I believe Emory subscribes to the “max. 60:40” rule-of-thumb, so it likely won’t ever become wider than that. But why is the gap widening to begin with? Why has the gap widened over the years? Why do more girls want to come to Emory than boys?
A whole lot of colleges are seeing this. More women are college-ready than men academically these days. Men are URMs at many schools these days (have an advantage in admissions over women).
Women make up 56-57% of college students nationwide. However, a huge factor is that Emory does not offer Engineering, so even a 58:42 ratio isn’t that bad.
@goldenbear2020 : That is indeed very interesting as I think many LAC’s have similar ratios. Also, haven’t a lot of medical schools seen a shift where a majority of some classes are female. Emory is a big pre-med destination so that may have some slight correlation in addition to the fact that it is a more liberal artsy pre-professional school overall due to the lack of engineering (as you’ve said).
Many LACs have more even ratios but those also tend to have significantly higher acceptance rates for males. The most likely explanation is that Emory is choosing to treat male and female applicants equally (or at least, give males relatively less preference than some other schools).
I also find it interesting that the fact that more boys than girls are failing/falling behind in school is painted by many (intentionally or unintentionally) as a positive thing for boys (preferential treatment in admissions) and as a result, a negative thing for girls , when the grim reality that our secondary education system being titled against boys is not a positive thing at all for boys and definitely not a negative thing for girls as they are succeeding in greater numbers. There’d be public outrage in 2015-16 if the nationwide college gender ratio is the other way around: 55-59% boys and 45-41% girls.
Not saying it’s a positive thing or not, but many non-college employment opportunities are skewed toward males: construction, electrician, welding, manufacturing, police, firefighting, etc.
@goldenbear2020 This is getting off topic, but what do you mean by “skewed toward”? If you mean it discriminates in favor of men: men don’t get preferential hiring treatment in those fields–they get in through merit (or lack thereof) and/or personal choice, not gender, unless it requires a lot of physical strength and/or endurance like construction (yup, nature is politically incorrect). Also, becoming an electrician requires post-secondary schooling. Just because a field is male-dominated (or female-dominated) doesn’t necessarily mean it is automatically due to sexism. By the way, you forgot garbage collector, sewage worker, soldier, coal miner, oil rig worker. Does homeless count, 'cause most homeless people are men.
@goldenbear2020 Oh, I get it now. You meant that fewer men might be going to college than women because many non-college jobs are geared toward men, so some men will choose to not go to college even if they can in order to enter those fields. Well, I think @GMTplus7 has a good answer. Also, maybe boys, on average, aren’t doing as well as girls in school. The secondary education system is tilted against boys due to biology. Girls reach puberty earlier than boys on average, i.e. between 10 to 14, while boys reach puberty between 12-16. So almost all girls have a developmental advantage over some (a lot?) boys during high school. Maybe this explains the national college gender gap?
@CrispyBullet : Other than standardized test scores like the SAT (where males still score higher I think) women outperforming males in grade school has become the norm. There are some interesting speculations as to why. For example, the puberty thing you mention may tie well into how some have noted that things like HS and grade school often reward certain behavioral patterns (as in that can influence how a professor grades or favors a student), in which case males may have a disadvantage as they may tend to be more disruptive in a classroom or have a tendency toward disobedience in other areas such as completion of homework. As in males “may” often test better than females, but other portions of the grade are underachieved.
And in HS, other portions of the grade tend to be larger than in many college courses, especially with STEM. Women continue to outperform males in college, but that is in terms of raw GPA I believe and does not account for disparities of enrollment in various disciplines. Like if STEM (especially engineering and physical sciences) is still much more heavily enrolled by males (likely it is, as there is still the female persistence issue) at most schools, then that will have an impact on the average GPA of males as STEM classes tend to have lower grade distributions. Females may be more concentrated in disciplines that have syllabus structures more similar to what we were accustomed to in HS, as in more balanced and not extremely weighted toward high stakes exams.
But again, this is merely one proposal that has been thrown out there and I don’t expect it to fully account for the phenomenon.
Do they have a large engineering school and is the enrollment in it a more even ratio than most engineering schools. If so, that would explain a lot. Though it is a little weird for a research university of its caliber to be that skewed, especially if its programmatic offerings resemble most other private schools.