Gendered Course Choices: Rationalization and Embodiment

The goal of our study was to explore how academic motivation, gender stereotypes and gender roles as well as cultural resources shape students’ choices of courses in the technical sciences and social sciences and humanities. Data collection and interpretation have been informed by Eccles, Adler, Futterman, Goff, Kaczala, Meece, and Midgley’s (1983) expectancy-value theory, which we have expanded with Bourdieu’s (1986, 1973) concept of cultural capital. We have also found Bourdieu’s (1984) concept of habitus, or more specifically Reay’s (1998) elaboration of its gender dimension to be a theoretically productive way to capture how students naturalize the gender ‘appropriateness’ of school subjects, study areas and occupations. We administered a questionnaire to 1301 final year secondary school students from grammar schools (46.7%) and four-year vocational schools (53.3%) from across Croatia. There were 679 girls (52.2%) and 622 boys (47.8%) in the sample. The questionnaire measured the following concepts from Eccles et al.’s (1983) expectancy-value theory: school grades, expectation of success and subjective task values, gender roles, and gender stereotypes. The questionnaire also included measures of cultural capital (Bourdieu, 1986). In addition to our questionnaire we conducted interviews with students in their final year of secondary schooling in order to explore how they rationalize their university course choices. Our discussion is based on 16 semi-structured interviews conducted with 8 male and 8 female students. Both female and male students in our sample endorse gender stereotypes relating to course choices and occupations. Endorsing such stereotypes about a lesser talent of one's own gender for a particular study area was found to predict weaker intentions to choose a course in that study area. Conversely, convictions about one’s own gender being more talented for a particular study area predicted stronger intentions to want to study a course in that field. Our interview data showed that this does not result from a rational decision making process. Indeed, students disassociate their own gender stereotyping of courses from their gender stereotypical course choices. We also found that parental cultural practices contributed to boys’ choices of courses in the social sciences and humanities.