From the happiness gap recently reported in The New York Times to the gender gap at colleges that has spawned alarmist articles, there seems to be a habit within the media of portraying male and female achievement as a zero-sum game.
Over the past few years, a national trend has emerged of women outnumbering men both in college applicant pools and on campus. Whitman is no exception.
Whitman College is predominantly female, with overall enrollment currently at 56.3 percent female and 43.7 percent male.
“It’s a national trend; it’s not unique to Whitman. It’s not really even sudden, it’s really been over maybe the last seven to 10 years. There are more women graduating from high school than men and certainly more matriculating to college,” said Director of Admission Kevin Dyerly. “The national average right now as far as college enrollment is close to 60 percent women, 40 percent men.”
While the first-year, sophomore and senior classes all conform to the higher female ratio trend, the junior class is actually only 46 percent female.
“Our admission rates between men and women are pretty consistent; there’s not a huge disparity in admission rates,” said Dyerly. “It has to do with the applicant pool, and it also has to do with our yield, or matriculation. So if we admit 1,400 students to get 400, some years you’re just going to end up getting more men. You never know the factors that are going to contribute to making the decision,” said Dyerly.
Some are concerned that exceptionally qualified women are unfairly being rejected in an attempt to maintain gender balance. A recent Higher Education Chronicle article wonders why women, who are being “discriminated” against, aren’t filing lawsuits en masse. It claims that less stellar male applicants are given preference over their more impressive female competitors.
At least at Whitman this specter of gender “affirmative action” is non-existent.
“The important message is that we want to make sure that any student who is admitted is qualified, and so while we’re building a diverse student body that we hope reflects not only higher education but society, sure, gender could be one of those factors, but there are so many factors that go into our decisions,” said Dyerly.
There are too many variables involved in the admissions process for Whitman to effectively maintain an artificial gender balance, Dyerly pointed out.
“I don’t think you can boil it down to just male or female. It’s more sophisticated than that. Rarely ever would it come down to just two files sitting here and the only difference would be male or female. It’s at a more macro level than that. No single factor is ever going to necessarily be the determining one. It’s a holistic approach,” said Dyerly.
According to Professor Melissa Wilcox, chair of the gender studies department, the language of affirmative action in this case might point less to a legitimate source of outrage for women than it does to implicitly racist attitudes about affirmative action itself.
“The same argument has been used for years to argue that Title IX disadvantages men and that affirmative action disadvantages whites, so this is kind of a backdoor way I think of using the case of women to prove that in fact affirmative action policies disadvantage the dominant group” said Wilcox.
The central concern, however, is that this trend illuminates a need to address a problem with boys. Boys are being disenfranchised and measures need to be taken to help them.
“Often this problem is described as being traceable all the way back to elementary school, where boys’ academic potential is being limited because they have to sit in classrooms all day. The irony is that the education system has not really changed “men still had to sit in classrooms all day when they constituted the majority of college students,” said senior gender studies major Nicole Pexton.
Dyerly echoed the popular boy problem dialogue but not with overwhelming concern.
“We do see a trend sometimes with male applicants where they might be a slower starter in high school. So sometimes we’ll see an applicant where we think, ‘This is a maturing male.’ I think that’s a national trend. Part of that, I think, is that men oftentimes mature or develop later in junior high or high school than women do. We don’t always assume that’s the case for a man, but oftentimes we’ll see that in letters of recommendation,” said Dyerly.
It is suggested that many of the skills valued in schools –– “for example, good behavior, organization and asking others for –– help” are “female” skills.
According to one article in the Weekly Standard, these skills are “the touchy-feely stuff.” According to a study by Brian A. Jacob of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, they are “non-cognitive skills.” In an ironic twist, the argument seems to say that boys are essentially being disadvantaged unfairly by their biology.
But it’s not clear that there have been significant changes in elementary or secondary education that would account for such a disadvantage.
“I’m inclined to say that we’re not just talking about women somehow having an advantage over men in college, which is, I think, the direction that a lot of these explanations want to go, and I’m not convinced by that. I don’t believe that we have primary and secondary classrooms that are somehow privileging girls in the way that classrooms used to privilege boys,” said Wilcox.
What, then, might account for the lower number of men?
“It may be that we’re dealing with militarization, which is drawing middle class men too; we’re dealing with incarceration; we’re dealing with shifting images of ideal masculinity for middle class white men, where being smart is not cool,” said Wilcox.
Wilcox noted that the gender gap is not consistent across race and class. Much of the gender gap dialogue obscures these significant factors and the issue is chalked up as simply one of gender.
“I would worry that when we start talking across the board about ‘the gender gap,’ that because we’re not talking specifically about race and class, we’re assuming that the people being disadvantaged are middle class white men. I’m not sure that’s really the case. And so, I think we need to ask some very hard questions about what role race is playing and what role class is playing here, and whether in fact what we’re seeing is an even stronger loss of men of color, and of working class and poor men, and that is probably where the outreach needs to go,” said Wilcox.
Another concern that has cropped up is the social impact of a gender skew. How will it affect the dating scene on campuses? One of the dominant concerns is how women will find dates and husbands with fewer options. Whitman, however, is not overly concerned.
“As we continue to try to be a co-ed college and have as diverse a student body as possible, that gender balance could be considered one of those factors. We certainly don’t want to get skewed so far as 70/30. That could really impact the social scene, the academic life and character of the college if we got to 70/30 or whatnot,” said Dyerly.
In response to the dating anxiety, Wilcox said, “Well, isn’t that heterosexist?”
All the potential problems aside, the parameters of the popular dialogue surrounding the trend are themselves revealing. Lacking conspicuously in the gender gap discourse is the trend’s tremendously positive implications for women.
“The positive side of this trend is that it’s become increasingly thinkable in most subcultures in the U.S. for women to be intelligent and academically talented and to want to go to college,” said Wilcox.
Rather than treating it at least in part as a victory for women, the focus of the media is with a perceived threat to dominant patriarchal and heterosexist paradigms.
“It’s interesting that it’s receiving all this attention; it’s interesting that that’s the gender gap we’re talking about when we’ve still got glass ceilings for women all over the place in employment. Take a look at the science division of every school, take a look at the ranks of faculty. The gender gap, when you look at the picture overall, is still very, very much about men having more access, at least when you hold all other factors constant,” said Wilcox.
“The opportunities for women in higher education have expanded dramatically. The social acceptability, which goes hand-in-hand with opportunities, has expanded dramatically; the willingness of teachers to treat girls from the very earliest ages as equally intelligent and equally capable as boys has expanded, although not to the extent that one might like. We can still have the [former] president of Harvard saying that women’s brains just aren’t quite as capable of science and math,” said Wilcox.
According to Pexton, the framework of the dialogue itself should be questioned.
“There are certainly many underlying assumptions that aren’t being questioned in this so-called gender crisis in higher education. When there are more women attaining higher levels of education they can be perceived as a threat because they’ll start competing for higher-level, traditionally male-dominated occupations. This attention toward the gender gap seems to me to be thinly veiled anxiety about the changing structure of gendered societal power dynamics. Perhaps in a few years, when people become adjusted to a high concentration of women on campuses, they will cease to notice or even consider it an issue,” said Pexton.