Gender Inequality Beyond the Gender Binary: A “Gender Predictive” Approach

Joel Mittleman

America's rapidly expanding college gender gap has refocused public attention on the underachievement of boys. Although scholars have long argued that boys' academic engagement is undercut by dominant masculinity norms, these norms have been largely invisible in quantitative research. Instead, researchers have been restricted to documenting disparities by binary sex, collapsing the entire gender spectrum into a 0 or 1. This binary approach erases the experiences of students who do not adhere to gender norms and is increasingly out-of-step with how gender is understood today. This project provides a way to move beyond this binary framework. Analyzing four decades of high school cohort studies, I will use machine learning to quantify the extent to which students' survey responses conform with the gender norms reported by their peers. By directly measuring gender norms, it becomes possible to analyze students throughout the gender spectrum: both those who adhere strongly to gender norms and those who depart radically from them. Across six separate cohorts, I will use this "gender predictive" approach to analyze students' social, academic and economic outcomes. Reanalyzing these old data in an entirely new way, I will advance a timely new account of masculinity and the rising gender gap in education.

About Joel Mittleman

Joel Mittleman is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame, where he is a faculty affiliate of the Gender Studies Program and the Center for Research on Educational Opportunity. As a quantitative sociologist and social demographer, Mittleman studies inequality with a focus on gender, education and LGBTQ+ populations. Across projects, his research advances innovative tools for analyzing gender inequality beyond the binary categories of female and male. Mittleman’s research has been published in the American Sociological Review, Gender & Society, Sociology of Education, the Journal of Adolescent Health and Educational Researcher. Prior to joining the faculty at Notre Dame, he earned his PhD in Sociology and Social Policy at Princeton University, where he was a trainee in the Office of Population Research.