The College Fix

OPINION: University leaders continue to worry about natural differences in interests between male and female students

One of our nation’s elite universities continues to struggle to understand that men and women have biological differences and inclinations.

The math department is worried because only 25 percent of its students are female.

“Despite campus-wide efforts to address gender disparities in STEM fields, including through the University-wide Diversity and Inclusion Action Plan, Brown’s Department of Mathematics has remained largely male-dominated,” the Brown Daily Herald reported recently. The student newspaper and campus officials previously sounded the alarm because only 45 percent of physical sciences students are female.

Department Chair Benoit Pasauder said the gender gap “is something that we take very seriously at Brown, and are making progress on, albeit at too slow a pace,” according to the student newspaper.

However, there are other forces at play – Pasauder told the newspaper the gap begins in high school.

There is no doubt it does – because on average, men and women are different in their interests. That does not preclude all women from studying math – after all, females still comprise 25 percent of the major.

However, Brown math professors need not beat themselves up – they are working against the natural inclinations of male students to the hard sciences and of female students to the soft sciences. As previously pointed out by The Fix, Brown students are supposed to be among the best in the country. So it cannot be that they are not smart enough to take these classes, but rather, have other interests.

Data from the student newspaper show 30 percent of female students are in the humanities, compared to 24 percent of male students.

(Brown’s student body is 40 percent LGBT, making statistics tricky. That should be the first problem the math department tries to solve).

Students are going to make choices about their majors based on their own interests. Some women are interested in engineering or math or physics. Some men are interested in English or social work. But generally, there is a gender divide in these majors – and that is okay, as long as no one is being excluded on the basis of their sex.

This is shown in one of the students interviewed, Abby Schindell. She does not just study math but also theatre, according to a response to a College Fix inquiry.

The gender gap might also be due to Brown’s good work in building its humanities program – a college consultant interviewed by the student newspaper in 2022 noted such majors typically draw female interest.

The university continues to spend time and money working to close gender gaps in different majors with programs like “Women in Engineering,” “Girls Get Math,” and the “Task Force on the Status of Women Faculty.”

But the school is fighting against nature – a battle that man (or woman) rarely wins.

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IMAGE: Joshua Masterson

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