Gender segregation in education

In Western countries women have caught up with men regarding their level of education (e.g., Buchmann et al. 2008; see also Hadjar, Chapter 10 in this volume). Overall, women are as likely as men to earn upper-secondary and tertiary-level diplomas (Bobbitt-Zeher 2007), and they have even surpassed men in terms of educational  attainment (Blossfeld et al. 2015). What has declined less over the last decades is horizontal gender segregation in education (Barone 2011; Reisel et al. 2015). In a general sense, horizontal gender segregation refers to the distribution of male and female students across educational programmes and study fields. These differences are not explicitly hierarchical and do not necessarily lead to gender differences in educational attainment. They can now be observed primarily at the secondary and tertiary level of the educational system. An important reason is that primary education generally has a very low level of differentiation. Furthermore, singlesex schools, which used to account for a large part of gender segregation in primary and lower-secondary school, have largely disappeared since the widespread implementation of co-education in Western countries (Wiseman 2008).
Gender segregation in secondary and tertiary education affects young people’s further educational and occupational careers and occupational attainment. The phenomenon is thus closely linked with gender segregation in the labour market and social inequality. Furthermore, the persistence of gender segregation seems inconsistent with the dissemination of gender equity and the profound changes regarding educational attainment and women’s move into many formerly male-dominated occupations. Consequently, educational gender segregation has become a much-discussed topic in sociological research. This chapter will begin with a discussion of how gender segregation in education has been conceptualized and measured (section 2.1). Sections 2.2 and 2.3 summarize the patterns of gender segregation in secondary and tertiary education respectively. Section 3 discusses theoretical explanations, starting with the perspective of gender segregation as a result of rational choices (section 3.1). Section 3.2 focuses on culturalist perspectives. Section 3.3 discusses influences of macro-level opportunity structures, such as value systems and the structure of the education system and the labour market. Section 4 summarizes research on the labour market consequences of gender segregation. Section 5 concludes with a discussion of the main gaps in sociological segregation research.