Gender Division in Sociology Degree Program – Causes and Effects?

In recent years there has been a tendency for Swedish higher education students to choose to study degree programmes rather than single subject courses. Due to the decreasing number of students taking for example sociology, Halmstad University in Sweden has constructed a degree programme, Sociologi och socialt utvecklingsarbete, with focus on community development and social action, with Sociology as the main specific subject. In the autumn of 2007 ninety-five percent of the 61 students were female, compared to the seventy-five percent of female students in sociology degree courses that Sweden has had in the past seven years. An increased gender division previously related to specific professional fields such as technology/engineering and care/nursing, seems to come into academic disciplines that earlier have not had problems with such a skewed gender representation. I look upon gender division in all its shapes as problematic. The paper is based on a lager study on students at Halmstad University in which the students’ motives for taking the sociology programme and their expectations on sociology as well as the programme are investigated. The importance of equal gender representation in sociology is discussed in this paper and its consequences for educational practices in sociology as well as the contents and status of the discipline in the future will be illuminated