Tom McKiver/The Mirror

You’re sitting in class. You look around, surveying your fellow Stags and their reactions to the professor’s questions. You start to notice, more and more, that the majority of students who answer these questions or participate in class are the ladies of Fairfield, rather than the gentlemen.

How pronounced is this discrepancy here on Fairfield’s campus? After doing some research into the male/female breakdown of academics, the answer remains somewhat unclear.

Phi Beta Kappa, one of the most prestigious honor societies in the country, has a chapter here on campus. Even after taking the male/female ratio, Fairfield still seems to have “smarter” girls on campus: only 30% of Phi Beta Kappa members are men.

Karen Pellegrino, Director of Undergraduate Admission,  maintains that Fairfield does not seek to recruit males any more than it does females: “We are conscious of the male/female breakdown in the class, but there are no special activities in place [to recruit more males], nor would you find a vast discrepancy between the quality of the men and women admitted.”

While it remains unclear to what extent Fairfield mirrors national trends, women are outperforming their male counterparts in the classrooms not just at Fairfield but also across the country. Despite Fairfield’s 62% female population, several points ahead of the national average, it remains uncertain how pronounced these gender roles are on campus.

So why then are men falling so far behind?

Numerous studies have been conducted questioning why women are outperforming men throughout the country. Campuses across the country are averaging nearly 60% female populations, and one is hard-pressed to find a college that has a higher male-to-female ratio.

Now that women are outpacing men in the classroom, the trends have only increased towards a heavily female-dominated educational landscape, one in which affirmative action is unofficially practiced in a bias towards recruiting and accepting males into colleges.

Approximately 170,000 more bachelor’s degrees will be bestowed upon women than men this year. If this downward trend continues the last man to receive a bachelor’s degree will do so in 2068, says Dr. Michael Thompson, a school psychologist who has done extensive research in the educational gender gap.

“Boys hear that the way to shine is athletically,” said Thompson.  “And boys get a lot of mixed messages about what it means to be masculine and what it means to be a student. Does being a good student make you a real man? I don’t think so… it’s not  ‘cool.’”

He added, “Girls are being told ‘go for it, you can do it.’… They are getting an immense amount of support.”

A possible reason, argues Dr. Thompson,  lies with fathers and other male role models.

“Where are the men?” he asked. “Why aren’t men advocating for boys? We know that boys who have fathers who go to PTA meetings, those boys get better grades.”

Christina Hoff Sommers, a former college professor, says a lot of the blame towards this new gender inequality can be placed on feminists.

“In order to advance girls, [feminists] exaggerated how vulnerable girls were, and they understated the needs of boys,” she said.

In other words, she argues, the reaction from the feminist movement outweighed the actual problem of gender inequity. Women simply had a stronger foundation of support than men, with more advocacy and encouragement.

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