A Woman's Place Is: In the College?

The UC presidency isn’t the only place where women have been making strides. Increasingly, college is becoming a women’s world, according to national enrollment figures. At the University of Cincinnati, about 53 percent of the enrollment is female.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the college classroom was a mainly male bastion, with women’s enrollment lagging behind men. Nationally, women’s enrollment equaled men’s by 1978, and women have been on par or in the majority ever since. Researchers at Northeastern University’s Center for Labor Market Studies predict that by the year 2010, there will be 138 women for every 100 men in colleges, based on projections from the U.S. Education Department.

At UC, women now outnumber men 17,372-15,603 (all campuses). That means the student body is 53 percent female and 47 percent male. If you factor out branch campuses, however, the gender breakdown is more like 50-50. Nationally, according to the latest figures available from the U.S. Education Department (2000), women made up just over 56 percent of college enrollment, while men accounted for 43 percent.

Looking back over the past 30 years at UC, the gender gap has been shifting gradually in women’s favor. Three decades ago, UC remained a man’s world predominately, with females accounting for only 38 percent of the student body. Twenty years ago, women remained in the minority, but had gained much ground, reaching 48 percent of UC’s enrollment. Looking back 10 years ago at UC, they had the edge on males, with 51 percent of enrollment.

While Anne Sisson Runyan, director of the academically-focused UC Center for Women’s Studies, celebrates the success of the women’s movement that these figures represent, she cautions that there are still problems to surmount. “I think this is really the fruition of women’s struggles for equality in education. When we consider that 30 years ago, women were a definite minority, this is an accomplishment of the women’s movement. But the darker side of it is that women with college educations still make less money on average than men with high school educations. For many women, college is the only alternative, because without it they would make even less. Unlike men, women know they must go to college to earn a livable wage.”

Runyan also points out that because of the higher number of women on campuses today, colleges and universities must be even more attentive to female students’ needs and issues. At UC, the Women’s Initiative Network (WIN) is one group that works to improve the climate for women on campus. WIN was, in fact, one of the entities that put forward Nancy Zimpher’s name for consideration to UC’s presidential search committee.

The need for such a group stems partly from the reality that while women have increased numbers at the undergraduate level, in many graduate programs, women are still underrepresented, points out Barbara Rinto, director of the UC Women’s Center, which oversees student services and activities related to females. “We know that the fields that have more senior women faculty tend to attract more female graduate students. Improving women’s representation in graduate programs requires us to support efforts to increase the number of women in the faculty ranks. These issues are linked.”

While women still do not enter “hard” sciences such as engineering in the same numbers as men, they have reached enrollment parity in areas like medicine and law, says Runyan. The figures below show some of the strides in certain disciplines over the last 30 years. All of the UC figures have been provided by the Office of Institutional Research:

For national numbers on college enrollment by gender, see:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2002/proj2012/table_10.asp