AU’s male/female ratio isn’t only an issue for students looking for a date — many professors at AU see a difference in their classrooms because of the gender gap.
School of Public Affairs professor Linda Mancillas has taught both predominately female and equally distributed classes.
“When you’re teaching classes, if you separate by males and females, I don’t believe they’re getting an equal education,” Mancillas said. “We don’t live our lives separately, at least in the USA and most of the world. We live our lives very integrated and I believe the college classroom is the perfect place to learn to communicate with each other.”
Women earned 57 percent of the 1.65 million bachelor’s degrees awarded in 2009, according to the U.S. Department of Education.
Katharina Vester, acting director of the American Studies Program and a History Department professor, expressed similar ideas about the benefits of mixed-gender classrooms.
“I wonder what will happen when the humanities is female only,” Vester said. “What will this do to the funding and how seriously these disciplines are taken? We should try to balance out all academic disciplines gender-wise to avoid some of these effects.”
Both professors say they change the way they teach when there are fewer males in the room.
“If there are few males in the room, I will often bring in by point the male perspective to address their interests and keep them engaged in the subjects,” Mancillas said.
Megan Cutter, a sophomore in the School of International Service, said the unequal ratio gives fewer differing opinions.
“So academically, if the female perspective is the only one offered, it lowers the quality of discussion,” Cutter said.
Vester said teaching her first all-female course this semester “absolutely changed her teaching style.”
“There were certainly a number of references and jokes that I definitely wouldn’t have done if a guy had been present,” she said. “The discussions in the class were extraordinary. Most people, even the shyest, were talking at one point. There were a number of people who were more dominant, but they were never dominating the entire discussion.”
But Vester said the absence of men might not have been a factor in the quality of the class’s discussions.
“I cannot say whether this excellent experience of class discussion can be attributed to a female-only class, I think it was more the extraordinary students already held these characteristics,” she said.
Colleen Hannum, a sophomore in the Kogod School of Business, said the skewed ratios have a negative effect on the classroom experience.
“It does take away from the discussion a little bit when there aren’t as many voices being heard,” she said. “But I think girls, myself included, are more comfortable speaking in front of each other than boys.”
news@theeagleonline.com
