Gender‐stereotypic Perceptions of Academic Disciplines

S ummary . Sixty college students, aged 16–20 years, rated 10 academic disciplines along seven 7‐point dimensions including masculine‐feminine, in a 2 (sex) X 3 (academic background) factorial design. Engineering, physical sciences, and mathematics were rated as significantly masculine whereas English, biology, psychology, French and sociology were rated as significantly feminine. There was no effect of the sex of the rater, and only in the case of biology was there a significant influence of academic background. For the mean ratings for each discipline, masculine‐feminine was correlated with several other dimensions, but a stepwise regression revealed only difficult‐easy as a significant predictor. On the individual ratings for three specific disciplines, correlations between masculine‐feminine and other dimensions were small and nonsignificant, and the regression analyses were all non‐significant. These results cast doubt on a previous conclusion that there is a cluster of other attributes associated with “masculine‘ when academic disciplines are rated.