Investigative Report on Factors Affecting Women College Students' Choice of Specialty

Abstract

Currently, an obvious difference is evident in the areas of specialization of female students compared to that of male students. The former have patently fewer opportunities to study in the fields of science, math, engineering, environmental science and technology, information, and hi-tech. Most women students concentrate in arts such as Chinese and foreign languages. Clearly women students' studies are restricted to a limited field of disciplines. In an effort to be enlightened on the subject, we explored the factors affecting women students' choice of a specialty. Our survey was conducted mainly through questionnaires. Taking into account the differences among various types of institutions of higher learning, we selected for our survey women students from three universities: Huanan Teachers' University, Jinan University, and Huanan University of Science and Engineering. The students who are chosen are from different educational levels: junior college, college, and graduate school. The questions asked involved the students' basic situation, their degree of satisfaction with the specialties that they had chosen, and the different factors that influenced them at the time they applied for their specialties. In addition to making use of the questionnaires in our study, we also interviewed a number of different types of women college students.