Recent trends show women nationwide are trading in kitchen aprons worn by their grandmothers and great-grandmothers for academic regalia.
In 2022, women were nine percent more likely to enroll in college than men, according to a March 2024 report from The American Institute for Men and Boys.
As of March 2024, women were 11 percent more likely to graduate from a four-year institution in four years and seven percent more likely to graduate within six years than men.
The report summarized that while the trends aren’t new, the continued growth of these “disparities pose significant questions for administrators, policymakers and students.”
Ball State University is aligned with such trends. 31.1 percent more female-identifying students than males graduated from the university in 2022, including from both graduate and undergraduate programs, according to a breakdown analysis from Data USA.
Katie Lawson, a Ball State professor and assistant chair in the Department of Psychological Science who studies gender-related topics, said this can largely be traced back to society’s changing connotation of a “traditional” family unit.
Citing from the Pew Research Center, she said, “Out of all the households in the U.S. that have children, just slightly under half are actually that traditional ‘Leave it to Beaver’ household, with a mom, dad and kids.”
As family dynamics change, the Pew Research Center has published a range of reports from Dec. 2015 through Sept. 2023, outlining the composition of “the American family today.”
Their most recently updated data collection essay from Sept. 2023 — “The Modern American Family” — details that a key change in family dynamics is the baseline marital age among U.S. adults, which intrinsically has led to more women having fewer children than in the 1970s, according to Pew.
“If women are postponing marriage and children, it allows them to focus on their educational development in a way that is much more challenging when you have children,” Lawson said.
She credited the uprising of women in higher education to a variety of factors, including the nation’s rising cost of living and exponential wealth inequities, which she said simultaneously impact the age at which couples settle down. Ultimately, she said the trend of more women enrolled in — and graduating from — higher education than men could most likely be attributed to the fact that “the types of jobs that women tend to go into tend to need a degree.”
“If you want to be a nurse [or] a teacher, you're going to need some sort of educational background. It's not something that easily fits into vocational-type training. The jobs that we’ve ‘funneled’ women into require a degree,” Lawson said.
Autumn Voegerl, a second-year social studies education student at Ball State, agreed with the increased cost of living as a plausible cause for women attending higher education, but she also mentioned a cultural shift in mindset.
“There are more resources now than ever women can use to attain a college education, and for a long time, women weren't really encouraged to go to college,” she said via text. “That has drastically changed in recent years, and [American] culture has shifted from, ‘Girls don't do that’ to ‘You can do anything you set your mind to.’”
July 2024 psychological research from WellSpring Center for Prevention enforces the benefits of positive affirmations, leading to enhanced academic or career performance, especially when affirmations are written down.
“Simply telling someone they are capable of doing something has been proven to be very effective in increasing people's chances of success in whatever they choose to do, college or not,” Voegerl said.
Voegerl is a first-generation college student with the goal of becoming a social studies teacher. She said that she was driven to pursue higher education by her parents who “both work blue-collar jobs.”
“They knew, even without having much experience with college, that it would afford me opportunities to learn that I couldn't get anywhere else,” she said.
Ball State has a track record of attracting first-generation students. According to the university’s administrative offices, 32 percent of Ball State’s undergraduate student population are first-generation students, and one in every three first-year students is also first-generation.
That, coupled with a locality far enough from home, a smaller-sized campus and professors who “genuinely care” about the academic success of their students, made the university the ideal choice for Voegerl.
“The learning environment is amazing, and being able to do extracurriculars in addition to go[ing] to school for something I love is icing on the cake,” she said.
Ball State’s learning environment is something Voegerl hopes to emulate in her own classroom in the coming years.
“For a long time, teaching has been the only thing I want to do, and my ultimate goal is to be able to have my own classroom with students to teach and [the ability] to make a difference in places that could use some positivity,” she said.
Although women seem to dominate higher education, Lawson, who also specializes in the psychology of women and gender, has observed the workforce to still be “very segregated.” The majority of women continue to occupy “traditional jobs,” such as nurses or caretakers, reinforcing the societal perception of women being inherently more nurturing than men.
“We fill the roles that we think [we’re supposed to],” she said.
Despite society’s idealistic correlation between women and nurturement, research shows no concrete, statistical evidence to support it, as Lawson pointed out.
A Dec. 2017 report from the Pew Research Center acknowledged the differences between men and women but declared “no public consensus” on the origins of those differences.
“While women who perceive differences generally attribute them to societal expectations, men tend to point to biological differences,” according to Pew’s report.
In Voegerl’s case, social studies is a predominantly male teaching field, with 58 percent of men teaching the subject — according to a 2018 Brown Center report on American education — compared to just over three-quarters (77 percent) of K-12 public school teachers who are women, according to a September 2024 Pew Research Center report.
The still-existing need for women in the workforce is not something that has gone unnoticed by Voegerl.
“At Ball State, specifically, I don't feel the uneasiness [of] being a woman in college as much because there are lots of female students here. However I feel the difference a lot more on a smaller scale when I'm in some of my humanities classes … [I try] not to think super deeply about it, but I'm conscious [of the disparities] in other domains, like some of my classes,” she said.
Lawson said historical strides have been made to help mitigate blatant inequalities and inequities between men and women. “There was flat out discrimination that used to keep women out of [certain] areas,” she said. There were programs, colleges and universities that said, ‘[women] can't go here.’”
Lawson added that in light of primitive advancements, there are “barriers” that still exist today, urging the importance of their continual removal.
Contact Katherine Hill via email at katherine.hill@bsu.edu.
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