Walking the halls of Lane, you are sure to see a plethora of types of people: a talkative group of upperclassmen, a teacher trying to escape the sea of students, a lost freshman. Turning the corner and heading into an English classroom, though, much of this diversity seems to disappear.
Sophomore Ben Sweeney, currently in Writing Center Instructors I and in the Omega concentration, said that “there are so few guys. I think within Omega, that’s changing a little bit, I don’t know. But the gender ratios are crazy.”
Take the Creative Writing elective, for example, where the ratio lies at “about 20-8 girls to boys. And you know, some of [the] students are gender non-conforming and assigned female at birth, and we have to account for that. But the rough breakdown appears to be 5-2 girls to boys,” according to the class’s teacher, Dane Haiken.
Encouraging women to pursue an education and career in STEM fields, while still a modern campaign, has been around for a little bit now; posters depicting a female bioengineer or astrophysicist often now cloak the walls of science labs. Diversity within research groups is known to increase the variety of research methods and questions asked, according to a Stanford study—but this attempt of inclusion does not yet reach the humanities.
Part of this gender separation may come from the lack of outreach of English electives, said senior Writing Center Instructors I student Jack Cherry. “Traditionally a guy is friends with more guys, and a girl is friends with more girls. So if [girls] take the class, then they tell their friends, so [the boys] know less about [the electives],” said Cherry.
While the marketing and outreach of classes may be important at Lane, women are consistently earning more bachelor’s degrees in the humanities than men at the national level, according to a study conducted by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Women are earning 62% of all humanities degrees, according to the same study.
Part of the lack of men in the humanities leads back to a broader societal issue, according to Sweeney. “There is the stereotype—the humanities are such a feminine field…like, to be creative or express oneself is feminine, is bad,” Sweeney said.
Despite the feminine stereotypes Sweeney mentioned, Haiken found a potential contrast from the historical background of writing—even though he said he is not in agreement with the associations he describes. “Writing in America has had a very sort of ‘macho’ association. You know, you think of Ernest Hemingway. You know the hard drinking, sort of man’s man, who sits at a typewriter and smokes a cigarette, that sort of thing. I think that’s one thing that makes creative writing have less of a gender disparity,” said Haiken.
Not all English electives at Lane, then, face the same issues, but it is still clear that a significantly larger number of girls and gender non-conforming students enroll in these classes; the Philosophy elective is the sole outlier as the only English elective with more boys enrolled than girls.
