Gender Imbalances in College Majors Are More Complicated Than They Appear

Researchers find that differences in academic preparation and interest in a major do not fully explain why some groups are underrepresented or less likely to stay in that field of study.

Engineering and computer science draw far more men than women, but the size of that gap depends partly on students’ academic records before college. A new study finds that male-majority fields tend to have their largest representation gaps among students with lower high school grades and test scores. Among the highest-achieving students, those gaps narrow considerably.

The findings, published in Nature Human Behavior, offer a more detailed picture of familiar divisions across college majors. Despite efforts to broaden participation, women earn about 25 percent of undergraduate engineering degrees and 18 percent of undergraduate computer science degrees. Men, meanwhile, remain a small minority of students earning nursing and education degrees.

Similar academic records, unequal representation

To examine how academic preparation relates to those patterns, researchers analyzed two large, nationally representative U.S. Department of Education datasets. They compared major selection and persistence among straight cisgender men and women, and LGBTQ+ men and women. Cisgender describes people whose gender identity aligns with their sex assigned at birth.

The High School Longitudinal Study of 2009 followed 6,340 students from their first year of high school in 2009–2010 through their junior year of college, providing information on sex, LGBTQ+ identity, academic preparation, interests, and outcomes. The Baccalaureate and Beyond Longitudinal Study of 2016 supplied academic and demographic information for 12,950 students who earned a bachelor’s degree in 2016.

In physics, engineering, computer science, business, and economics, straight cisgender men with below-average high school grades and test scores were substantially overrepresented compared with straight cisgender women who had similar academic records. The difference was much smaller among students with the strongest records.

“Across both datasets, we found evidence that when there was a representation gap that varied across the achievement distribution, that gap tended to be more in favor of the major’s historically dominant demographic group among the students with lower pre-college grades and test scores—and less so at other points in the distribution,” says lead author Joseph Cimpian, a professor of economics and education policy at NYU Steinhardt and NYU Wagner. “Those gaps tend to narrow considerably among the students with the strongest pre-college performance, highlighting the importance of looking more closely at how these gaps differ by achievement level rather than just overall representation to better understand who is entering these different fields.”

Grades alone leave gaps unexplained

Prior academic performance alone also did not explain who stayed in a major and who left. Individual academic and demographic factors could not fully account for the observed patterns.

The researchers suggest that social norms and institutional environments may subtly favor the demographic group that has historically dominated a field, potentially helping explain the larger gaps among students with weaker academic records. The study examined correlations, however, and cannot establish that those norms caused the gaps.

LGBTQ+ underrepresentation extends to nursing

The analysis also extended beyond the usual comparisons of men and women in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics. It is among the first studies to use nationally representative data to examine LGBTQ+ students’ distribution across the full range of college majors.

LGBTQ+ students, regardless of sex, were underrepresented in male-majority fields such as engineering, computer science, and business. LGBTQ+ men were also underrepresented in nursing and other health fields, indicating that their limited representation extended to some fields where women were the majority.

Female-majority majors did not consistently mirror the pattern found in male-majority majors. Evidence that straight cisgender women were disproportionately represented among students with lower pre-college achievement was mixed. Some models instead showed that LGBTQ+ women were overrepresented in female-majority fields among students with the highest prior achievement. The researchers interpret that finding as a possible sign that LGBTQ+ women may need stronger academic credentials to gain a foothold even in fields that appear welcoming.

“These patterns suggest a kind of missed opportunity,” Cimpian notes. “If talented students are leaving—or never entering—majors where they would do well and contribute, partly based on factors unrelated to their preparation or even interest in these fields, that’s a loss for the students and for the fields themselves.”

Reference: “Gender and LGBTQ+ representation across college majors and achievement levels using nationally representative US data” by Joseph R. Cimpian, Zachary T. McDermott, Jo R. King, Nathaniel Woznicki and Taek H. Kim, 3 September 2026, Nature Human Behaviour.
DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02510-8

This research was supported by grants from the Institute of Education Sciences, US Department of Education (R305B140037 and R305B200010).

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