College Expansion And Gender Equality In The Enrollment Of Higher Education

Gender inequality is one of the most significant inequalities in human society, which exists in various fields. But after the implementation of college expansion since1999,the opportunity distribution between sex in the enrollment of higher education has experienced equalization. However, the expansion and the equalization of distribution are two independent process. The expansion will not result in the equalization necessarily. Theoretically speaking, the expansion of enrollment will not benefit a specific group(take women) without an institutional preference. Thus, a close study about how the added educational oppertunities are distributed between sex is in need. Refering to the question of how expansion results in the gender equalization in the enrollment of colleges and universities, this paper will focus on how the added opportunities are distributed and which factors contribute to the gender equalization.There are many factors, external ones and internal ones, influencing people’s education. The internal factors consist of one’s intelligence, diligence and so on. The external factors consist of the quantity and the distributioal mechanism of educational opportunities. In the field of social stratification, studies concerning on the factors influencing the educational enrollment put emphasis on the social factors. Specifically, they care how the ascribed factors, such as father’s social-economic condition, education and class status, affect the distribution of education opportunities. The less the ascribed factors affect the acquirement of educational opportunity, the less the inequality is. This paper puts the ascribed factors into the equation as well. But we concern on how the different effect between sex changes instead whether they have an independent effect on the educational acquirement. Thus, it is possible for us to grasp the process of gender equalization. This paper finds that father’s social-economic condition, education and hukou, an institutional factor with Chinese features,may have respective effects on the distribution of enrollment opportunities. However, the effects are different between male and female, which means that the ascribed factors may result in the gender inequality and in turn, the changes of the different effects may change the gender inequality as well. As a result,we build two sets of models,one group before expansion and the other one after the expansion, to see whether the different effect changes. The results show that the expansion change the opportunity structure between male and female. Two groups make the most contributions. One is the group in which the respondents’ fathers’ education is on the level of junior school. The female respondents in this group get more opportunities due to the expansion. The other group is rural-group, in which the females’ inferior position has gotten improved by the expansion which narrows the gender gap of opportunities.