Gender Imbalance Affects Relationships on Campus

By: Mary Van Akin
Posted In: News

A 9 p.m. curfew on Saturday night, nuns saying the rosary when girls went out on the town, running down the Cliff Walk in bloomers. This is the Salve Regina that Jane Farley remembers.

But, then, Farley was a member of the pioneer class at Salve Regina in 1951 when there was a total of 53 in her freshman class and absolutely no boys.

Yet despite the girl to boy ratio of 100-to-0, the female undergraduates had a busy dating life with boys who had a profound respect for women. “They really romanced the girls,” Farley said. “They brought flowers, and you wouldn’t go out on a date and have the question, ‘Who’s place,yours or mine?'”

Maybe it’s a generational difference, but Salve relationships in 2010 seem to lack this romantic quality that Farley describes.

With a girl to boy ratio of 69 to 31, many girls are facing self-esteem issues and are compromising their values as the face stiff competition to catch the attention of boys.

This gender imbalance is part of a national trend on college campuses. According to a report released by the American Council on Education, girls have averaged 57 percent of college campuses since 2000. Although this gender imbalance reflects well on the progress girls have made in the classroom, it does lead to difficulties in the social scene.

Sarah Thompson, a junior at Salve, feels that some boys are both aware of their advantage in this ratio and ready to take advantage of it. During one meal at Miley, she listened to a boy complain about his girlfriend to a friend. “His friend compared women to cars and he’s like, ‘think about it this way bro, just get a new model. Trade her in for a new one,'” Thompson said. “And I remember being like, wow.”

This recognition that boys can easily move on to another girl has resulted in girls altering their behavior to keep a boy’s attention. “They display a type of sexual behavior where they [girls] dance together very provocatively or they kiss very provocatively, but it’s not so much signaling their pleasure, like a new form of bisexuality, it’s signaling a hyper-heterosexuality,” said Dr. Debra Curtis, professor of anthropology at Salve Regina. “So they’re saying, ‘Look, I’m the most heterosexual woman you’ll find because I’ll kiss another woman to please you.”

Even if these extreme efforts result in a relationship, girls still suffer the consequences of sacrificing their values to please a guy. “Everything is sacrificed, not only their notion of what fun is,” Curtis said. “You know like, what are we going to do today? Are we going to go to the movies or are we going to go for a walk on Second Beach? Well, he’s going to decide. And what about the most intimate, sexual practices? Is it always going to be about his pleasure? Because they have to keep this guy at all costs.”

David Dawson, a clinical social worker at Salve Regina, says that over his three years at the university, about half his visits from girls center around relationships-whether it be girls looking for a relationship or recovering from a breakup.

Dawson says that many girls are acting outside their own value system in the attempt to keep a boy from moving on to the next girl. These efforts range from altering their social behavior at parties and bars to feeling pressured to have sex to keep a guy’s interest.

Behaving in this manner has a negative effect on a girl’s self-esteem. “Because then they’re going to shame themselves,” Dawson said. “And that is one of the most challenging emotions to overcome, is when you shame yourself, or when you feel like you’ve been shamed by others. And they’re going to blame themselves when they cross outside their own value system.”

Even after potentially dealing with this resulting shame, Dawson says girls will find that as long as they are not being true to themselves, they will not find a successful relationship because they will constantly be trying to live up to someone else’s expectations.

Not all boys at Salve are as willing to take advantage of the gender ratio. Dawson says there are plenty of boys at Salve who are just as insecure as girls, but are just better at hiding this insecurity.

Campuses across the nation have sought out different ways of improving the gender imbalance. The Gender Equity report issued by the U.S. General Accounting Office reports that this trend of higher percentages of women in colleges was set into action in 1972 with the passing of Title IX. Title IX was the first federal law to prohibit discrimination based on gender in higher education institutions receiving government support.

Title IX resulted in a much greater effort to find ways to help girls starting at a very young age, often resulting in systems of education that favor the way girls learn.

Laura Oliveira, the vice president of enrollment at Salve, explains that this is why the gender imbalance issue cannot be solved simply by adopting a program of preferential enrollment for boys. “You have to start early to solve it,” Oliveira said. “It’s got to be a solution that spans the spectrum of education. You can’t expect colleges to fix an issue when it’s too late.”

That is not to say that Salve has not made efforts to attract more boys. Oliveira says that the introduction of the football program, the effort to promote Newport’s outdoor recreational activities and the addition of three men to the admission staff at Salve are all part of an effort to make Salve more appealing to potential students. Oliveira even said that there have been preliminary discussions about a possible partnership with a school with a strong engineering program whose students could take liberal arts classes at Salve.

Ultimately, Oliveira stresses that Salve will stay true to its mission and will not discriminate based on gender. “When I look at talented students, I don’t look at their gender,” Oliveira said. “I look at what they’re doing, what they’re bringing.”

So perhaps Salve will never have that magic 50-50 ratio that so many girls hope for. That doesn’t mean there isn’t something to be gained by having such a large number of girls. “You get to assume all of the leadership roles in a college and many times I think the women still do,” said Farley, who was at Salve when it was an all girl school. “You get to be the editor of the yearbook. You get to be the one who begins a club. You learn to appreciate your friends.”

More than anything, Farley stresses the strong friendships she gained at Salve. Fifty years later, she still talks to her Salve friends regularly and looks forward to class reunions.

Sarah Thompson, a student at Salve now, agrees. “What’s that saying?” Thompson said. “You don’t come to Salve to be a bride, you come to find your bridemaids?”