nwasianweekly.com
Dec. 15, 2007

Let’s hear it for the girls

For the first time, all top honors in the Siemens Competition in Math, Science and Technology — one of the nation’s most prestigious high school science competitions — went to girls. On Dec. 3, after the final round held at New York University, teenage girls had won first prize in the team category and first and second prizes in the individual category. Eleven of the 20 finalists were girls — the first year that girls outnumbered boys in the finals.

What is more remarkable than these young ladies’ accomplishments, however, is that they themselves see nothing remarkable about it. The New York Times reported that “the fact that girls swept the top prizes for the first time this year did not seem to faze the winners.”

And really, why should it? These girls are coming of age in a time when the front-runner in the Democratic presidential primary is a woman. They don’t just think a female president is possible in their lifetime — they assume it’s inevitable.

Women now outpace men in all areas of education. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of women enrolling in college after high school is up 20 percent from 1967 to 2000, while the number of men enrolling has decreased by 4 percent.

And because women also tend to finish once they enroll, the disparity becomes even more marked when comparing graduation rates. Between 1975 and 2001, the number of bachelor’s degrees earned by women jumped by 70 percent, compared with a 5 percent climb for men, reported Tom Mortensen in his 2003 study, “What’s Wrong With the Guys?”

This is the trend not just in this country, but also internationally. The rate of men earning college degrees outnumbers women in only six industrialized nations.

In the U.S., the disparity between female and male college enrollment becomes even more prominent when race is factored in. In 2000, black women earned twice as many bachelor’s degrees as black men, according to Mortensen, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.
Though not as dramatically, this disproportion holds true almost across the board when comparing all racial populations in the country. Only among Asians do men still have higher enrollment rates, according to the 2005 U.S Census data. (In our own backyard, however, this doesn’t seem to be the case. Out of the 180 students in the University of Washington Law School’s incoming class, 30 are women of color and 15 are men of color. Of those, 15 are Asian females, and only seven are Asian males, according to Norma Rodriguez, director of admissions recruitment and diversity for the law school.)

Often, when minority college enrollments are presented in the press, it’s to bemoan the bleak state of affairs. Positive trends can easily be overlooked. But what we see are women of color who are advancing their communities, and who are the futures of those communities.

But perhaps, instead of highlighting this perspective, or calling attention to it, we should adopt the attitudes of the young scientists at the Siemens competition and treat such extraordinary deeds as a given, as nothing more than just how women are.

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