Women in College: The New Century's Student Body
by Mary Anne Feeney

Originally published July 26, 2000 on studentadvantage.com.

This is the second in a series of articles and columns on the lives of women in college today.

Michelle DeMeo's mother married shortly after she graduated from high school in the 1950s. "Those were still the days when women were the happy homemakers," Michelle said. "College wasn't even an option for them."

Michelle DeMeo, a senior at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts, is the first woman in her family to go to college. Although many of the men in her family had attended, the women had not, largely because her family discouraged them from doing so. "Boys were more favored in that situation," DeMeo said.

DeMeo's mother, however, was determined to make her daughter's future turn out better. "Education and hard work were always stressed in my family," she said. "When it came time for me to go to college, there was no question about it."

When she comes home on breaks, DeMeo said, her mother loves hearing her talk about all she's learned and experienced at school. "The fruits of her life have come into play," she said of her mother. By going to college, she is fulfilling the dream her mother could not pursue.

DeMeo's story isn't an isolated one: She is one of the reasons women now significantly outnumber men in American colleges and universities.

Women Take the Lead

The shift in academia's gender tide is nothing short of impressive. In 1947, 39 percent of those enrolled in college were women, according to the U.S. Department of Education. That number climbed to 57 percent this year and is expected to reach 61 percent by 2009, according to the National Center for Educational Statistics.

"The bottom line is the world is changing in ways women know how to take advantage of and men do not," said Tom Mortenson, senior scholar at the Center for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education and an independent analyst of higher education policy. There are many reasons for more women going to college today, he said, from family encouragement to the bustling economy to improved access to education.

Legislation known as Title IX is also widely cited as a major impetus for the furthering of efforts to equal the playing field between college men and women. Signed into law in 1972, Title IX prohibits public institutions that receive federal funding from excluding women from activities and programs. The legislation has been used to ensure a greater level of sexual equality in everything from college sports to academic courses.

This equality, Mortenson says, is essential in a society that has become increasingly dependent on self-sufficient women. "This is a private service-based economy; a world in which women are excelling," he said. With so many more single mothers in America today than a generation ago, women need to be educationally prepared and economically independent, he said.

An Uphill Battle

However, though women are now entering college at a higher rate than men, the road to earning their degrees isn't much smoother. Thirty percent of all incoming freshmen felt "frequently" overwhelmed by daily tasks in college, according to a Fall 1999 Higher Education Research Institute study. HERI found that twice as many women freshmen felt this way than their male peers.

"I feel a million times more stress now [in college] than I did in high school," DeMeo said. I'm the first woman in my family to go to college. There is a lot more pressure to perform."

There are various reasons for women to feel a high level of stress, ranging from a greater concern for personal safety on campus to greater involvment in campus and local activities.

The HERI study reported that women "spend significantly more time studying, performing volunteer work, participating in student clubs/groups, and tending to housework or child care responsibilities." Men, on the other hand, were found to "spend significantly more time than women exercising or playing sports, watching television, partying and playing video games."

In addition, female students realize the difficulties they will face in the career they are pursuing, so they work to prepare themselves for the competition that lies ahead, DeMeo said. For instance, DeMeo, a premed student majoring in history, said an "established old-boys club" still exists in college that makes it harder for women to succeed in the medical field.

DeMeo herself, however, is a symbol of how women have begun to overcome the disadvantages of the male-centric system. She is presently a coordinator of Project Health Care, a volunteer program for premeds at Bellevue Hospital in New York. Of the 57 students participating in the program, 45 are women, she said.

"Girls are up-and-coming in the medical field," DeMeo said. "Nine out of 12 new residents at Bellevue are women."

In fact, the number of women enrolling in medical school jumped from 38 percent in 1991 to 43 percent by 1997, according to an Association of American Colleges study.

Statistics like these show women are successfully making inroads into traditionally male-dominated fields. But male dominance is still strong in particular fields, such as college-level teaching. Today's professors continue to be mostly men. According to a recent AAUP survey, 39 percent of undergraduate faculty in the U.S. are women — well shy of the 58 percent female student population.

Through her first three years of college, DeMeo has seen only one female professor teach a history course. Generally she would like to see more women professors, she said, because "you're more inclined to speak to them after class."

Sonia Inamdar has also faced obstacles as a female student. A senior at Harvard, Inamdar is majoring in economics — a traditionally male-dominated field. Both she and students she knows have experienced a great deal of stress as women on campus.

"In my field I've had to seek out female professors to talk to," Inamdar said. "In my department, which is one of the biggest departments on campus, there is only one tenured woman professor that I know of, and this professor is mostly involved in outside endeavors.

"Having so few female professors in the fields sends out a signal," Inamdar said. "There's just not a presence of women on campus that you can turn to."

In her economics classes, comprised mostly of male students, "I often think twice before giving my opinion," Inamdar said. "When there are 28 men versus one woman you're more self-conscious; since you're the only female, everyone seems to be scrutinizing what you're saying a little bit more."

Even when female students attempt to fill that leadership vacuum, Inamdar said, they are put down for being too assertive. "I think the women who play an important role on campus are often labeled as being too bitchy," she said.

The academic stresses unique to women may be amplified by the added stress women experience simply by living on campus. In 1999, the National Center for Victims of Crime estimated that one in four women on college campuses have been sexually assaulted.

"[As a woman], I have to be more careful about how I act and how I present myself," Inamdar said. She was significantly impacted by the rape of a fellow student near campus last year. "It was on a busy street near my campus, one that I walk down every day to get to work," she said. "After I heard about the incident, I biked to work instead of walking and always made sure someone was with me if I was walking at night."

Inamdar was also acquainted with another student who was assaulted on campus. "The girl was date-raped by a guy she had been going out with for a while," Inamdar said. "It made me think that you can't be as trusting as you want to be."

Inamdar was shocked by her school's inability to deal with such a violent act against its own students. At first, Harvard decided not to suspend the student, but after female students protested the school eventually forced the perpetrator to take a year off. "He got the same sentence as someone who is caught with marijuana," Inamdar said.

Crossing Boundaries

Unlike DeMeo and Inamdar — whose college lives have been an uphill battle — many college women don't experience problems related to their sex. Karen Mo, a junior majoring in English and political science at the University of Pennsylvania, said her experiences have been mainly positive.

"I've never met conflict in terms of my gender," Mo said. This, despite her assertion that most of her interests "have been more male-oriented," such as music and Web design. "The people I have encountered have been open-minded and are well-informed," she said. "Because of that, they're not going to make assumptions just because I'm a girl." Many of her professors are also female, she said.

In fact, women have done so well in American colleges and universities that men like policy analyst Mortenson have begun to wonder if their concerns are being pushed to the side to make way for women.

"It's been a policy to think of women as having the disadvantage, but it's time we ask the question why the boys aren't doing so well," Mortenson said. "The growing gender gulf is continuing to widen," he warned.

For better or worse, though, women are increasingly gaining a strong foothold in the academic world. "In our generation women have come a long way," DeMeo said. "Now, whether or not you're a girl doesn't play a factor in deciding to go to college."

"Whatever you put your mind to you can do, regardless of your sex," she said.

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The Long Road to Equality
The New Century's Student Body
Blatant Lack of Faculty Equality, Female Profs Say
We, the Teachers (column on female profs)
Freshwoman Primer
Why I Hate Men (column on women's studies)
How Women's Studies Was Born
Mourning the Death of Radcliffe
Where Boys Need Not Apply
Life as a ROTC Woman
The Gender Gap Grows (on trends in specific majors)