All Posts Tagged With: "male female ratio"

With more women at most schools, young men have never had so many dates

“If you strike out everywhere else, just come to the Mount,” says Cody Brown, a congenial second-year student at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax. The reason is simple: the Mount’s student body is 79 per cent women. “It’s a great ratio,” says the 19-year-old enthusiastically. “A phenomenal ratio.”

Though the Mount is an extreme example, female-dominated campuses are an increasing reality at universities across the country. According to Statistics Canada, 57 per cent of the student body in universities is female. Of the 69 schools Maclean’s surveyed in its 2010 university guide, 24 institutions have a student body that’s over 60 per cent female. And it’s not just Mount Saint Vincent where the females make up more than 70 per cent of the population. It’s the same at NSCAD University and Université Sainte-Anne.

The trend is welcome news for women who want to focus on homework instead of being incessantly courted, and men who like all the attention. But as the female-to-male ratio skews, dating must adapt.

Brown, a clean-cut guy wearing a nondescript outfit of jeans, a white T-shirt and runners, notices “the Mount’s” ratio most on pub nights. “You’re treated like a VIP,” he says, adding that he hasn’t had to buy a drink yet. But the ratio isn’t always as rosy at it seems. The attention has its downsides. Namely, of the Mean Girls high school drama variety. “It’s crazy,” he says, “girls are at each other’s throats.”

For some girls at the Mount, the ratio is actually a blessing. Just ask the students at Birch 1*, the girls-only residence on campus. “It’s more studious,” says residence adviser Melanie Brister, 19, the result of its female-only environment, she explains. Brister says her roommates—many of them religious—think “guys are a distraction.”

Even students from one of the few remaining male-dominated schools, the University of Waterloo, are taking advantage of the growing female presence. Although men still outnumber women 57 to 43, students are turning lemons into lemonade. Matthew Cam, 20, a software engineering student at Waterloo, says one way to overcome the female drought is to choose parties strategically. For example, chemical engineering parties have more girls than software engineering parties. Who knew?

Cam’s software friends say an even better option is to walk over to Wilfrid Laurier University, just a kilometre away, which has plenty of coed revelries. At WLU, the male-female ratio is much more male-friendly, at 61 per cent women.

If there’s a campus where the skewed ratio appears to be overcome, it’s the University of Western Ontario, in London, Ont. (which, at 58 per cent female, is pretty typical). Nevertheless, it has a reputation for parties and the attendant hook-ups. The high-density residences, like the notoriously raunchy 1,250-person Saugeen-Maitland Hall, may be to blame. (There also happen to be four richly furnished bars on campus and at least seven major clubs on nearby Richmond Street.)

One thing is certain, they don’t shy away from sex. Just look at the residence cheers drilled into new students, says Devon Johnson. When the Western alumnus arrived in 2004, she learned the residence cheer that matches their mascot—a rooster. “The guys would go, ‘Who loves the cock?’ and the girls would call back, ‘We love the cock,’ ” says Johnson.

Krystle Ficker, 18, says the residence cheer is still alive. In fact, Western’s reputation precedes it so much that visitors ask her and her friends, “Are your dorms really ‘STI-ridden’?” and, “Do you get laid every night?”

If she gets too tired of all the attention, perhaps she should consider transferring to a place like Mount Saint Vincent, where the boys are few and far between. She may even want to consider living in Birch 5.

*The all-girls residence at Mount Saint Vincent University was incorrectly identified as Birch 5 in a previous version of this article.

To claim that women are at a disadvantage in school is absurd

My friend Sarah Berman bought me a beer recently. She had come into $1,200 unexpectedly. “Just for having a vagina,” she told me with a smirk. She’s a journalism student in my class at the University of British Columbia and a recipient of a Gwyn and Aileen Gunn Bursary. The awards are only available for female students.

The bequest was made five years ago in honour of the late Gwynyth Gunn, a CBC reporter who had succeeded in journalism at a time when it was still dominated by men. It’s easy to sympathize with Gunn’s estate for wanting to donate her money to young women who face the same disadvantages that Ms. Gunn had to overcome.

While awards like these may be sexist, they’re still allowed as long as women are “underepresented in the faculty,” says UBC’s associate director of enrolment services, Barbara Crocker. The problem is, women aren’t under-represented in the faculty of journalism–or almost any faculty anymore. So why are they still getting special awards?

In my journalism class there are four women for every man. A tally of genders among the smiling graduates in the class of 2000′s photo confirms that it’s been that way from the very beginning. In that very first graduating class  men were already the minority. I called up my friend Karon Liu who graduated from Ryerson’s journalism school last spring. The numbers from his graduating class were closer to five women per man, he says after a quick count.

These affirmative action scholarships may seem harmless, but they have a negative impact on men’s self-esteem. I’ve felt it. The other men in my class have felt it. Favouritism towards women may even be contributing to the shrinking population of males on university campuses.

Darren Fleet, a colleague of mine at the School of Journalism has worked for daily newspapers, produced mini-documentaries and trained journalists in Zambia. But despite his stellar resume, he says he felt discouraged from applying for a recent scholarship after reading the words “equal opportunity” on the form. “What would be the point in applying?” says Fleet. “Even if I had invented the cure for cancer and saved a busload of children from a burning building I wouldn’t get it. I am too white, too male and too straight.”

While some women still cling to the “glass ceiling” argument to justify these scholarships, other women have long since broken through. Just take my school for example. The founding director was a woman. The school’s current director is a woman.  There is certainly no dearth of female instructors, or female role models to meet during our internships. When we went on a class trip to the Vancouver Sun newsroom, both the executive editor and editor-in-chief who toured us around were women.

It’s true that many newsrooms are still slightly more male than female, but they certainly won’t be for much longer. In the past decade, broadcasters have hired more women and promoted women at a faster rate than men. In 2006, nearly two-thirds of all jobs at the CBC went to women. I’m certainly not complaining about the fact that many more women were hired. Considering how much women outnumber men in journalism schools, they almost certainly earned their higher share of recent hires. It is only to claim that women are at a disadvantage in schools that is absurd.

Perhaps the fair thing to do would be to encourage scholarships that only young men can apply to. But the idea of men-only scholarships for programs where they’re outnumbered would be ridiculous, considering men are outnumbered in just about every program but math and engineering. Are we going to give scholarships to women who want to be engineers and mathematicians, and men money so long as they want to study anything else?

Plus, according to Ms. Crocker, a scholarship program aimed at men-only would be “illegal” and “probably never accepted.” (I know I’d laugh.) Perhaps the real solution is for universities to stop accepting scholarship programs that are sexist toward men. No one should feel discouraged from getting an education just because of what they have between their legs.

Josh Dehaas is journalism student at the University of British Columbia, and a former On Campus blogger.

Gender imbalance persists and social science continues to dominate, says Stats Can.

Students graduating from Canadian universities increased by 43 per cent between 1992 and 2007, according to a Statistics Canada report released today. The study revealed few demographic shifts among Canadian students and what they studied. There were a few notable changes in the gender distribution and in the share of international students graduating from Canadian institutions.

The proportion of graduates aged 22 to 24 has held steady at 44 per cent. Graduates between 25 and 29 increased slightly from 22 to 25 per cent,  while graduates over 30 decreased slightly from 25 per cent to 23 per cent.

The gender imbalance on Canadian campuses has persisted, as the share of women graduating increased to 61 per cent from 56 per cent. Data on international students prior to 2000 was inconsistent across the provinces, but between 2001 and 2006, international students graduating from Canadian schools increased to 7.4 per cent from 4.7 per cent.

There has been virtually no change in the fields that Canadians study, with the social and behaviourial sciences and law accounting for a little more than a fifth of all graduates. Additionally, the top three fields including business and public administration and education, as well as the social sciences account for more than half of all graduates.

Health related fields are almost exclusively female, with 82 per cent of all graduates in 2007 being women. In fact, women dominate in all fields except for three: architecture and engineering, math and computer science, and protective and transportation services. However, the only category that saw a decrease in the share of women is math and computer science, which has been accompanied by a similar decline among Canadian males pursuing those fields. It is a trend that has been offset by a greater proportion of international students, mostly male, studying math and computer science.

Statistics Canada says data for 2008 will be released next year.