Point-Counterpoint: Fordham's Gender Ratio

Next Friday night, look at the crowds that gather outside dorms as they wait to make their noisy way through the darkness. Watch the women teeter on their high heels, watch them stagger through the ice like fawns taking their first steps. The cold breeze does not help their progress; it whips their carefully arranged hair and cuts through the thin fabric of their ensembles of leggings, silky tops and light jackets. Count the number of dolled-up women and count the number of men in these groups. If the number is equal, then you have found an anomaly.

Fordham was one of the universities mentioned in a New York Times article about gender imbalance on college campuses earlier this month. The article focused on the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, which has a student body that is 60 percent female, 40 percent male. However, it mentioned several schools with student bodies with slightly less skewed ratios, and cited the ratio as a source of social tension.

From a feminist perspective, the larger numbers of women in colleges is a wonderful development. The American Council on Education reports that women make up 57 percent of enrollment in American colleges, partially because women tend to have better grades than men, and more end up going to and staying in college. This could also be because there are more job opportunities open for men directly out of high school.Maybe women are just aware of the double standards in society, so they choose to go to school and study hard so they can defy sexism and shatter the glass ceiling. For whatever reason, higher numbers of women attend college, and this bodes well for the ideal of gender equality.

However, the numerical inequality of genders on college campuses does not bode well for college women, at least on the social level. On college campuses where there are more women, men have the upper hand socially, can call the shots in relationships.

While this phenomenon is greater on campuses like UNC, the social scene at Fordham does seem a little off-kilter. The Fordham Web site’s Admissions page and CollegeBoard.com shows the not-so-shabby gender ratio for the class of 2013, 51 percent women to 49 percent men. However, the “Fordham Facts” section of the site admits that overall, the ratio is about 55.2 percent women to 44.2 percent men.

Single women at Rose Hill might be discouraged when they examine the dating pool. After subtracting men in relationships and men they are not interested in, the 45-percent male populationlooks more ominous. Collegeprowler.com refers to the Rose Hill dating scene as a “monotonous recycling program by visiting the same bars over and over again” where “Rose Hill women tend to find the same jock-and-beer men over and over again,” which sometimes seems like it is not too far from the truth.

Though there are many people at Fordham who are in relationships, including me, for every woman I know in a relationship, I know one who has been rejected by a guy claiming that he just did not want to be tied down or restrained by a relationship. This lack of commitment is supposedly normal in today’s world. However, according to Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus by Kathleen A. Bogle, which is available online at the Fordham library, this is exacerbated by uneven gender ratios. After all, if a man can have his pick of a wide range of women who must vie for his attention every weekend at Tinker’s, why settle for just one?

Many of the women I know who have been in longer-term relationships are or were with people they knew before Fordham. This could just be because they met someone great before going to college, but it could also suggest something about the pool of available men at Fordham. Maybe if there had been more choices and a more favorable dating scene, dating someone here would have been more tempting.

Though this is a vexing issue for some people at Rose Hill, this is apparently not resolvable. It would be wrong for the University to establish gender quotas, where less qualified men might be admitted over more qualified women. Perhaps Fordham could consciously recruit more men. This might work up to a certain point, but in the end, admission and scholarships should never be used to try to even out the gender ratios. While there does not seem to be a real solution to this problem, it puts college women in a sticky position, and it gives men more social control. The positive phenomenon of rising numbers of women in college has created the less important but negative phenomenon of a dating scene that is unfavorable to women.

Christine Barcellona, FCRH ’12, is an English major from Dallas, Texas. She can be reached at cbarcellona@fordham.edu.