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Current trends suggest that significant gender disparities exist withinScience, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education atuniversity, with female students being underrepresented in physics, but moreequally represented in life sciences (e.g., biology, medicine). To understandthese trends, it is important to consider the context in which students makedecisions about which university courses to enrol in. The current study seeksto investigate gender differences in STEM through a unique approach thatcombines network analysis of student enrolment data with an interpretive lensbased on the sociological theory of Pierre Bourdieu. We generate a network ofcourses taken by around 9000 undergraduate physics students (from 2009 to 2014)to quantify Bourdieu's concept of field. We explore the properties of thisnetwork to investigate gender differences in transverse movements (betweendifferent academic fields) and vertical movements (changes in students'achievement rankings within a field). Our findings indicate that femalestudents are more likely to make transverse movements into life science fields.We also find that university physics does a poor job in attracting highachieving students, and especially high achieving female students. Of thestudents who do choose to study physics, low achieving female students are lesslikely to continue than their male counterparts. The results and implicationsare discussed in the context of Bourdieu's theory, and previous research. Weargue that in order to remove constraints on female student's study choices,the field of physics needs to provide a culture in which all students feel likethey belong.

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Bourdieu, networks, and movements: Using the concepts of habitus, field  and capital to understand a network analysis of gender differences in  undergraduate physics