There is an incongruous logic to Penni Stewart’s claim that “female students and academic staff still continue to suffer inequities…” and that these inequities are most apparent in “science, engineering and related disciplines” (President’s Column, Bulletin, September 2008).

The key to her claim is that while fe­males were the “majority of all university students (57 per cent)” and the “majority of PhD students in the social and behavioural sciences and in law (59.7 per cent), they represented less than a third of students in mathematics, computer and information sciences.” Stewart goes on to protest that “women accounted for less than 20 per cent of enrolments” in architecture and engineering and “only 40.6 per cent in phy­sical and life sciences, which includes the more feminized discipline of biology.”

But Stewart overlooks all those disciplines in which men are vastly under-represented, starting with the startling fact (as reported in CAUT’s Almanac of Post-Secondary Education, 2008–2009) that women comprise 58.1 per cent of the total undergraduate enrolment, whereas men comprise only 41.9 per cent (table 3.10 pp. 22–23).

This statistic becomes all the more revealing if we break it down into “more feminized” and less feminized courses. In education there is a male/female ratio of 22.3/77.7; in the humanities a male/female ratio of 37.7/62.3; and in the social and behavioural sciences, and law a male/female ratio of 34.4/65.7.

If you think these ratios hold only in the more “feminized” fields, the ratio for business, management and public administration is 47.8 per cent men and 52.2 per cent women. How about the ratio for agriculture, natural resources and conservation — 42.6 per cent males to 57.4 per cent females? In the less mother-earthly category of physical and life sciences and techno­logies, females represent 57.4 per cent. Of the 12 disciplinary categories listed, males are the majority in only two, namely, architecture, engineering and related technologies and mathematics, computer and information sciences. Moreover, total graduate female students still comprise a majority with a ratio of 50.5 per cent (table 3.11, pp. 23–24).

Stewart further contends that the higher male ratios among faculty are part expression of a climate of “systemic hostility” to females. But the way to examine these ratios is to see them in terms of trends rather than as static pictures. This can easily be done by comparing the male/female ratios in the full professor, associate professor and assistant professor categories (table 2.11, pp. 12–14). The trends are clear — across all the singular disciplines the proportion of female faculty grows as we move from “full” to “assistant” professor.

I say “singular” disciplines because here the categories are broken into specific disciplines, i.e., humanities is broken into history, classics, journalism, etc. If we look at the statistics for the categories as a whole, one finds that female assistant professors are already the majority in education, fine and applied arts and health professions. They are almost even in the humanities.

Besides, piling up the ratios for faculty at large is a retrograde way of looking at trends. The ratios for full professor reflect mostly a generation that grew up in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s. They reflect the state of gender relations in those decades. What is most revealing about gender relations today is undergraduate enrolment. Here the statistical trend is clear — except for math and engineering, it is men, and not women, who are suffering systemic hostility.

Ricardo Duchesne
Sociology
University of New Brunswick at Saint John

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