Gender and Power: Sex Segregation in American and Polish Higher Education as a Case Study

This article presents a comparative case study of the manifestation of sex segregation in higher education in the United States and in Poland from the end of the 19th century to the 1930s. The study is guided by a theoretical framework, which is organized around a concept of power and derived from The Sources of Social Power by Michael Mann (1986). In the United States, well-developed capitalism, democracy, and the ideology of separate spheres underlay the high collective power of men, their distributive power over women and—consequently—high levels of sex segregation in higher education. Contrastly, in Poland, weak capitalism and lack of democracy meant less collective and distributive power of men, which produced lower levels of educational sex segregation.