RPI: Engineering Institute for Young Women

(For July 19^th)

            The gender bias at universities is prevalent throughout history. It’s been said in the past that women make good nurses and teachers, men are better suited to run businesses and build technology. Despite women fighting for rights, and justly winning said rights, the bias of gender in professional fields remains. The majority of young women entering universities tend to major in the same areas: biology, education, communications, and literature. This fact strikes my curiosity, as I am currently attending RPI: an institute which is now being promoted as “an engineering school for women”.

            In this day and age, gender bias is a concept which is viewed as preposterous. The majority of women know that they have the freedom to be whatever they wish. It has been proven that women can do most anything that men can do. Regardless, personal preferences, such as individuals being more comfortable with a male doctor over a female, keep the concept of gender bias alive. As my professor had pointed out, more than half of the population is female. Going to this school, I would have never even guessed it was anywhere that large.

            The ratio at RPI tends to hover around a male:female ration of 70:30. This almost seems like a massive delusion, since I have almost never seen a girl in my classes. Being a senior though, I’ve discovered that typically the young women who attend this institute major in categories from a small diverse set: biology (or biology-based engineering), management, and philosophy inclusive. In contrast to that, it is somewhat rare to find a male philosophy major, or a male biology major that is not going into some pre-med program. This corresponds directly with what most of us see in the media: college classrooms filled with studious males, with male professors educating their students.

            The media’s perspective of a schoolhouse classroom is a room of mixed male and female students, with a female teacher up front. There’s nothing wrong with that setting, but there is a significant inconsistency with media’s portrayal of individuals in the workplace and the actual workplace appearance. Why is it that there are no portrayals of a male professor teaching? Why is it that the doctors in medical university commercials are almost always male? It’s ridiculous that students in technical institute commercials (similar to my own school) are primarily male. It’s obvious that these similarities between media’s portrayal of gender-specific jobs and actual jobs are not merely coincidental. The media has a strong impact on minds, both young and old, subconsciously telling individuals to accept those facts and conform to those stereotypes. Even in this day and age, when such big strides for equality and integration have been successfully made, gender-based discrimination thrives.

            For once, I’d like to see an all-female engineering school (or primarily female). In my entire time at this university as an electrical engineer, I’ve counted 5 girls in my classes overall. The media’s gender-specific encouragement (or rather discouragement) has such a strong impact on an individual’s choices in life. If an individual views a commercial claiming that they can make more money in one position, or discretely implying that they would be better suited for another position based off of their race, they can be strongly swayed to pursue that career. To quote what my preschool teacher told me years ago: “be what you want to be, not what someone else wants you to be”.