Social dominance orientation, gender, and increasing educational exposure

Using a large panel sample of undergraduates, we measured the social dominance orientation (SDO) scores of men and women once a year across a 4-year period. Employing repeated-measures ANOVAs, we found that, even after controlling for the character of students' academic majors (hierarchy enhancing or hierarchy attenuating), males showed significantly higher SDO scores than did females across the entire college career. The data are discussed in terms of the invariance hypothesis within social dominance theory.