While powerful gender inequalities remain in American society, women have made substantial gains and now largely surpass men in one crucial arena: education. Women now outperform men academically at all levels of school, and are more likely to obtain college degrees and enroll in graduate school. What accounts for this enormous reversal in the gender education gap? In The Rise of Women: The Growing Gender Gap in Education and What It Means for American Schools, Thomas DiPrete and Claudia Buchmann provide a detailed and accessible account of women’s educational advantage and suggest new strategies to improve schooling outcomes for both boys and girls. The Rise of Women opens with a masterful overview of the broader societal changes that accompanied the change in gender trends in higher education. The rise of egalitarian gender norms and a growing demand for college-educated workers allowed more women to enroll in colleges and universities nationwide. As this shift occurred, women quickly reversed the historical male advantage in education. By 2010, young women in their mid-twenties surpassed their male counterparts in earning college degrees by more than eight percentage points. The authors, however, reveal an important exception: While women have achieved parity in fields such as medicine and the law, they lag far behind men in engineering and physical science degrees. To explain these trends, The Rise of Women charts the performance of boys and girls over the course of their schooling. At each stage in the education process, they consider the gender-specific impact of factors such as families, schools, peers, race and class. Important differences emerge as early as kindergarten, where girls show higher levels of essential learning skills such as persistence and self-control. Girls also derive more intrinsic gratification from performing well on a day-to-day basis, a crucial advantage in the learning process. By contrast, boys must often navigate a conflict between their emerging masculine identity and a strong attachment to school. Families and peers play a crucial role at this juncture. The authors show the gender gap in educational attainment between children in the same families tends to be lower when the father is present and more highly educated. A strong academic climate, both among friends and at home, also tends to erode stereotypes that disconnect academic prowess and a healthy, masculine identity. Similarly, high schools with strong science curricula reduce the power of gender stereotypes concerning science and technology and encourage girls to major in scientific fields. As the value of a highly skilled workforce continues to grow, The Rise of Women argues that understanding the source and extent of the gender gap in higher education is essential to improving our schools and the economy. With its rigorous data and clear recommendations, this volume illuminates new ground for future education policies and research.

In Women In College, Mirra Komarovsky followed her groundbreaking works on gender roles to focus on the essentialist debate. Komarovsky interviewed post-WWII generation female students about their feelings about gender inequality and domesticity. She makes a strong case for the role of society over biology in shaping gender roles.

Winner of the Bridgewater State College Class of 1950 Distinguished Faculty Research Award Toward the end of the nineteenth century, as young women began entering college in greater numbers than ever before, physicians and social critics charged that campus life posed grave hazards to the female constitution and women's reproductive health. "A girl could study and learn," Dr. Edward Clarke warned in his widely read 1873 book Sex in Education, "but she could not do all this and retain uninjured health, and a future secure from neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system." For half a century, ideas such as Dr. Clarke's framed the debate over a woman's place in higher education almost exclusively in terms of her body and her health. For historian Margaret A. Lowe, this obsession offers one of the clearest expressions of the social and cultural meanings given to the female body between 1875 and 1930. At the same time, the "college girl" was a novelty that tested new ideas about feminine beauty, sexuality, and athleticism. In Looking Good, Lowe examines the ways in which college women at three quite different institutions—Cornell University, Smith College, and Spelman College—regarded their own bodies in this period. Contrasting white and black students, single-sex and coeducational schools, secular and religious environments, and Northern and Southern attitudes, Lowe draws on student diaries, letters, and publications; institutional records; and accounts in the popular press to examine the process by which new, twentieth-century ideals of the female body took hold in America.

Is romance more important to women in college than grades are? Why do so many women enter college with strong academic backgrounds and firm career goals but leave with dramatically scaled-down ambitions? Dorothy C. Holland and Margaret A. Eisenhart expose a pervasive "culture of romance" on campus: a high-pressure peer system that propels women into a world where their attractiveness to men counts most.

The Impact of Food Insecurity on First-Generation Female Higher Education Students seeks to emphasize the importance of mattering, belonging and effective student resources in the lives of first-generation women college students. They face unique obstacles that if not adequately addressed could impact their retention and persistence. Success in higher education relies on access to resources, connection, and a sense of meaning and purpose. Based on a yearlong qualitative study the book highlights the ways in which access to student resources, mattering and marginalization frame larger issues including mental health and food and housing insecurities. Interviewing both students and staff provides a window into Riverside's campus climate and solidifies the importance of positive interactions. First-generation women striving to matter explain a need for faculty that understand their strengths, staff that encourage them to ask for assistance, and peers that invite them to join the conversation.

Traces the history of the struggle of women to achieve equality in American colleges from Colonial times to the present.