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European Sociological Review 15:391-404 1999
© 1999 Oxford University Press

research-article

Explaining Sex Differences in Educational Choice An Empirical Assessment of a Rational Choice Model

Jan O. Jonsson

Swedish Institute for Social Research, Stockholm University S-106 91 Stockholm, Sweden

Sex segregation with regard to choice of type of education, or educational programme, is persistently high in Sweden, while men and women nowadays reach similar levels of education. In order to explain this phenomenon, a rational choice model is proposed in which sex-specific comparative advantages in different fields of study are in focus. Such relative advantages in sex-typical areas of study are hypothesized to influence educational choices through their effects on the expected probabilities of success in different study programmes. The theoretical model explains sex differences very well when judged against aggregate data, but empirical analyses on micro-level data are less supportive of the underlying hypothesis. While indicators of both absolute and relative school achievements are powerful predictors of educational choice, boys and girls with similar ‘ability profiles’ largely follow sex-typical choice patterns. Comparative advantages may ‘account for’ 10 to 30 per cent of the sex effect on educational choice at the upper secondary level of education in Sweden. The paper concludes with a short discussion of alternative explanations

Manuscript received: March 1, 1998.


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