Sophomore Ersane John spends a lot of alone time with women — at least three hours a week in a class called Women and Medieval Art, in which he is the only male student in a class of 17.
John's class is just one glimpse of the noticeable gender gap at DePauw. According to statistics provided by Director of Institutional Research Bill Tobin, the DePauw student body has been 55 to 57 percent female for the past 10 years. But for the past three years, the male to female ratio on campus has been 43 to 57 — the largest gap seen since the 2001-2002 academic school year.
Director of Admissions Dan Meyer said the inquiry pool of prospective students is about 60 percent female.
"We're fishing in a pool that is predominantly female," he said. "And you have a far greater likelihood of catching a female."
Meyer said the Admissions Office does not market the school differently toward men and women. The academic quality and reputation of the institution, he said, should resound in the same way with both genders. Additionally, since the Admissions Office is gender-blind when examining applications, no quota is placed on the number of men and women accepted to DePauw.
"I care less about the male-female ratio," Meyer said. "I care more about when I admit a student, is he or she going to be able to walk across the stage four years from now and graduate? That ultimately has to be our concern."
President Brian Casey said DePauw's predominantly female population reflects national trends in comparable liberal arts colleges.
Professor Anne Harris, chair of the art department and director of the women's studies program, agrees.
"Women are also claiming their education," she said. "Many, many more women ... they see the college as a chapter of their lives, not a waiting period."
Admissions statistics for many of the schools in the Great Lakes College Association, a group of 13 private, liberal arts colleges to which DePauw belongs, are also consistent with this trend. There are, however, some extremes. Albion College squeezes the gap with a 49 to 51 male to female ratio, but Hope College widens it with a 60 to 40 ratio.
Although Wabash College, DePauw's closest GLCA neighbor, is an all-male college, Meyer said it doesn't draw very many men away from DePauw because of the stark differences in the gender ratios.
Nonetheless, DePauw has the second-largest student-gender gap in the GLCA, along with Kalamazoo College. Casey said he doesn't believe this affects the academic climate at DePauw, but some disagree.
Harris said gender gaps at DePauw are much more visible in certain academic programs. In her women's studies and art history classes, like the ones John has taken, Harris teaches predominantly women.
"There are certain disciplines that still overwhelmingly attract women, and there are certain disciplines that attract more men," she said. "There are still some pretty powerful gender norms in the majors at DePauw."
Tobin found some blatant gender trends in certain disciplines while studying the top majors of current students by gender in the spring of 2010.
For instance, 57 more women studied communication and 49 more women studied psychology in comparison to men. On the other side, 56 more men studied economics and 32 more men studied computer science in comparison to women.
However, subjects many would assume are predominantly studied by males, including biology and biochemistry, were fairly evenly split.
Harris understands why so many women are attracted to college. She said high school and college educational systems provide structure for females, who are historically trained to meet societal expectations.
"The cultural expectation to please helps women to thrive in high school and through some of college, but when it comes to charting your own path, women need a lot of encouragement, whereas men have been doing that," said Harris, who completed her undergrad at Agnes Scott College, an all-female college in Decatur, Ga.
Senior Alana DeWitt, who is an art history major in the Women and Medieval Art course, said DePauw's curriculum reflects the gender gap on campus in the existence of a women's studies major, but no disciplines that look exclusively at men.
"It just seems like everything is geared toward fostering women's experience and making women stronger, but where does that leave men if they're constantly being put down or not supported as much?" DeWitt said.
Meyer said more males would attend DePauw if certain majors attractive to men, such as engineering, physical education or coaching, were part of the curriculum.
DeWitt, having experienced a one-male classroom with John, wishes there were more men in her classes.
"It's clearly mostly women in the classroom, so I feel like we kind of miss out on the male perspective sometimes," DeWitt said. "There is only one man in there, and I just love hearing his opinions, hearing his thoughts on things, and I feel like there might be a different dynamic were more men in the classes."
DeWitt has only felt uncomfortable in a DePauw class once — when she participated in discussion and felt attacked for her ideas in a college writing class, which consisted of predominantly male students.
In the opposite situation, John initially felt uncomfortable in Women and Medieval Art as the only man in his heavily female class. And while he said he sometimes feels like an "outcast," he challenges himself to open up.
"I always try to talk and keep it honest on my view, try to attack ideas and not people," John said. "I don't hold my tongue...I'm kind of like the male perspective in the group and try to establish that not every male thinks like me."
By taking women's studies courses at DePauw, John feels he has a more comprehensive understanding of women's gender roles.
"[Women] are underrepresented in that a lot of the issues they face are really personal, so they don't usually come to light immediately or at all," he said.
Overall, John doesn't feel as if the university's gender ratio affects him, nor does he think the gender gap will ever entirely close.
"I don't feel like women are overpowering men on campus. The gender gap doesn't really get to me that much. I don't feel any superiority or inferiority complex with it," he said. "I feel like there's no way to get it to 50/50. You're always going to have one group that's larger than the other."
Casey doesn't see the gender gap as a dilemma yet.
"It's funny," he said. "When it was 60 percent male and 40 percent female, no one thought it was a problem."
However, the university isn't ignoring the problem, and will consider socially engineering the gap if it begins to blatantly harm the education experience at DePauw.
"I think we're carefully monitoring, but not doing anything," Casey said.
— Andrew Maddocks contributed to this story.
