In the United States, female college students enter less prestigious occupations and earn far less than their male counterparts. Though some employers may discriminate against women, the "gender gap" in the workplace is also fostered by decisions made by women college students themselves. A study conducted on a university campus in the Northwest shows how men and women students position themselves differently for careers, marriage, and parenthood while sharing an ideology of gender difference.Anthropobgy & Education Quarterly 31(l):67-89.
Stone and McKee
Gendered Futures 69reproduction theory, students are continually creating, modifying, discarding, and reinventing ideas about gender, work, marriage, family, and self that guide their life choices. Their interaction with educational institutions is only one dimension of this process of cultural construction. Holland and Eisenhart's long-term study of women students on two southern campuses moves away from social reproduction theory to a theory of "cultural production." Their approach allows us to see students as active agents who construct "systems of meaning" through which they relate to and act within their world. The most important construction that Holland and Eisenhart uncover in their study is a "culture of romance" that privileges males and is generated within student peer groups. Some women students fall into the "culture of romance" as they become discouraged in their studies. Although a few women in their study voiced complaints about school sexism-for example, that some male professors did not take them seriously-women students were primarily discouraged in their studies because they found their schoolwork too hard and too boring. Retreating into the culture of romance, these women came to measure their social prestige and their own worth in terms of their attractiveness to men. Holland and Eisenhart's conclusion is "not that the sexism of the university and society at large is irrelevant, but rather that the most effective mediation or communication of male privilege to girls and young women is through the peer group" (1990:222).The Holland and Eisenhart study provides rich material on women students' ideas about romance and marriage, but, curiously, it does not touch on students' ideas about motherhood or how these ideas might be related to students' decisions about their careers. By contrast, Anne Machung's (1989) study of Berkeley students, conducted at about the same time, indicates that senior women students planned to interrupt their careers for child rearing. Likewise our study reveals that a "culture of motherhood" rather than a "culture of romance" may lie behind women students' lower career aspirations.Granted, this difference between our findings and those of Holland and Eisenhart may be partly because of the different foci and methods of these two studies. The Holland and Eisenhart research focused only on women students, whereas our study compared women and men. This allows us to highlight those views of women students that stood out in s...
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