Sociation Today

Here for the Mrs. Degree:
Women's College Major Choice and Marital Status

by

Kathryn A. Huggins

Wake Forest University

Introduction

The stereotype of the Mrs. Degree alleges that some women attending college choose an "easy" or "less useful" major, often identified as those majors with a less explicit career path, under the assumption that they will not need to use this degree in a career. Instead, these women use their college years to find a husband, whom they expect to marry shortly after graduation, so that they can be housewives. This stereotype emerged in the 1950s when women started attending college in larger numbers, and it did develop out of an actual phenomenon. However, in the wake of second-wave feminism and the women's movement of the 1970s, women have started moving away from these limited domestic roles of wife, mother, and homemaker, holding professional careers and marrying at much later ages. It is troubling, then, that this stereotype lingers, often uttered as a criticism of certain female-dominated majors and the female students whose goals are suspected to tend towards domesticity, which is seen as a lack of ambition among other college students. Why does this stereotype linger? Given the changing gender composition of universities and within certain undergraduate majors and the shifting marriage patterns, is there a practical basis for the Mrs. Degree, or is it merely an example of sexism in higher education that stems from a suspicion of female ambition? To test this question, I hypothesize that, if the Mrs. Degree stereotype plays out on today's college campuses, then women in "less useful majors," such as traditionally female majors like those in the humanities, are more likely to be married and less likely to be employed than those in the "useful" (and traditionally masculine) majors, such as those in business and health fields.

Literature Review

The stereotype of the Mrs. Degree has been a pervasive challenge towards women pursuing a college degree since they were granted wider access to secondary education. The trope represented a woman who attended college or university for the sole purpose of finding a husband and got married as soon as possible, sometimes before graduation. This image emerged from a trend in the 1950s which Judy Blume recollects from her personal experience, in which "you go to college; you get a degree in education in case, God forbid, you ever have to go to work, and while you're there, you'd damn well better meet the man you're going to marry because otherwise, where else are you going to meet him?" ("Part One...") This mindset revealed women's limited independence in the post-war era in which this trend emerged. It was, quite simply, a practical solution to ensure personal security. One researcher hypothesizes that women in the 1950s considered this Mrs. Degree as a smart financial move because attending college provided a created a strong opportunity of finding and "marrying a college-educated husband with high earnings potential" (Jacobs). However, this path assumes the woman will remain in the domestic sphere, as it provides limited career plans beyond the role of housewife, mother and homemaker. As Blume further recollects, it even created a toxic environment for women because this opportunity for education was reduced to a race to the altar, in which engaged victors "would raise their hand…so you could see the diamond" because "that's what it was all about: the ring, the silver pattern, the china" and all the other trappings of married domesticity ("Part One…"). Indeed, this pattern resulted in a post-WWII surge in exceptionally young marriages. In this time, the aforementioned description was not an uncommon illustration of the female college experience; in fact, at that time, there was a strong correlation between higher levels of educational achievement and likelihood of marrying, especially at a young age (Glick and Carter).

     This positive relationship between college education and likelihood of marriage continues to hold true. In fact, women with college degrees are more likely to get married than those without degrees in rates higher than the so-called "baby boomer" post-WWII cohorts (Goldstein and Kenney). However, recent trends show a shift in marriage rates in which women, especially college-educated women, are getting married later than the baby boomer cohorts did. It is very important to note that this change represents merely a widespread tendency to delay marriage rather than a shift towards non-marriage, due in part to the rise in cohabitation among dating couples as a precursor to marriage and the presumable tendency for women to seek work after college graduation rather than marrying right away (Oppenheimer, Goldstein and Kenney). Employment does not decrease the likelihood of a woman getting married; depending on the rigidity of gender roles, employed women might be more likely to get married (Ono, Oppenheimer). Indeed, many married women continue working (Oppenheimer, Glick and Carter, Goldstein and Kenney).

     In spite of these changes, the Mrs. Degree trope persists, but now it is the idea that certain majors are inherently less useful in the workforce than others, leading to the conclusion that a woman must have selected her particular major as a filler with which to bide her time until she gets married. This attitude can be attributed to the degree with which a young woman holds traditional gender roles, which are developed during socialization from the family, specifically by parental views towards women in higher education and marriage. Research shows that parents' socioeconomic status (which can be captured by education levels or occupation) determines parents' attitudes toward gender roles, and it is a statistically significant indication of these views being passed on to their children (Cunningham). Beyond socialization, the basis of this view is understandable, given the breadth of research that has observed a gender divide in major choices, despite the higher number of women receiving undergraduate degrees (England and Li, Jacobs).

     Generally speaking, women are underrepresented in engineering and technical sciences—particularly computer science—and they are more likely to change majors if they initially declared majors in one of these fields (Turner and Brown, England and Li, Dickson). Instead, they are more inclined to select majors in the humanities, especially English and education, or social sciences such as sociology and psychology. Increasingly, women are majoring in physical and life sciences, particularly biology (Dickson, England and Li, Ma). Turner and Bowen suggest that the gender divide within the sciences might have to do with math intensity, in which men are more likely to use more math-oriented disciplines (1999). Ma observes that women are more drawn towards majors in "helping" professions because of the intrinsic, altruistic and social rewards of a career than men, who are more concerned with finding jobs with more money and prestige. However, this divide only holds true for students of high socioeconomic status (2009).

     Research has not considered students' outcomes in given majors, even though the broad gender lines affect their success in the workforce (Ma). Bose and Whaley describe this phenomenon of "pink-collar occupations," which are female-dominated white-collar occupations, sometimes labeled as semi-skilled instead of fully professional jobs because they are less prestigious, pay lower salaries, and have less autonomy for employees (2001). Men are less likely to enter these fields, but those who do advance much quicker than women, while women in male-dominated fields earn less, showing the systemic tendency to devalue women's work (Bose and Whaley). They further argue that this trend can be explained by human capital theory, defined as "characteristics or skills that make a worker more productive and attractive to an employer," with women taking paths providing less human capital with "the resulting female-dominated occupations [being] low-skilled, hav[ing] short career ladders, be[ing] amenable to intermittent employment…based on a 1950s understanding of women's roles" (Bose and Whaley). Given the gendered perception of these majors—there is no male equivalent of the Mrs. Degree stereotype; a man is expected to earn a degree to get a job—it is worth examining whether or not there is any truth to this concept. This imbalance raises further questions of how men in female-dominated majors' employment rates compare with their female counterparts.

Methods

To test for the existence of the Mrs. Degree, I used data from the 2012 and 2014 General Social Survey (GSS). The GSS is a sociological survey conducted every other year by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) that samples English and Spanish-speaking adults over the age of 18 to measure the demographic characteristics and attitudes of American citizens. For this research, I selected recent college graduates between ages 25 and 35 from all GSS respondents in the selected survey years to serve as my sample. This sample reflects current trends of marriage patterns and college major choice while also measuring instances of younger marriage. Including a wider age range in the sample would introduce the possibility of confounding results stemming from incidents occurring later in life, such as divorces, death of a spouse, and second marriages. I used crosstables to analyze the relationships between the following variables:

Undergraduate major choice (Major1; independent)—this variable is important because post-graduate degrees are less important to the purposes of this research, as the Mrs. Degree stereotype does not hold as strongly after the undergraduate degree. Presumably, those students who wish to go to graduate programs are serious about their academic and career pursuits. For ease of interpretation, I recoded the original 80-plus responses of college majors into nine categories: business, communications, health, social sciences, physical sciences (such as biology and chemistry), technical sciences (such as computer science and engineering), humanities, arts, and other. The design of the hypotheses meant that I focused on three of these categories: health and business (the male-dominated majors) and humanities (the female-dominated major).
Marital Status (Marital; dependent)—for ease of interpretation this variable was also recoded into three categories: married, never married, or other. Given the age of the sample respondents and the research question, divorce and death of spouse are less important considerations.
Workforce Status (wrkstat; dependent)—this variable measures respondents' employment status, with multiple detailed categories that were very helpful to the purposes of this research. Besides listing working full- or part-time and unemployment, respondents could also select "keeping house," a category that is crucial to the research question, as it specifically addresses the possibility of married women filling the role of homemaker.
Sex (control)—to show gendered differences in post-graduate paths as indicated by the literature.

Findings

Generally, I found that the data did not support the hypothesis proposed by the Mrs. Degree stereotype, meaning that the Mrs. Degree stereotype is not replicated in contemporary American society. Even without considering college major choice, the percentage of married women working (58.4%) is greater than the percentage of married women keeping house (35.5%), which indicates, at least in broad strokes, a pattern of working women that does not indicate support for the Mrs. Degree, even though this model includes women who did not attend college and are therefore are exempt from the Mrs. Degree stereotype (Table 1). Furthermore, at 43.6%, the percentage of married women working full-time is greater than married women keeping house. At least on the macro-level, the phenomenon of women almost exclusively filling the domestic roles of mother, wife, and homemaker is not supported by the data. This finding is a notable first step towards disproving the Mrs. Degree stereotype because it marks a movement away from the 1950s understanding of gender roles that fostered the development of the stereotype in the first place. Although this data does reflect the general trend of larger numbers of working women than in previous generations, it is important to remember that it is a measure of all women between ages 25 and 35, so the sample includes women who are not college graduates. This model is useful from a foundational standpoint and offers the hope that similarly encouraging results will emerge for female college graduates, regardless of their major. (see Table 1)

However, it is important to note that the first model does not mark the complete overthrow of traditional gender roles, as illustrated when considering the same general trends for young men. Just over 90% of married men between the ages 25 and 35 are working, with 86.1% working full-time (Table 2). This huge gap between married men and women working full-time indicates that men remain, in many cases, the primary breadwinner of the household.

With less than 1% of married men in the sample keeping house instead of working, the idea of stay-at-home dads, a possibility raised by the trend of larger numbers of working mothers, is not one that is reflected in this data. (See Table 2). There is no inversion of gender role expectations when it comes to which partner is expected to be the primary one who fills roles in the domestic sphere; homemaking remains an almost exclusively female space. A noticeably larger percentage of men indicated that they are unemployed or temporarily not working (6.2%). Although there is no way to measure how long they have been unemployed, it is interesting to consider the possibility that these men may consider their situation to be a temporary one, even if they have potentially been out of work for a significant period of time. Even if the male partner is the one at home more, in the absence of full-time employment, he does not consider homemaking to be a permanent role.

However, this pattern does not completely cancel out the encouraging trend of more women in the workplace, especially because the same general findings are largely replicated when measuring college major. The relatively high levels of employment across majors for female college graduates at least partially disproves the Mrs. Degree stereotype because marriage and homemaking are not used as alternatives to pursuing a career. Overall, 77.6% of female college graduates are employed, with 62% working full-time, which are strong rates in a competitive job market like the one we currently face (Table 3). Interestingly, female humanities majors—the category of majors most closely associated with the Mrs. Degree stereotype—had 80.7% of respondents working full-time, second only to female arts majors (81.1%), a discipline that receives similar suspicion of "usefulness" in the workforce. The Mrs. Degree stereotype would imply that these majors should have the smallest percentages of women working full-time. On the other hand, women in the traditionally male-dominated, "more useful" majors do not have the highest percentages of full-time employment, with 78.7% of female business majors working full-time and a markedly low 48.6% of female health majors working full-time. Very few majors have large percentages of women working part-time, which is an interesting complication of the proposal that women can balance work and homemaking by holding a part-time job. However, female health majors do have a relatively high percentage (27.5%) of respondents working part-time, which could be potentially be explained by the tendency for women to work in greater numbers as nurses, a position that can more easily be a part-time job rather than the higher-prestige healthcare occupations that are mostly filled by men. It is very interesting to note that, for most majors, the percentage of women who are not working and keeping house is generally less than 20%. The most noticeable exception to this finding is for female technical science majors, of which 32.6% are homemakers, but very few women choose these majors, which is reflected by an extremely small number of 9 women in this category. Therefore, this number is overinflated by the very small sample size. In this specific finding, gender differences in college major are reflected in the findings, but the relatively low gap in employment levels between men and women reflect the encouraging shift of women working in larger numbers.

The results for male college graduates' workforce status has very interesting comparisons that further fail to support the hypothesis, illustrated in Table 4. Most interesting among these is the finding that humanities majors have the largest relative percentage of male college graduates keeping house (8.2%). Although this highest male level compares with the lowest levels of women keeping house, this particular measure is noteworthy because a majority of the college major categories do not report a measure of male students keeping house. This finding could reflect the emergence of stay-at-home dads to accommodate more working mothers as the family's primary breadwinner, but the similar levels of men keeping home and men not working raises the possibility of some overlap in these categories. Perhaps some of these stay-at-home fathers are performing some identity work to reconcile their current unemployment with traditional male roles in the household as the breadwinner in which they identify their unemployment as a temporary status instead of acknowledging their long-term role as homemaker. For these men, such an acknowledgement could be conflated with a concession of defeat: their failure at performing traditional masculinity. This conclusion is feasible when we consider the fact that, for each major, men have generally higher percentages of full-time employment compared to their female counterparts, with three majors reporting measures greater than 80%, roughly the highest measure for women in any major. These extremely elevated measures are perhaps less surprising because two of these measures are for majors that are in traditionally male-dominated fields: Business (91.8%) and Technical Sciences (81.2%). The third discipline, Communications, reports 93.4% of male majors holding full-time employment, which is somewhat surprising because it is not necessarily a male-dominated field. While this finding could be an instance of the "glass escalator" in which men in female-dominated fields have greater opportunity for promotion and more rapid advancement, there is an extremely small number of male Communications majors in this sample, which limits the significance of this particular measure.

The second portion of the hypothesis concerning the relationship between college major choice and marital status also failed to support the existence of the Mrs. Degree stereotype. Although women in the Humanities have among the higher relative percentages of majors who are married (66.7%), the overall range of married respondents is relatively narrow, with the lowest measure being 49% of female Physical Science majors and the highest measure being 69.6% of female Technical Science majors (Table 5). This finding implies that for any given major, the possibility of these women being married and working full-time are not mutually exclusive options, as the stereotype would believe. In some cases, being unmarried is an equally viable option because for half of the majors, the difference between married and never married respondents is close to a 50/50 split, which certainly fails to support the Mrs. Degree stereotype. Quite interestingly, among these majors are two female-dominated disciplines: Communications, with 49.1% of female respondents reporting they have never married, and Social Sciences, with 41.1% of female students never married. However, it is important to note that overall, a majority of female college graduates (60.6%) are married. Women tend to marry younger across the board, regardless of college major choice.

Male college graduates do not have such a pronounced split between married and unmarried respondents. The division is closer to an even split: 43.8% of male college graduates were married and 54.3% had never married (Table 6). This tendency towards an even split is replicated across most majors; the two significant exceptions favor non-marriage, with 64.3% of male Humanities majors being unmarried and 100% of male Arts majors being unmarried. In the latter case, this extreme finding is a result of the extremely small sample size, with only 6 male Arts majors. Generally, these findings support patterns that larger portions of men marry at later ages than women. It would appear that these gendered differences in marriage patterns are operating on a deeper, more complex level than college major choice, given the absence of a distinct relationship between these two variables for both men and women.

Conclusions

While speaking in broad terms, the conditions defined by the Mrs. Degree stereotype are not replicated in the data, as no one major is more inclined to have women with high rates of marriage, low rates of employment, and high rates of respondents serving as the homemaker. However, it does appear that the internalization of traditional gender roles, those which were at work when the stereotype emerged in the 1950s, are still in operation. Despite the relatively high percentages of women working across the board, especially for women working full-time, these rates are never as high as those for men, implying that the male presence is more expected in the workplace. The disparity between married men and women keeping house also contribute to this narrative of devaluing women's work. The distinct gap between unemployed married women and married women keeping house, with higher levels of women keeping house, indicates that there is no shame for a woman to be the homemaker. After all, there are elements in society that continue imply that the domestic sphere is her expected place, despite the larger numbers of women taking the professional workplace by storm. On the other hand, the levels of unemployed married men and married men keeping house are very close to equal, which raises the possibility of some overlap in this sample. That is, because the domestic sphere is devalued as a feminine space, as are many things which are associated with women, it would be shameful for men to admit that their wives are the primary breadwinners in the couple. It would be seen as a mark of loss of manliness that the husband must fill the "woman's role" while she "brings home the bacon." To save face, these men might see their unemployment as no more than a temporary state, even if they have been unemployed for some time, rather than admit that they are not fulfilling their duties to be the "man of the house." In these ways, gender norms are upheld, even if this lingering example of sexism in higher education is not replicated in reality.

A major limitation of this study is that the sample size is very small in the models measuring college major choice. These extremely small samples limit the confidence with which we can interpret these models' generalizability. For majors that composed particularly small percentages of the population, this problem is especially true, which means that some of the control conditions (women in male-dominated majors and vice versa) can only be interpreted with caution, as their statistical significance is limited at best. Further research with a larger sample size would eliminate any errors or false reports in the existing models and allow for greater generalizability of the results.

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