Higher Education Of Women Essay ⋆ Education Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

In 2004, women constituted 57 percent of all undergraduate enrollments in U.S. higher education and 59 percent of graduate enrollments, whereas women make up 43 percent of tenured faculty and slightly more than 20 percent of college and university presidents. Female students and faculty are not proportionally distributed across academic fields, although the trend toward women entering fields traditionally dominated by men is increasing slightly. Female faculty and administrators are more likely to be in community colleges than in four-year institutions and less likely to be at research universities than in any other postsecondary education sector. Federal policies (e.g., Title IX and affirmative action) have been responsible for substantial increases in women’s participation in higher education, and White women have benefited disproportionately compared to women of color. Women’s status on campus influences and is influenced by campus climate, the pattern of perceptions, and attitudes related to gender. This entry looks at the record of women in postsecondary education and briefly examines issues of campus climate.

Historical Perspectives

Higher education in the United States dates to the founding of Harvard College in 1636; women entered postsecondary education two centuries later through the establishment of academies and seminaries for women in the 1820s and 1830s. There is some debate about which institution should be counted as the first women’s college, with arguments for Mount Holyoke (founded as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary in 1837, becoming Mount Holyoke College in 1893) and for Wesleyan College (chartered Georgia Female College in 1836, opened in 1839). By 1880, there were 155 women’s colleges, a number that peaked at 214 in 1960 and has declined since as women’s colleges have merged with men’s and coeducational institutions or made strategic decisions to admit men. In 2006, there were fewer than 75 women’s colleges, educating less than 1 percent of college-going women. Most participate in the Women’s College Coalition (http://www.womenscolleges.org).

Coeducation—the practice of educating male and female students at the same institution—has a more clear-cut history, beginning when Oberlin College admitted women to its collegiate department in 1837. Coeducation at public colleges and universities happened later in the nineteenth century, beginning with the University of Iowa, which was coeducational from its 1855 inception. There was significant resistance to coeducation at several leading public institutions, including the University of Michigan.

The Civil War resulted in a dearth of available college-age men, which in turn led a number of institutions to admit female students, a trend that continued after the war was over. The Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862 provided funding for public institutions and did not make any requirements for or against women’s education. The normal schools, also public, made a substantive contribution to the higher education of women, enrolling coeducational classes from their start. Public, historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) were often coeducational from their start, and private Fisk University was founded in 1866 to educate male and female students.

Historically, women of color have had less access to higher education than have White women. The private women’s colleges admitted very few known African American students, and legal racial segregation kept many public and private institutions closed to nonWhite women until the Supreme Court’s decision on Brown v. Board of Education was enforced. African American and Latina students currently attend college at lower rates than do their White and Asian American peers. American Indian women are more likely than American Indian men to go on to higher education, but they remain less likely than women from any other racial group to attend college. As a group, Asian American women are as likely as White women to attend college, but within the Asian American community, differences in college attendance rates are apparent by ethnicity and generation in the United States (e.g., a third-generation Korean American is more likely to attend college than a first-generation Hmong woman).

Other groups of women have faced substantial challenges to attend higher education. Discrimination against Catholic students, and a desire to educate Catholic women in distinctly Catholic environments, led to the establishment of Catholic women’s colleges. Jewish women and men faced tacit and explicit quotas in admissions to selective private colleges throughout the early twentieth century. Women and men from working-class and poor backgrounds have struggled and continue to struggle to gain access to and to afford a college education, as have immigrants to the United States. Women with disabilities are attending college in increasing numbers due to changes in public policy, but they remain underrepresented in four-year institutions.

Access Policies

Affirmative action and Title IX have played key roles in increasing women’s access to higher education in general and specific programs within it. Affirmative action, a policy that aims to correct for historic underrepresentation of members of particular racial, ethnic, or gender groups, and its companion practice, Equal Employment Opportunity, were created in Executive Order 11246 (1965, amended to include gender in 1967) issued by President Lyndon B. Johnson. Women—and White women in particular—have benefited in university hiring practices through these policies. Faculty searches that were formerly conducted out of view through predominantly male networks of scholars were opened for public posting and administrative oversight, with accountability for recruiting a diverse applicant pool and advancing qualified female and minority candidates through the process. Affirmative action in selective college admissions had a similar effect, although it did not mandate that all-male institutions admit female students.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 did require public institutions—and any other institution receiving federal financial assistance, which includes student financial aid and thus includes all but a few postsecondary institutions—to open their doors to women. Within institutions, programs and activities that had been previously sex-segregated (including intramural recreation and intercollegiate athletics; military training programs such as the Reserve Officers Training Corps, or ROTC; marching bands; and certain majors such as nursing) were compelled to allow male and female students the opportunity to participate.

Although Title IX is now known largely for its ongoing impact on collegiate athletics, it is important to note that it had a much more sweeping effect on higher education and women’s opportunities; known paths to elite leadership ranks (such as the Ivy League colleges and the national military academies) were opened to women for the first time. Title IX is not without controversy, and debates about its relevance arise among calls for more single-sex public education for boys and girls, but its impact on higher education is profound and enduring.

Status Of Women

Women make up the majority of student enrollments in higher education, a trend that is predicted to continue. Proponents of gender equity point out that women remain underrepresented in fields of study that lead to high-paying careers in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology and are overrepresented in traditionally female professional preparation programs in teaching, nursing, and clerical support. Progress toward equity has been made in graduate and professional programs in medicine, law, and business, and enrollments in life sciences undergraduate and graduate programs have also leveled off at about 50 percent female.

Female faculty remain underrepresented overall and especially in science, mathematics, engineering, and technology. Women are less likely to have tenure or be in tenure-track faculty positions than are men, less likely to be in research universities, more likely to teach in community colleges, and less likely to be in full-time positions in any sector of postsecondary education. An explanation for this underrepresentation, called the “pipeline argument,” has been advanced; it asserts that once female undergraduate and graduate enrollments rise in areas where women have traditionally been underrepresented, then the proportion of female faculty in these areas will rise in time.

The pipeline argument alone cannot account for gender patterns in faculty work, but it does lend itself to the metaphor of a “leaky pipeline,” which seeks to explain what factors in postsecondary education and society work to reduce the number of tenured female faculty. Factors often cited include campus climate, work-family priority conflicts, an increase in the use of part-time and non-tenure-track faculty across higher education, sex discrimination, and race discrimination that compounds other factors for women of color.

The pipeline argument has also been used in attempts to explain the disproportionately low number of women in college presidencies. Additional factors proposed as challenges to women’s academic leadership include the fact that most college and university boards of trustees are overwhelmingly male, and persistent cultural stereotypes of leaders as White men. Women of color leading predominantly White institutions face additional challenges and have few role models.

Campus Climate

Running across discussions of women’s status in higher education is the issue of gender climate on campus. Campus climate describes attitudes and perceptions that define the cultural context of an institution and its members. Gender climate, in particular, refers to common patterns in beliefs, perceptions, and behaviors related to sex differences and gender norms on campus. Campus climates have been described as warm and welcoming to members of both sexes and individuals who display a range of gender identities, or as cool and unwelcoming. Bernice Sandler (http://www.bernicesandler.com) and her colleagues coined the term chilly climate to describe hostile or indifferent campus climates for women and girls.

A key element to understanding and assessing campus climate lies in its nature as both objective or measurable and subjective or perceived. Factors that contribute to a warm climate include policies and practices that clearly prohibit sex and gender discrimination and that effectively prevent harassment based on sex and/or gender; equitable treatment of women and girls in the curriculum; the presence of female role models among faculty, student leaders, and administrators; and a history of welcoming and including women on campus. Factors that contribute to a chilly climate include an absence of any of the warming factors, plus the presence or perceived presence of sexual and gender harassment and discrimination, inequitable treatment of women, and persistent “micro-aggressions” that convey the message that women are not central to the mission and function of the institution.

Although campus climate is largely intangible, it has been shown to affect satisfaction, persistence, and achievement. Person-environment models of college persistence and professional achievement explain the mechanisms through which chilly or hostile campus climate dampens women’s expectations of themselves and leads to diminished outcomes. Chilly climate in particular academic fields and in administration contributes to the leaky pipeline rationale for the dearth of tenured women in the sciences and in senior campus leadership. Women’s colleges, where the gender climate is arguably the warmest for women, historically have very high levels of student and alumnae satisfaction and have produced graduates who achieve at disproportionately high levels in academic, business, education, and leadership fields, including those in which women have been and remain underrepresented.

Bibliography:

Glazer-Raymo, J. (2001). Shattering the myths: Women in academe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Martinez Aleman, A. M., & Renn, K. A. (2004). Women in higher education: An encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.
(2005). Digest of education statistics tables and figures, 2005. Retrieved August 25, 2006, from http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d05/lt3.asp#16
Solomon, B. M. (1986). In the company of educated women: A history of women and higher education in America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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