Women Behind Humanities Crisis? How Women’s Emancipation Has Affected University Majors in the US

It often comes as a surprise to others when I tell people that I used to study electrical engineering in my previous studies. It is either because they think that engineering is too difficult, or undesirable for girls, or that it is too good to leave! The latter one may pertain to modern days as specialized engineering is unfolding new ways of making money in industries. The first reason, however, bitters my mood as a woman. Perhaps, there is still this way of thinking that engineering requires manual work and technical capacity as opposed to humanities, and therefore, it is better for boys. This attitude dates back to the early 20th century when industries needed manpower to work the big machines and digitalization hadn’t taken over the market yet.

With women possessing less physical strength and men more, most men were driven into industrial work areas, which later on came to be considered a “masculine” environment. Women, however, had more challenges ahead to pick a career path. The segregation in American universities before the mid-’60s would not allow female admission in most majors. Benjamin Schmidt, a former associate at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, has drawn interesting insights in his blog series Sapping Attention. In one of his blogs, he discusses the boom-time for humanities in the mid-'s 60s as segregation was abolished and women rushed into universities. Favored among them were precollegiate education, social sciences, and humanities.

Even though the civil rights for women had been granted, the concept of a woman working in a male-dominated industry was still not widely common. Second-wave feminism, as suggested by THE NEW REPUBLIC, ushered women into business and law schools and the likes, which had previously mostly been occupied by men. Science and engineering became more integrated and digitalized and businesses expanded over the decades and women became important levers in the economy. The golden era of humanities in the 20th century ended by the late 70s.

With women struggling fo find their way in academia and the job market_ that was mostly dominated by men by the time_ what happened to the fate of humanities? Does all this mean that the humanities are in crisis today? Are women to blame for the decline in humanities? While women were causing many upheavals in academic statistics, men never seemed to bother changing any numbers. As entertaining as it is to drop a controversial statement, I find more comfort in pinpointing statistical nuances that explain better the nosedive in the attendance of majors such as humanities and social sciences.

Most demographic and natural phenomenons follow a pattern called “ the normal curve”. When a change occurs, it ought to adopt this normal curve or try to perform as close to it as possible. It looks like a hill or a valley and it actually functions like one. There is an “up” and a “down” and nothing increases or declines forever! A quick look into the timeframe of total women’s bachelor’s degrees in the US from 1965 to 2000, can tell us how these changes and flows into humanities and the newly offered majors for women have followed the same path. I would argue that this not only doesn’t indicate a crisis but actually reaffirms my belief that humanities are in a “normal” state at the moment.

Men hold less percentage in attending humanities and social sciences_as they constantly have for the entire 20th century_ because there haven’t been any major changing factors to their choices. So, they are technically off the hook. Women could still be under the microscope, but the blame can easily be lifted if we restress the “normal” behavior in describing changes. As we all know, when speaking of the 20th century, we are not discussing men and women within an equal and similar context.

With the legal and social barriers out of the way, it would be pretty blinded to assume that the ratios wouldn’t change. If you crave a drink and you only have gin, you go for it, but what if you have ten different drinks in front of you? Is it that now the gin per se is selling less than the other drinks, or that before, there were NO other drinks to compare it to? In this sense, if as a woman, you only had one or two options for attending the university, there wouldn’t be any surprises in your choice. And if as a modern woman, you have hundreds of options to choose from, you’re clearly less likely to choose the same majors that women in the ‘60s and ’70s did. Likewise, the grief for the decline of humanities can be ended if we consider it a normal nosedive after the optimum, which is supposedly the mid-’60s. In other words, nothing lasts forever!

Humanities for women in the US, and many other nations, has gone from being out of the question to a convention, and an option onward. Just like men’s nearly static admission rate, the optionality of humanities for women after the 70s has pushed this discipline into the low end of the normal graph; no surprises here and there, but very little growth. I think It’s safe to say that humanities, in its darkest times, is in a stable condition; no booms or falls anymore.