The University welcomed its most diverse freshman class to campus last fall, but the student body’s diversity with regard to gender does not extend into many areas of study.
According to the Spring semester’s 14th day Enrollment data, while the University has a slight majority of females at 51 percent of the undergraduate population, there are large discrepancies between genders within University programs.
The College of Engineering has a total enrollment of 4,055, but 3,230 of them are male. The College of Agriculture has 1,252 students enrolled, but 335 are male. But only one in three students the College of Art and Design students are male.
College of Agriculture instructor Luke Laborde said his impression is nine in 10 of his students are female.
Laborde’s former student, renewable natural resources junior Jessica Waller, said there may be more females in her college because the field doesn’t guarantee a lot of money.
“There are ways to make money, but when it comes down to it, you’re not going to be making engineer salary,” Waller said. “I think girls are not as concerned with that. It may be just an assumption, and it may be a wrong assumption, but if you look in engineering, there’s mostly males.”
Sociology professor Dana Berkowitz said she doesn’t think the gender dispersion at the University is necessarily due to future salaries.
“I would say that the reason why you have gender segregation at the University and in different colleges and departments is because as very young children, we are trapped into different specialties,” Berkowitz said. “So you learn very different qualities and skills based upon the toys and games you’re encouraged to play as children.”
Berkowitz said boys’ toys are geared toward building and constructing, and girls’ toys are more centered on nurturing and caregiving.
“Boys are socialized to sort of always be able to have the right answer, and where arts and English and humanities, you don’t necessarily have an answer, and I think that has a lot to do with gender in schools,” Berkowitz said.
The skills picked up in childhood from toys and socialization when they are young can be tracked into what people choose to study.
Renewable natural resources senior Ryker Doskey said he chose the School of Renewable Natural Resources because he wants to go to veterinary school to be a veterinarian for pet reptiles.
“It’s kind of hard to tell when a reptile is sick,” Doskey said. “I didn’t realize it until [now], but now that I think about it, most of my classes are women.”
Doskey said he has enjoyed the classes in his major and plans to go to the LSU Vet School after some post- graduate work. In the past, Doskey had various reptiles as pets and even bred his female bearded dragon.
Berkowitz said the gender majorities in education are also related to ethnicity.
“There’s a much larger story to be told,” Berkowitz said. “If you look if you look at the numbers, you’ll find that white middle class boys are still very much represented in the student population, but what you’re seeing less of is boys and men of color.”
There are more female students than male students at the University, but there are fewer Hispanic and African- American males than African-American and Hispanic females going to college, Berkowitz said.
Berkowitz said the percentage of males compared to females enrolled in a University program might mirror the faculty of the program because people look up to role models of the same gender.