Is the Gender Distribution in the Humanities Cause for Alarm?

A surprising ratio

Photo by Edwin Andrade on Unsplash

Last Friday, Matt “Dean Dad” Reed opened his “Fragments” post with a startling stat from his daughter, who’s starting at Maryland this fall:

Stat of the Week: The Girl reports that among the first-year students in the Honors Humanities program at UMD this fall, 68 are women and two are men.

It struck me as the sort of number that belongs in Harper’s Index.

I knew that gender segregation by major remains very real, even after all these years. I expected more women than men in the program. But I wasn’t quite prepared for a ratio of 68 to two.

This is remarkable to me not just because it’s kind of wild as a ratio, but because of the general lack of discussion about it on social media. If someone noted the existence of a STEM honors program that was 68 percent male, that would be like sowing the Internet with dragon’s teeth: giant culture warriors would spring from the ground and start fighting to the death. (And, to be clear, I would agree that a STEM honors program being 68% male in 2022 would be a Bad Thing.)

So it’s very odd to my eyes that a “humanities”¹ honors program that’s just under 3% male just gets a “Hunh. How ‘bout that?” This seems every bit as unhealthy as the oppositely skewed ratios in STEM fields, but doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as fertile as a source of thinkpieces in respectable outlets.

This is, obviously, a single factoid, not even a full anecdote, let alone data. It’s conceivable that this is a one-time quirk in the way the honors admissions shook out, and the broader picture (including non-honors majors, or other years of the honors program) is more balanced. It’s even possible that it’s just mistaken, that the 68-to-2 split was just a non-representative subset of people who could make a particular event or whatever. And, you know, it was posted on a Friday in August, so maybe it just wasn’t noticed by anyone who cared enough to respond. (IHE doesn’t do comments, but Reed’s tweet of a link to the piece got all of five likes and one jokey response.)

That’s such a wildly skewed number, though, that it seems worth signal-boosting (admittedly, on a Monday in August…). So, assuming that 68-to-2 is an accurate figure, is that alarming? Should we be talking about a crisis in the gender balance of “the humanities” paralleling that in STEM?

Or, if it’s not a problem, why isn’t it? Especially when so many pixels have been spilled on the need to fix much smaller disparities in STEM fields?

(It does occur to me that there might be some win-win opportunities here for intersdisciplinary sychronicity, in that moving men away from STEM majors would improve the gender balance for both sets of fields. Perhaps we need a bunch of workshops and conferences on how to make the culture more welcoming for men who might be interested in arts and literature, but find the general atmosphere of technical fields more congenial. Maybe we could finally get both of the Two Cultures to converge on a common style…)

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My usual failure mode when it comes to blogging about academia is being careful to the point of being gnomic, and thus not generating any engagement. I’m a little worried that this is going to go off the rails in the opposite direction, and end up being more provocative than I have time to deal with, but I guess we’ll see… If you’re curious as to whether this blows up in my face in a way that leads to future posts, here’s a button:

And we’ll at least start with the comments being open, though I reserve the right to delete comments, restrict access, or even close comments altogether if things seem to be getting overly nasty:

I am the sole judge, jury, and executioner when it comes to the comment section, so be on your very best behavior.

1. Scare quotes because I quietly hate this term for its implication that math and science are inhuman, when nothing could be further from the truth. As I’ve argued at book length.