Every quarter since the beginning of my freshman year, I have been enrolled in at least one course — poetry, for example, or a seminar on a female author — that eventually dwindles to an all-female class.
Usually, the situation goes something like this: on the first day, a lone male walks in, chuckles sheepishly at the professor’s jokes about “providing a diverse perspective” or “being lucky to have all these ladies” and then promptly disappears for the rest of the quarter.
I would sincerely like to think that the guys who decide to drop out of female-dominated courses all have completely legitimate, schedule-based reasons for doing so, but it happens so consistently that there seem to be other forces at play.
Is there something about an all-female class that makes men nervous like how I feel nervous when I walk into a subway car filled with men? Is it that being the only male in a classroom simply means that you are more visible, and thus more likely to be held to a higher standard than your peers?
Or, as I am more likely to believe, do they think that a high percentage of female students indicates that a course is less substantial than one with a more equal ratio?
To understand why guys are dropping out of girl-heavy classes, we have to take into account the fact that generally, more girls seem to gravitate toward the liberal arts than toward the hard sciences, mathematics and engineering.
As an English major, I imagine I witness the vanishing-male phenomenon far more regularly than an engineering student or a math major.
Pages upon pages of studies attempt to explain this imbalance. The less biased ones tend to concur that female students are tacitly and often unintentionally discouraged from studying math and science from a young age, and later on forced to choose between science, technology, engineering, and mathematics careers and having families. The more biased ones claim that the female brain is biologically inferior to the male one when it comes to unraveling technical problems.
I – and hopefully most students at this University – consider this last opinion patently absurd. However, the general sense of lamentation expressed by these studies still holds some sway over the way we think about gender and courses of study.
Both the sociological and the biological explanations for why women tend to gravitate toward the liberal arts are based on the general assumption that there is some sort of impediment between women and the hard sciences. They are not studying, for example, why students of either gender might be intellectually drawn toward English or Art History.
I am extremely happy to be an English major. Literature and writing have always been my driving academic passions, and I am fortunate enough to study brilliant texts under the instruction of brilliant professors in the hopes of someday creating something brilliant myself.
The only real downside to the major is the looming near-certainty of unemployment after graduation, which is an issue that deserves its own column, but my strategy so far has been just to ignore that for as long as possible.
I understand that many women have been disenfranchised both consciously and unconsciously from the sciences, but that is no reason to assume that the liberal arts are a less substantial course of study. The skewed distribution of women in the liberal arts versus the hard sciences is something to be seriously examined.
However, I am hopeful that the primary cause is the fact that my fellow liberal arts majors are deeply passionate about our respective subjects, regardless of gender.
Certainly the outstanding caliber of my peers’ writing and in-class insights would support this theory. Dropping a course because it is too female-heavy insults the abilities of my fellow female liberal arts majors.
Both STEM and liberal arts curriculums can be incredibly challenging. But we should never use the gender of our peers as a gauge of how worthwhile a course is.
Caroline Dean is a Weinberg sophomore. She can be reached at [email protected]
