called paradox is more evidence of what feminist scholars have been saying for decades: that gender is a multidimensional structure. ”
To conclude from the Stoet and Geary study that the segregation of STEM increases with gender equality requires that we accept a unidimensional conceptualization of gender equality, defined as whatever the GGGI measures. It also means that we must be willing to exclude women’s representation in STEM from the definition of gender equality. My research takes a multidimensional approach to the study of gender, and I have shown that different dimensions of equality in fact rise and fall according to independent causal logics.
6. GSL: You actually studied this same trend back in 2009, trying to understand why sex-typing of field of study appears to be stronger in more economically-developed countries. One of your findings is that there are different drivers of gender segregation in higher education in postindustrial compared to developing countries. What is a “postindustrial” country and what features of postindustrial societies might lead to greater sex segregation?
Postindustrial societies are characterized by large service sectors, large and structurally differentiated educational systems, and high levels of female labor force participation. These structural changes have generally been accompanied by women’s increasing segregation into feminized educational and occupational niches – essentially women are incorporated as women. After World War II, for example, policies promoting expansion and democratization of higher education in the US and Europe were infused with stereotypes about gendered abilities and career paths. In the ensuing decades, presumed feminine aptitudes and affinities were accommodated through establishment and expansion of female-labeled programs in home economics, healthcare, business administration, and hospitality. Expansion of service industries was made possible in large part by the growing availability of these educated women to fill new sales, service, and clerical jobs.
Cultural belief systems are also important drivers of gender segregation in postindustrial societies. And again, it is well established that cultural gender beliefs vary on more than one dimension. In particular, “essentialist” beliefs about hard-wired gender difference are extremely resilient, and they appear to coexist quite comfortably alongside the liberal-egalitarian principles that help undermine overt gender discrimination in affluent democracies. The resultant “different but equal” ideological regime grants men and women the same formal rights but expects them to make different choices. I have argued that the observed cross-national differences in gender segregation are partly attributable to differences between rich and poor countries in the degree to which gender-essentialist beliefs influence people’s educational and occupational aspirations and choices.
7. GSL: Stoet and Geary (2018) interpret the inverse correlation between gender equality (as measured by GGGI) and women’s tertiary degrees in STEM as evidence for the existence of baseline sex differences in interest in STEM, expressed more freely in high-resource, high-gender-equality societies and suppressed in low-resource, low-equality ones. What are your areas of agreement with Stoet and Geary’s approach and analysis, and where do you differ? Does your research offer an alternative hypothesis to that of Stoet and Geary?
I am not sure that Stoet and Geary interpreted the inverse correlation as evidence of innate differences, but it was certainly understood that way in press coverage of their work. These sorts of essentialist interpretations of gender inequality are appealing because they are easy to understand and they align well with the pervasive “Mars-Venus” trope that depicts men and women as innately “opposite” in abilities, affinities, and temperaments.
Stoet and Geary’s findings are consistent with mine as regards patterns of cross-national variability in the gendering of STEM degree programs: I have repeatedly reported that some of the most gender-segregated STEM workplaces are found in reputably gender-progressive countries. Where we seem to disagree is in the idea that gender-progressivism per se is responsible for this segregation. Again, I’m not sure whether this is the authors’ conclusion, but I have seen their findings represented along the lines of: women are less likely to choose STEM professions in countries where they are more empowered. This seems to imply that women naturally prefer non-STEM activities (because that’s where their relative academic strengths or their intrinsic interests lie) and that they are better able to realize these preferences in countries where they don’t have to worry as much about economic survival and/or gender discrimination.
One problem with this interpretation is that the gender gap in STEM preferences is itself quite variable. In one study of 8th-graders in 32 countries, I find that the gap between girls and boys in “liking” math and “liking” science grows as countries become more affluent. It is much larger in the United States, for example, than in many Eastern European and Middle Eastern societies. This is true holding constant students’ math ability, socioeconomic status, and other characteristics. So, observed patterns of gender segregation reflect more than just women’s greater freedom to indulge tastes for non-STEM work in affluent societies; tastes are themselves more gendered in these contexts.
Charles & Bradley (2009) argue that distinct factors drive sex segregation in materialist and postmaterialist societies. A decisive determinant is large, statistically significant differences between the country groups exist in professed affinity for science and math. Table used with permission of Charles.
GSL: Why might this be?
This question requires further research, but I have found support for one explanation, which relates to effects of societal affluence on cultural value systems. Research by political scientist Ronald Inglehart has established a connection between broad-based material security and the spread of “postmaterialist” values that emphasize quality of life and self-expression more than the pursuit of existential security. In affluent democracies, educational and occupational choices are about more than earning a living; they present opportunities for self-expression and help define who we are. I have suggested that this self-expressive turn needs to be understood with attention to the persistently gendered lens through which people see the world and their own identities.
The authentic inner selves that we imagine realizing and expressing in postmaterialist societies develop in cultural environments that are permeated by beliefs about hard-wired gender difference. These gender-essentialist beliefs generate powerful cognitive biases. One bias (which we know can be self-fulfilling) is that we are not good at gender-nonconforming work. Another bias (that has been underappreciated, I think) is that we expect to enjoy gender-conforming work more. We seek congruence between our core personality traits and the task content of our jobs, but understandings of our own core personality traits are biased by gender stereotypes, as are our understandings of jobs (e.g., we’re all familiar with stereotypes of math nerds, science geeks). In postmaterialist societies, the ideal of self-expression through work renders these biases more salient. Girls will expect to enjoy work that they think will be more people-oriented, more emotionally rewarding. And following these passions will probably not lead them toward the solitary science career depicted in Western popular culture.
8. GSL: Twenty years ago, it was common for scholars to argue that men’s greater achievements in STEM could be explained by biology. Men, they claimed, were better than women at the quantitative, spatial-rotation, and abstract thinking required in STEM. Now, the hypothesis that innate, evolved biological differences drive gender segregation in STEM fields has been reframed. Rather than claiming that there are sex differences in abilities, researchers in this stream, such as Stoet and Geary, focus on sex and gender differences in preferences, aspirations, identification with, joy in, or sense of self-efficacy in STEM fields. Could you contextualize this shift for us, from your perspective as a sociologist?
Yes, gender segregation tends to be seen as legitimate and unproblematic today to the extent that it can be attributed to gender-specific preferences. Individual preferences are sacrosanct in Western culture and we tend to treat career aspirations as if they stem from primordial dispositions that need only to be discovered and realized. This sort of fixed understanding of individual interests and affinities is reflected in the pervasive American career-advice mantras to “follow your passion” and “do what you love.” Most of us don’t know in advance what we will love or be good at (especially in adolescence), so it’s easy to fall back on stereotypes about what people like us love. Since gender is such a salient part of our identities, I have argued that cultural norms of self-expression are likely to result in a deeper penetration of essentialist gender stereotypes in the development of educational and occupational preferences. This idea was the inspiration for the title of my 2009 article with Karen Bradley, “Indulging our Gendered Selves.” The main argument is that cultural beliefs about gendered affinities can have the same segregating effects as gendered affinities themselves.
“Most of us don’t know in advance what we will love or be good at (especially in adolescence), so it’s easy to fall back on stereotypes about what people like us love. ”
We shouldn’t underestimate the combined power of stereotypes about gender difference and cultural mandates to express these differences through education and work. American girls who opt out of STEM courses or aspire to become Kindergarten teachers rarely experience these choices as forced conformity to societal gender norms, or feel that they are yielding to the realities of their hard-wired feminine competencies. Rather, these aspirations are viewed as reflecting likes and dislikes that are quintessentially individual and must be respected as a matter of personal freedom. This emotional buy-in contributes to the resilience and cultural legitimacy of gender segregation.
9. GSL: As a follow up, what sort of evidence would help to distinguish between a gender gap in STEM caused by innate predispositions versus one generated by cultural variables such as stereotypes about careers and interests?
In a world where pervasive beliefs about innate gender difference shape the lens through which people see and respond to the world around them, it is nearly impossible to accurately measure relative effects of biology (e.g., different reproductive roles) and sociocultural factors on occupational outcomes. Social scientists can say definitively, however, that social structures and cultural belief systems matter a lot. One obvious marker of sociocultural influence is variability across time and space. Not only does the gender composition of STEM fields vary across countries and historical periods, but so do gender gaps in “liking” math and science, and so do social understandings of specific STEM fields as intrinsically masculine or feminine. Although people understand their career aspirations as something deeply personal, there is a lot of experimental and ethnographic evidence that aspirations vary depending upon what people believe about the gendering of occupational work tasks and depending on their expectations of the workplace climate and their likelihood of fitting in. Strongly skewed occupational gender ratios are in this sense self-reproducing.
The sort of variation we observe is difficult to reconcile with simple biological interpretations of gender segregation. But an important question is whether the burden of proof should be with those who see segregation as biologically determined or those who see it as socially constructed. The answer to this question has significant social policy implications.
10. GSL: In a recent article and edited book with sociologist Sarah Thébaud, you offered an up-to-date review of prevailing theories and evidence regarding sex segregation in the STEM fields. What are the main take-aways of current sociological research on gender and STEM for lay readers, members of the media, and scholars across the disciplines encountering the hypothesis of a “Gender Equality Paradox” in STEM?
Sarah Thébaud and I find most support for multilevel explanatory accounts of gender inequality in STEM. What I mean by this is that people’s aptitudes and affinities for scientific and technical work are influenced by the sociocultural environments in which they live, and the resultant career choices are likely to reproduce gender-segregated organizations, labor markets, and educational systems. These gendered institutions will in turn reinforce gender-specific aptitudes and affinities, employers’ understandings of the ideal worker, and cultural beliefs concerning the intrinsically gendered nature of STEM work. This dynamic interplay between micro- and macro-level forces contributes to the resilience of gender segregation, even in societies where overt gender discrimination is widely rejected. It also makes unequal outcomes “feel” self-expressive and hard-wired, even when they result from wide-ranging sociocultural processes.
How to cite this interview:
Richardson, Sarah and the GenderSci Lab. “Gender Stereotypes, Gendered Self-Expression, and Gender Segregation in Fields of Study: A Q&A with Professor Maria Charles,” GenderSci Blog, February 14, 2020, https://genderscilab.org/blog/gender-stereotypes-gendered-self-expression-and-gender-segregation-in-fields-of-study-a-qampa-with-professor-maria-charles
Statement about intellectual labor
The GenderSci Lab is committed to an equity- and justice-based approach to scholarly research, which includes the practice of citations and intellectual attribution. As such, we’ve followed the CLEAR Lab’s (an innovative feminist, anti-colonial marine laboratory) guidance in determining author order. For this blog post, Richardson drafted the questions and gathered feedback on them from GenderSci Lab members. Charles answered the questions by email, and Richardson lightly edited the final draft.