Her College Experience Is Not His

September 26, 2008
Chronicle of Higher Education

Her College Experience Is Not His
By Linda Sax

At a time when national attention is focused on the relative numbers of women and men on college campuses, little is known about the characteristics of the two genders and how aspects of college further shape those characteristics. The popular messages are oversimplified: Gender equity has been achieved, women are an academic success story, and men are experiencing an educational crisis.

Each of those messages has some truth, but they tend to convey the status of women and men as a zero-sum game: If one gender is succeeding, the other must be failing. The reality is that both genders face obstacles and challenges in their pursuit of higher education, and we need a deeper understanding of the nuances and implications of the gender gap in college.

As a scholar in gender issues, I have studied survey responses of more than eight million students who participated over the past four decades in the freshman survey of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program at the University of California at Los Angeles. I have also examined longitudinal information obtained by the College Student Survey of students who entered college in 1994 and were followed up in 1998. Such data has enabled me to assess how gender shapes the characteristics of women and men entering college, how both genders experience college, and how college influences them. And I have found that women and men differ significantly from each other — and in ways that raise many questions for further research:

Connection to family. It has largely been assumed that leaving home is equally important for both genders, but we have found that it may be especially beneficial for female students, who develop greater scholarly confidence, stronger leadership skills, and a healthy sense of emotional well-being. For men, whether they live close to home or thousands of miles away is less relevant.

Today, however, students and parents stay in frequent contact with each other. The challenge facing colleges is how to encourage women to develop a healthy sense of independence at the same time that they stay connected to their parents.

Questions for future research: Do women turn to their families because of academic or social difficulties? Does their dependence on their families inhibit their personal and academic development? How do the type and frequency of student-parent communications relate to students' personal, academic, and social development?

Student-faculty interactions. Gender differences fall into three main categories. First, while interactions with faculty members encourage liberalism, political engagement, and a commitment to social activism among all students, we generally find that the more time men spend engaged in one-on-one interactions with faculty members, the more liberal they become in their political views and the greater concern they develop about race relations and the welfare of the larger society.

Second, men who work with faculty members on research or receive advice, encouragement, and support from them hold more-egalitarian views on gender roles. They become less supportive of the notion that "the activities of married women are best confined to the home and family." For women, the opposite is true: Those who spend more time with faculty members, especially in the context of research, become more committed to traditional gender roles.

A third theme relates to professors' influence on women's sense of confidence and well-being. Feeling dismissed by faculty members in the classroom has negative consequences for women's long-term academic aspirations, confidence in math, and even physical health.

Faculty members would benefit from a better understanding of the implications of their actions for students. They need to recognize that even when they believe they are treating male and female students the same way, the two genders may internalize those interactions differently.

Questions for future research: Does the nature of student-faculty interactions depend on where those interactions take place — in the classroom, a faculty office, a research lab, or elsewhere? Why and how do research experiences influence students' gender-role attitudes? What sorts of messages do professors send — intentionally or not — regarding women's social roles? What specific faculty actions lead women to feel they are not being taken seriously? What are effective strategies for promoting healthier student-faculty relations and for promoting safe spaces in the classroom? How does all this depend on the faculty member's gender?

Presence of female faculty members. It is often stated that female students benefit from greater numbers of women on college faculties — and, in fact, attending institutions with more female professors strengthens female students' scholarly confidence, motivation to achieve, and grade-point average. Yet the presence of female professors appears to bring a broader range of benefits to male students, including gains in mathematical confidence, scientific orientation, leadership ability, and emotional well-being. An obvious implication of those findings would be for colleges to hire more female faculty members. That could be an opportunity to shape the academic climate, as female faculty members have been shown to be generally more concerned than male faculty members with students' emotional development, character development, and self-understanding.

Questions for future research: Could the trend of males' benefiting more from the presence of female faculty members result from such professors treating their male students more favorably than their female students? Or, taking another perspective, might the developmental benefits accrued to men result from having less exposure to male faculty members? Are these findings due to a larger climate shift that occurs when an institution employs more female faculty members? In other words, how does the representation of female faculty members shape the culture of departments and institutions, and what impact does that have on male and female students?

Academic engagement. In high school, women devote more time than men do to studying, homework, and a range of academic and extracurricular activities. Women also place greater value than men do on the intellectual benefits of going to college, such as the opportunity to learn more about what interests them and to prepare themselves for graduate school. Women's superior record of academic achievement and intellectual engagement creates a gender gap that holds steady over the course of college.

But although men are less academically engaged than women, the influence of academic engagement is stronger for them. The time that men spend preparing for class has a greater impact on their grades, academic confidence, critical-thinking skills, and motivation to achieve. And the more time that men devote to their studies, the more interested they become in the larger political and cultural contexts that surround them, while the same is not true for women. Certainly, studying matters for women as well, but it seems to make more of a difference for men.

Clearly, colleges need to consider strategies for encouraging greater academic engagement among male students. As Jillian Kinzie, the associate director of the Center for Postsecondary Research and National Survey of Student Engagement Institute, and her colleagues suggested in a 2007 research paper on gender and student engagement, colleges should involve men more in "learning communities, first-year seminars, writing-intensive courses, student-faculty research, study abroad, internships, and capstone seminars."

Questions for future research: How much do colleges consider the different academic needs of male and female learners? Should strategies for promoting student engagement be the same for both?

The impact of diversity programs. My research found that experiences with diversity both inside and outside the classroom are more liberalizing, motivating, and eye-opening for men than women. For example, attending racial- or cultural-awareness workshops or engaging in social diversity — dating, dining, studying, or living with someone of a different race or ethnicity — contributes more strongly to men's desire to improve race relations. In addition, taking ethnic-studies courses and participating in racial-awareness and cultural-awareness workshops give rise to more-progressive gender-role attitudes among male students.

Yet, at the same time, such activities are also often accompanied by heightened feelings of discomfort in male students. Campuses should provide appropriate resources for such students — following up with them in the weeks or even months after their participation in diversity programming to gauge whether they may need counseling or other support.

Questions for future research: Why are men more challenged and conflicted by diversity experiences than women? What specific aspects of diversity programming lead to such outcomes?

Careers and majors. Colleges often find it difficult to attract more women to pursue the traditionally male fields of engineering and computer science. Large numbers of women opt out of the science and engineering pipeline before they attend college, often because of factors beyond colleges' control, such as family influences and early educational experiences.

But colleges are in a position to recruit and retain women who have the ability and preparation for science and engineering careers yet who may nevertheless select other career paths. They have an opportunity to educate students about the ways in which math and science can help improve society and the human condition, particularly at a time of tremendous progress in computer and biological technologies. The more that higher-education institutions can connect scientific concepts to issues that women tend to care about — education, the environment, human rights — the more likely women will become scientists and create change in those areas.

Strategies to increase the number of women in science include summer internships, mentorships, professional-development workshops, and online networks of women in science. They are usually viewed, however, as programmatic supplements rather than integrated into the mainstream curriculum. In fact, we know far less about how to transform the broader culture of academic science.

Questions for future research: How can we make science more appealing to women? What are the characteristics of programs that successfully educate students about the connection between scientific concepts and larger societal concerns?

Besides those aspects of college life, female and male college students' experiences in higher education differ in several other key ways. For example, female students' average income has fallen further behind men's, so they are substantially more concerned than their male counterparts about whether they will have enough money to complete college. Thus, colleges should evaluate whether they allocate student aid and work-study opportunities fairly to women and men, which types of work experiences are most beneficial, and the extent to which women and men have equal access to the most-desirable positions. We should study, for example, whether having a job in the campus bookstore relates to a different set of outcomes than working in the admissions office, in the recreation center, or at the local coffeehouse or a retail store.

Also, despite the fact that college women earn better grades and exhibit a stronger academic orientation than their male counterparts, they tend to suffer from comparatively low academic confidence. In fact, women rate themselves lower than men on nearly every assessment of their academic abilities. Further, these gender differences grow during college. We should learn more about why women rate themselves lower — because they believe they are less capable, or are they simply reluctant to describe themselves as having high ability? — and what conditions account for the widening gender gap in academic self-confidence.

Finally, compared with men, women enter college with higher levels of self-reported stress and lower ratings of their physical and emotional health. Such gender gaps remain significant over four years of college and reflect the fact that men spend more time on activities that can be considered ways to relieve stress (playing sports and video games, partying, and watching television) while women often devote themselves to a range of responsibilities that tend to induce stress (studying, homework, community service, and family responsibilities). Colleges should encourage all students to strike a healthier balance between academics, extracurricular activities, and leisure. We also need to develop a better understanding of what it means for a student to maintain balance.

Although women have a numerical advantage in college, both genders face challenges to their adjustment and development. Just as we need to be concerned about high stress and low self-esteem among women, we must be concerned about growing academic disengagement among men.

And while we aim to encourage all students to become engaged and involved, we must be mindful that the dynamics of those experiences can be quite different for the two genders, especially when it comes to students' interactions with their professors. Thus, institutional efforts aimed at improving the college experience for both genders must consider the distinct needs of each.

Linda Sax is an associate professor in the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California at Los Angeles. This essay was adapted from The Gender Gap in College: Maximizing the Developmental Potential of Women and Men, published this month by John Wiley & Sons. Copyright 2008 by John Wiley & Sons.