Gender gap issue still hot despite enrollment trend

Editor’s note: An article titled “Gender gap widening in college enrollments,” focusing on the growing number of female college students nationwide and at WSU, was run in the Jan. 10, 2003, issue of WSU Today. That item was an abbreviated and localized version of a Dec. 23 article by Jake Ellison in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer titled “Gender gap puzzles colleges.” Since then, leaders of several women’s groups at WSU have asked that “WSU Today” run the remainder of that article having to do with employment and pay for women in higher education and the corporate workplace. In response, here is that information, printed with permission from the Seattle P-I.

Although the number of educated women has been on the rise for decades, women have yet to realize big gains in the upper echelons of corporate America or academia. A recent study by Catalyst, a research organization that studies trends involving women in business, showed that women make up only 15.7 percent of the corporate officers in the United States’ 500 largest companies. Other reports reveal that millions more men than women make $100,000-plus a year.

What’s more, only about 21 percent of university presidents and 27 percent of two-year college presidents are women, according to a new report from the American Council on Education, a research and advocacy group for colleges. Researchers say several factors conspire to hold women back, among them a lack of female role models, the challenge of juggling home and work lives, and persistent stereotypes about what kind of person is effective in top management positions.

Alice Coil, director of women’s resources at Washington State University, said she is concerned that some areas of study and employment are still “very gender-defined,” and progress for women in male-dominated career tracks “has been relatively slow.”

“I would caution people who just look at the numbers,” Coil said. The percentage of women “tells one story,” but doesn’t mean women face an equitable situation at school or in the workplace, she said.

Indeed, Jacqueline King, a researcher with the American Council on Education, said college enrollment figures can prompt some to say, “Women are taking over.”

“But the reaction of some women is that, ‘Someone forgot to tell me,’ “King said.

King said the economic picture is a “compelling reason why young women would be going to college.” Women with high school diplomas can expect to make far less than similarly educated men, King said. In fact, through trade and labor employment – fields that remain dominated by men — a man can make nearly as much with a high school diploma as a woman with a bachelor’s degree, she said. As for men who do pursue higher education, King said her research shows that “men continue to earn the majority of degrees in fields that tend to have the highest wages.”

UW business professor Vandra Huber said that as a teacher on a major university campus, she sees a consistent pattern in the current enrollment trend: “Frankly, young women are more motivated.”

However, she said, once they’ve decided what to study, women face some defining moments. They must decide whether they will put the degree to use, and “whether they will settle for a second-rate job because they are thinking of getting married and having kids and don’t want the extra demands.” The fact remains that although there are more women in the workplace, “we’re not seeing a significant increase of women in higher-level positions” and income levels, Huber said.

Lori Homer, a UW graduate student in business, predicts that in the end, “we could just have a really highly educated female population” without building the “critical mass” for a revolution in the workplace.

When she began looking into the barriers that hold women back, Homer said a professor told her he thought it wouldn’t be an issue much longer.

“But I don’t see it changing,” she said, adding that her dissertation on this subject revolves around testing why women are not reaching top positions. One theory, she said, is that there are not enough women in leadership positions yet to promote fellow women. The theory she’s testing, however, works off the idea that people of both genders see men in power and then assume men are better for that kind of role. She calls this a “cognitive shortcut,” and she is exploring what it would take to get people to look solely at performance and resumes rather than gender.

Some educators remain optimistic about women’s prospects in the workplace.

Kris Bulcroft, a vice provost at Western Washington University in Bellingham, for one, said women’s ongoing academic successes should set the stage for similar advances in other areas.

“Assuming that we are becoming a more egalitarian society,” she said, “I think we will see more women in the corporate CEO positions.”

For a full version of this article, go to type “gender gap” in the search box. Additional reading suggestions include: “We’ve All Got Scars: What Boys and Girls Learn in Elementary School,” by Raphaela Best; “Real Boys: Rescuing Our Sons from the Myths of Boyhood,” by William S. Pollack.

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