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Even though female students now make up more than half of all higher education students in many countries, the distribution of women across fields of study is still very uneven. This study examines the gendered nature of recruitment and dropout in higher education. Our results show that students who made gender traditional choices more often had an early preference for the study programme they enrolled in. Moreover, female students reported more often than male students that they had been encouraged by their parents and friends. However, unlike what we expected, there are no differences between students in gender traditional and nontraditional programmes with regard to encouragement from parents and students' confidence that they had made the right choice. While male students' dropout is unrelated to the gender composition of educational programmes, women drop out of female-dominated programmes to a lesser extent.

Even though the interaction between teaching and research at universities is a well-studied topic, it is difficult on the basis of available studies to draw any definite conclusions concerning the character of this relationship. This study, which is based on survey data, as well as interviews, shows that university faculty believe that their research influences their teaching and that their teaching activities have a positive effect on their teaching. They find, however, that research is more important for teaching than vice versa. The characteristics of the interaction vary between teaching on various levels and between disciplines. In general, the interaction is stronger at a graduate than at an undergraduate level. At an undergraduate level the relationship is stronger in the humanities and the social sciences than in other fields of learning, while there are no such differences at a graduate level. The findings are discussed on the basis of differences between disciplines and types of teaching.