Unpacking the People vs. Things Divide in Gendered Field of Study Choice

Despite achieving formal gender equality, women and men often gravitate towards different educational and occupational pathways, particularly along the "people" dimension and the male-typed "things" dimension (e.g. Su and Rong 2009).  While women in general prefer socially interactive roles and men roles that involve technological aspects, it has remained unclear what specific characteristics drive these choices. For example, we do not know whether men dislike supporting people emotionally while being indifferent to working in teams. For women, it could be that they do not mind using technical gadgets, but are averse to developing the same devices.

To answer this question, we conducted a large-scale choice experiment with a representative group of Swiss high school students (N ~ 5000). They were presented with hypothetical fields of study that differed in several characteristics corresponding to the dimensions "people" and "things". In addition, we frame these characteristics as requiring skills that are either innate (fixed mindset) or can be acquired (growth mindset), assuming the latter will reduce gender-typed preferences.

Our results show that women have a strong aversion to several traits in the "things" dimension, with the strongest aversion to programming, while they show a preference for analytical thinking. For men, we find neither strong aversions to traits in the "people" dimension, nor large preference differences between traits. Furthermore, framing these traits in terms of a growth mindset increases women's preferences for most traits in the "things" dimension. Conversely, this is not the case for men in the "people" dimension.