International research into stratification in and through higher education (HE) emphasises the interconnections between high selectivity within admission processes and stratification of universities, and how these in turn (re)produce societal elites (e.g. Bourdieu and Passeron 1979; Stevens 2009; Karabel 2005). Studies in Scandinavian contexts, emphasised processes of horizontal stratification, (i.e. differential access to study programmes) despite strong discourses around meritocracy and egalitarian structures (e.g. Börjesson et al. 2016; Munk and Thomsen 2018). This research tends to focus on social class reproduction, demonstrating how academic attainment and parents’ socioeconomic status strongly shape access into programmes. Meanwhile, other studies concentrate on how gender shapes HE, in relation to choice of study (e.g Kriesi 2019), as well as the formation of gendered student identities (e.g. Archer and DeWitt 2015). However, such research often focuses on a particular institution or programme, without situating it within the national field. This paper sets out to examine the relationship between gendered horizontal stratification in a national field of HE and the processes of gendering at the intersubjective level of a programme’s study culture. Firstly, the stratified nature of the Danish field of HE is established, considering gender, academic attainment and socioeconomic background. This is done via Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA) using register data from Statistics Denmark from 2021 on HE applications. Secondly, the processes of gendering at the highly selective Cognitive Science programme at Aarhus University are examined. The programme is interdisciplinary, ranging across philosophy, linguistics, anthropology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence and psychology and there is an overrepresentation of women. Drawing on the MCA and, Bourdieu’s (1998) and Lamont and Molnár’s (2002) work on social and symbolic boundaries, I examine how hierarchies between the disciplines are mirrored and maintained, and how this shapes understandings of the ‘ideal (gendered) student’. To do so, I analyse interviews with 10 cognitive science students, and observations from the first day of induction week. The study sets out to more fully integrate gender into research on stratification and elite HE. Gender, academic merits and socioeconomic class are shown to intersect in the formation of social and symbolic boundaries both at the structural macro level of the field of HE, but also at the cultural micro level of study programmes. This challenges the perception that the academic achievement of women, their growing participation in HE and their presence in elite study programmes (i.e. the feminization thesis), have eliminated gendered barriers in HE.

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