The Homecoming of American College Women: The Reversal of the College Gender Gap

A lthough the fact is not widely known, the ratio of male-to-female undergraduates in the United States was about at parity from 1900 to 1930. Male enrollments began to increase relative to female enrollments in the 1930s and later as GIs returned from World War II. A highpoint of gender imbalance in college attendance was reached in 1947 when undergraduate men outnumbered women 2.3 to 1. But starting then and continuing until the present in an almost unbroken trend, female college enrollments have increased relative to male enrollments. The relative improvement for females was slow at first and then increased with remarkable speed. In 1960, there were 1.60 males for every female graduating from a U.S. four-year college and 1.55 males for every female undergraduate (U.S. Department of Education, 2005, Table 247). But beginning in the late 1960s and early 1970s, young women’s expectations of their future labor force participation radically changed and their college-enrollment and graduation rates relative to males began to soar. No longer did young women anticipate that they would follow in their mothers’ footsteps. This group changed behavior along many dimensions: taking more math and science courses in high school, electing different college majors that were more like those of their male peers, marrying and having children later, and demonstrating greater attachment to a career. By 1980, the college gender gap in enrollments had evaporated. This change was a return or a “homecoming” to the parity of the early twentieth century, although the levels of college going were almost six times higher in 1980 than in the