Gender Identity Norms and the Gender Gap of College Major Choice
From the perspective of gender role culture,this paper explains the increasing gender gap of college majors in the context of gender reversal in Chinese higher education.First,this paper proposes a theoretical framework that gender identify norms impact college major choice by influencing individuals'expectations about the future benefits and costs of majors.Then,this pa-per uses micro-survey data to examine the impact of regional gender identity norms on individuals'choice of humanities and social sciences or science and engineering majors.The results based on instrumental variable estimation show that the more traditional provincial gender identity norms are,the more likely the female are to choose humanities and social science majors,but it has no significant impact on male major choice.Those affected are mainly the female with medium aca-demic performance,and the extent of the impact gradually weakens over time but increases in or-der in the eastern,central,and western regions.Further analysis shows that the impact of gender identity norms on female major choices has already emerged at the senior high school stage.
gender identity normsgender gapcollege major choice
万方数据
维普
