May 2005

Taking GW in Strides

GW's History Shows Issues Relating to Women and Higher Education Moving from Access to Advancement

By President Stephen Joel Trachtenberg

GW began its life in 1821 as Columbian College. It was small and all male. It also was typical of its times. What was good enough for Harvard, Yale, and the other old American colleges was certainly good enough for Columbian.

Higher education for women was by and large in the 19th century considered irrelevant: what would a woman do with all that learning? Her place was in the home, ideally as a wife and mother. What use could she possibly have for studying calculus or Greek or — God forbid! — anatomy? In fact, the GW Medical School actually admitted four women in 1881, then thought better of it three years later because coeducational instruction in medicine placed “a strain on modesty.” While the Law School did not deal with naked bodies or other unmentionables, it observed in 1887 that training women for the law was “not required by any public want.” Apparently, by 1913 there was a “public want” for female lawyers and the Law School began admitting women. The Medical School also changed its mind.

The great moment for coeducation arrived at GW in 1888 in the person of Mabel Nelson Thurston, the first woman undergraduate. But in her time there were only 13 women undergraduates. And it’s interesting that GW’s first dormitory, built in the 1930s, was the Hattie M. Strong Residence for Women. Even then, there was some tacit understanding that men could fend for themselves in living quarters out in the dangerous world, but women needed protection. This may sound outlandish to young people today. But mind you, in the 1930s, and even decades later, it was common to refer to women as “the fair sex” or “the weaker sex.”

That, I’m pleased to say, is history. And so is the idea that a woman’s place is in the home, not the laboratory or the library or the Dean’s office. There is plenty of evidence of how women are doing at GW elsewhere in this publication, but as GW’s president, a few numbers stand out and make me especially proud. This year, in total on all of our campuses, we have approximately 10,500 full-time undergraduates, and 56 percent of them are women. We have about 12,400 graduate and professional students, and 54 percent of them are women. In the Medical School women outnumber men by handy margins — so much for “the strain on modesty.” The same is true in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development and in both the undergraduate and graduate programs in the Elliott School of International Affairs.

But this is not true of all our schools and programs; men dominate many programs. I have a few thoughts about that.

First, it is probably unlikely that any university or college admitting students on their merit and potential will ever achieve a wall-to-wall, 50-50 balance of men and women. For example, the rise of women in the populations of medical schools — not just our own, but across the country — is a phenomenon of the last 10 or 15 years and, I doubt, anybody predicted it or has produced a plausible reason for it, yet the evidence is the evidence. Any university could artificially limit the number of male and female students in its programs at 50 percent, but this would require admitting less qualified applicants and turning away some first-rate ones. That is one version of academic suicide. Another would be to revert to being an all-male institution.

Second, while it is true that women are trailing in some areas, they are gaining ground. Take the School of Engineering and Applied Science. Three of the five department chairs in that school are women. Women account for 29 percent of undergraduate engineering majors and about 25 percent of the graduate students. The good news is that these numbers are much higher than, only recently, they used to be. Further good news comes from the American Society for Engineering Education that ranked GW’s engineering school number one in the percentage of doctoral degrees earned by women — 31.4 percent. And we’re 10th nationally in the percentage of women on our engineering faculty.

Yes, there is room for improvement. But let me offer my third observation — and I trust I will not get lost in a Larry Summers Moment. Men and women often have different interests: in the Graduate School of Education and Human Development there are more than twice as many women as men. I don’t think this has anything to do with “intrinsic aptitude.” But I think it may have something to do with social conditioning — most of which takes place before young men and women apply to a university. If girls, as many K-12 educators have pointed out, are not really encouraged to study the sciences when they’re in junior and senior high schools (in fact, as my wife was, they’re often discouraged), then why should we expect them suddenly to develop a passion for biology or engineering the day they arrive at GW?

It may not be surprising that our education school is predominantly female: teaching has traditionally been a profession open to women and thus produced role models. But then look at the unexpected dominance of women in GW’s international affairs programs. I wonder if that also is a social effect, having to do in part with the appointments of Madeleine Albright and Condoleezza Rice to be secretary of state. What happens outside the university is very powerful, as both traditional choices and breakthrough innovations prove.

This is not to say that we are off the hook. It would be melancholy to write off a young woman of 18 and say she didn’t do science before, so she won’t — or can’t — do science here. I think we need to find ways to encourage women to try out those fields in which they have significantly smaller presences. I’m not going to propose a radical curricular reform here, but surely the department chairs, the deans, and especially those professors advising newly arrived freshmen ought to be able to come up with a plan that might at the very least encourage young women to take a course, early on in their time at GW, in a field that is unfamiliar — even formidable and foreign.

We also need to do better in attracting and retaining more first-rate women to our faculty. Today, they are outnumbered by almost two to one by men. Some of this is the result of history: in the past the ratio was worse, and today we have simply inherited what happened in hiring 20 and 30 years ago. We will outlive that history. But in the meantime, it must be our business to seek a better balance between men and women on the faculty — and we shall do so.


It will take time because we will be rewriting history. We have a large contingent of young women professors, many of whom are surefire candidates for tenure, so I am sure that we will soon have an even better balance in the faculty. How long that will take I cannot tell you. We are still living off our old history while attempting to write a new one. But the new history will prevail.

And don’t be surprised if the person writing the president’s column in the years ahead is a woman..

Send feedback to: bygeorge@gwu.edu