Why do people choose one university course over another? Is it primarily a question of career prospects and salary expectations?
The research we are publishing in the journal Formation et emploi shows that another factor plays a central role: the social prestige associated with professions. But this prestige does not affect girls and boys in the same way.
Based on more than 120 years of data on university enrollments in France (1899-2022) , we highlight a marked asymmetry between male and female trajectories in two historically prestigious fields: law and medicine.
For boys, these two paths function as competing options. For girls, on the other hand, they appear complementary. In other words, career choices are not based on the same considerations depending on gender, even when the paths offer comparable social prestige.
Why is this result important?
Since the 19th century , doctors and lawyers have been among the most socially valued professions. This symbolic proximity means that studying law and medicine can, in some cases, appear as alternatives when access to one of the courses becomes more uncertain.
This is precisely what we observe among students: when the number of male students in medicine decreases, the number in law increases. Prestige then fuels a logic of competition and social risk management, with law acting as a fallback option to maintain a high level of status and social recognition.
The career paths of female students tell a different story. The increase in the number of women in medicine is accompanied by a rise in their presence in law. Far from a simple substitution, this creates a ripple effect. Female success in a prestigious field acts as a collective signal, legitimizing and spreading academic ambitions toward other long and socially valued careers. Prestige here functions less as an instrument of competition than as a lever for gradual emancipation, contributing to the overall feminization of higher education.
How did we proceed?
Our analysis is based on an original database that tracks, over a long period, the number of male and female students in law and medicine in France. To identify the interactions between these fields of study, we used statistical models that allow us to analyze the dynamic and causal relationships between time series, without imposing their meaning a priori.
This approach is part of a broader analysis of the phenomenon of overcrowding in higher education. When a prestigious program becomes saturated or highly regulated, students, historically influenced by their social background, adjust their choices with a delay, based on perceived signals regarding career prospects and prestige. These delays produce cyclical movements comparable to a “cobweb” effect, or “spider web model ,” well-known in the social sciences: decisions made today in reaction to a past situation contribute to creating the imbalances of tomorrow.
We also isolated the period 1971-2020 in order to analyze the role of the numerus clausus in medicine. This institutional constraint appears as a major instrument of indirect regulation of the university system, modifying the balance of elite programs, but in a differentiated way according to gender.
What are the prospects?
Our results show that selection mechanisms, even when intended to be neutral, produce lasting gendered effects. For men, the numerus clausus acts primarily as a direct constraint, leading to redirection towards other prestigious fields of study.
For women, it is part of a more circular dynamic, where the rise of female ambitions is linked, with a certain delay, to mechanisms of institutional regulation.
This historical perspective sends an essential message to those responsible for educational policies: in the absence of anticipatory management, training systems tend to reproduce, cycle after cycle and generation after generation, phenomena of congestion and misalignment, closely linked to the historical and institutional contexts in which they are embedded.
Integrating the effects of prestige, gender and expectations into the regulation of training provision therefore appears as a key condition to avoid the repetition of past imbalances and to design a higher education that is both efficient and more equitable.
Author Bios: Magali Jaoul-Grammare is a CNRS Research Fellow in Economics and Claude Diebolt is Research Director at the CNRS, UMR BETA at the University of Strasbourg
