February 2, 2012
Does your gender affect your choice of a college major? Whether or not gender plays a conscious role in this decision process, the numbers at Hamilton reveal that many concentrations at Hamilton contain a decided gender imbalance.
In the Class of 2011, there were more female than male concentrators in almost every discipline: Female concentrators outpaced male concentrators in the Arts, the Sciences and the Humanities. In the Social Sciences, however, about 50 percent of male seniors elected to pursue social sciences, while only about 35 percent of female students made that choice.
Since Hamilton merged with Kirkland College in 1977, the College has seen a changing face of gender distribution across majors. The first class admitted after the merger was 55 percent male and 45 percent female. Beginning with the Class of 2001, however, women outnumbered men 53 to 47 percent.
The merger not only challenged the ratios of the campus body; it also introduced new academic elements to the Hill. New departments such as Sociology, Comparative Literature, Theater and Dance all became regular course offerings at Hamilton. According to Publius Virgilius Rogers Professor of American History Maurice Isserman’s book On the Hill, Women’s Studies and American Studies became the first interdisciplinary majors offered while Kirkland and Hamilton were still separate institutions. Upon merging, women made up 19 percent of the faculty. By 2009, female professors were 45 percent of faculty.
In the Department of Comparative Literature, which is deeply rooted in the traditions of Kirkland College, the gender distribution also seems to harken back to the days of Kirkland. In the Class of 2011 there were two graduated male Comparative Literature concentrators as opposed to 10 female concentrators. This trend has held steady since 1999. Only once in the past 10 years has there been an equal division of gender in the Comparative Literature major: the Class of 2007 saw five concentrators of each gender.
The dominance of female concentrators is not unique to comparative literature—in most of the Hamilton classes in languages and letters women greatly outnumber men. Additionally, there is a more even distribution of female majors in the Sciences. Hamilton’s distribution of concentration by gender challenges the national trend. According to Forbes Magazine, the most popular major for women is business. In the Social Sciences, men and women are equally represented, while women are underrepresented in the hard sciences.
At Hamilton the greatest gender disparity is in economics and government. Last year, 25 male (about 10 percent of male graduates) and 14 female (5 percent) Government majors were graduated. In the Class of 2011, there were 60 male concentrators in Economics (25 percent) and 17 women (six percent). There has not been a great change in this distribution of gender over the past decade. The Class of 1999 saw 43 men and 13 women major in Economics.
Two Hamilton professors, Anne Owens and Elizabeth Jensen undertook a study in 2001 of how to retain more female students in Economics classes. They found that pre-determined attitudes external to the classroom have a great effect on female students’ choice to remain in Econ classes. As a result of their study, they recommended that “allocating more time to discussion and more time to topics that are traditionally considered to be of female interest to women will encourage students of both sexes.”
Senior and economic concentrator Sara Leshen noted that, “the gender divide is certainly apparent in classes (there have definitely been classes where there have been five or six girls out of the 40 people). But it certainly hasn’t impacted my learning experience in any overt ways and it definitely didn’t affect my decision to become a major.”
For Leshen, being one of few female concentrators in the class of 2012 has had several positive effects. She said, “although other female students may find it intimidating, I find it’s helped me develop stronger relationships with female professors and has sometimes been a motivational factor.” Leshen finds that the experience of being the “lone female” is not at all unique to Hamilton. She has had a similar experience at her internships in the field of economics.
However, female Hamilton students may not be deterred from economics so much as male students are attracted to it. A 2004 study at Colgate University found that while female students may be deterred from taking economics classes for myriad reasons, another cause of the gender imbalance could be that male students are more likely to remain in economics classes regardless of their academic performance, whereas women who perform poorly will abandon the route of concentration.