Men with lower grades are more likely to be found in ‘male-dominated’ fields — a study

The gender gap across university degree programmes in the US was found to be most pronounced amongst students with lower school grades and test scores. It is particularly noticeable in fields where men have historically been in the majority.

The study, published in *Nature Human Behaviour*, demonstrates a link between academic preparation and the extent to which the representation of men and women varies across different degree programmes. However, the research does not prove that belonging to the majority group in itself helps a student to remain in their chosen field.

Details

A team led by New York University professor Joseph R. Cimpian analysed two nationally representative longitudinal samples from the US Department of Education.

The High School Longitudinal Study included 6,340 individuals who were tracked from secondary school onwards. The ‘Baccalaureate and Beyond Class of 2016’ contained data on 12,950 graduates who obtained a bachelor’s degree in 2016.

The researchers compared the representation of heterosexual cisgender men and women, as well as LGBTQ+ men and women, across different fields of study. ‘Male-dominated’ fields included, in particular, physics, engineering, computer science, business and economics; fields with a predominantly female student body included, first and foremost, medicine, healthcare, education and some related fields.

Among students with lower pre-entry academic performance, heterosexual cisgender men were significantly more strongly represented in ‘male-dominated’ disciplines than women with comparable results. The relative risk was 2.62, with a 95 per cent confidence interval ranging from 2.29 to 3.00. Among the most successful students, this gap was considerably smaller.

The association persisted even after adjusting for prior academic performance, chosen school subjects, interests and career plans. LGBTQ+ men were also under-represented in ‘male-dominated’ fields, including engineering and computer science. For fields where women are in the majority, the picture was less clear-cut.

The authors suggest that the choice and retention of a field of study may be influenced by the norms and culture of a particular academic environment. However, the study is correlational: it does not establish that these specific factors are the cause of the observed differences. Furthermore, the results apply to the US higher education system and to the categories of gender and identity recorded in the original government datasets.

Why this matters

Average figures for gender composition can mask where the widest gaps actually lie. This new study shows that the gap is particularly pronounced among students with weaker academic backgrounds, whereas among the top-performing applicants, the differences are significantly less pronounced.

This is important for programmes seeking to increase the participation of women and LGBTQ+ students in engineering, IT and other fields with persistent gender imbalances. The authors believe that differences in grades and interests alone are not sufficient to explain why students are distributed across degree programmes in this particular way.

Source

The main source is a study by Joseph Cimpian and co-authors, ‘Gender and LGBTQ+ representation across college majors and achievement levels using nationally representative US data’, published in the journal *Nature Human Behaviour* on 3 September 2026. DOI: 10.1038/s41562-026-02510-8. The original news article is from Phys.org / New York University.