education
In this essay, I borrow from diverse literature to address several central issues about the nexus of gender inequality and higher education. I discovered studies relevant to these questions in a wide range of fields beyond sociology, such as economics, history, social psychology, career guidance, and policy in education. Instead of summarizing all studies that address the question of sex differences, I am concerned with those matters that are most fundamental to the issue of gender inequality.
I discuss topics that have been highly contested, including the impact of single sex colleges on women’s attainment. Educational theory and research continue to be preoccupied with social class differences. Standard examinations of inequality in education have generally centered on differences by social class among men. When gender imbalance is mentioned, it gets comparatively little attention. Academics who do write on gender tend to write off all aspects of education as being to the disadvantage of women.
It is my argument, however, that education tends to be a comparatively privileged domain of social experience for women and that gender imbalance is experienced more in certain areas of the school system than in others. Women are faring fairly well in terms of access, but not as well when the issue of college experience is brought in, and worst of all, concerning outcomes from school. Analyses of gender inequity within higher education system ought to recognize distinctions among these varying components of schooling and must address those circumstances wherein women have gained parity as well as where women remain behind men.
Women’s Access to College in the United States
Here, I summarize evidence on women’s and men’s enrollment and degree higher education attainment, using recent and historical data on the United States and cross-national comparisons. I then consider explanations provided for these trends, critical or reproductions, status attainment, comparative historical, and economic. One of the most noticeable characteristics of American education is the leadership role played by women as college students.
Women made up 53.1% of all enrolled college students in 1992. Among high school females who graduated in 1992, 65.4% entered college in the following autumn, as compared with 59.7% of men. Women’s proportion of degrees rose gradually throughout the 1970s and 1980s, at a time when the proportion of college-age young adults in school rose gradually but consistently. By 1982, women had more bachelor’s degrees than men.
Women have received more bachelor’s degrees than men ever since. Over the past few years, college education ,master degrees, online education colleges, higher learning, commission women lead in college enrollment has been comparable to that found for degrees earned, indicating that women and men graduate at equivalent rates. The path to graduate and professional degrees is now at parity by sex. This represents a marked extrusion from in advance durations on this century, while women’s of entirety quotes trailed men’s. Only amongst PhD recipients do women’s illustration continue to lag.
International Comparisons
Women in the United States surpassed their counterparts in higher education at other countries in access to schooling at both the secondary and tertiary levels for more than a century. Today, the United States has more college students per capita than almost any other nation, and women’s proportion of college enrollments in the United States is higher than in most other nations.
In most of the advanced industrial nations of Europe, women’s proportion of enrollments is very high. But even there, wide disparity remains, as women’s proportion varies from 40% of university students in Switzerland and 41% in Germany to 55% in France and 61% in Portugal. Women also did better as regards education in the socialist nations of Eastern Europe, and socialist governments in developing nations, in their early years in power, generally prioritized for girls.
Comparative Historical Methods
A second sociological methodology examines comparative and historical differences in educational experiences. Once more, this methodology must be well-placed to explain gender inequality. Still, adherents of this methodology are preoccupied with class and race concerns and have not yet given sustained consideration to the link between schooling and gender inequality. Few studies examine gender trends in schooling, and not all of these have been concerned with accounting for the magnitude of gender differences.
Walters, for instance, discovers that increasing employment opportunities helped fuel the expansion of higher education for women between 1952 and 1980. However, legal higher education, anthology education, research and development, higher education institution, higher edu the remaining mystery is why the gender gap in has closed more than the gap observed in labor force participation. Ramirez & Boil document world trends in enrollment up to 1975. They propose that the world diffusion of a model of the state-individual relationship based on the compulsory schooling of all has occurred among nations.
Citizens, which naturally leads to the integration of females into the school system. They argue that citizenship demands foresee a growing female proportion of higher education, though extending the concept of citizenship to describe enrollments in higher as such appears somewhat far-fetched. More such research with a longer time horizon and more nations would be insightful.
Culture and politics are emphasized in comparative historical studies, while they are often assigned a lesser role in other accounts of education.
To what degree do cultural considerations hinder girls’ access to schooling? The experience of women’s education in Muslim societies can be illustrated here. In some conservative Muslim societies, the stipulation that boys and girls be educated in different schools may limit girls’ access.
Girls’ education suffers when there are insufficient schools for girls or where the distance to such schools gives rise to concerns on the part of parents about safety, decorum, and loss of time by a daughter for domestic duties. This is most significant in poor nations; oil wealth has brought significant increases in the education of girls. In Kuwait, for instance, primary and secondary education is for both sexes, and more women go to college than men.
CONCLUSION
I have argued that access, process, and outcome are different dimensions of higher education that must be analyzed separately. The trends in these dimensions tend not to occur simultaneously with each other, and therefore, differential explanations of these aspects of higher are necessary. For instance, women continue to be in the minority as faculty and are disadvantaged in rank and institutional prestige. However, as students within the United States, women form a majority of students at virtually all levels of higher education system and are not uniquely disadvantaged in positions within institutions.
To treat women’s position in the faculty and among the student body as a single phenomenon will not suffice, as the degree of women’s advancement varies between these two statuses.
I am still amazed at how much mainstream research in the sociology of overlooks women and how much of the remainder focuses on gender interactions instead of gender inequality. That is, gender tends to become an issue of variations on the theme of socioeconomic or racial inequality. My first suggestion for future education research, then, is that gender is worthy of the focus of sociologists of education.
Gender poses a lot of intriguing puzzles, both when gender inequality exists and when it does not. What we require is a theory of when gender will be significant and when it will not matter. We also require a theory of what economic, social, cultural, and political forces are likely to influence the place of gender in education. Second, I think that decision-making is understudied. Research-based on commonly available panel data sets encourages an input-output perspective on education. While this might make intuitive sense for the examination of some outcomes, e.g., test scores, it underestimates people’s perceptions of their reasons. Furthermore, this data framework abstracts away from socially embedded processes.