The increasing feminization of anthropology

Have you been in an anthropology class / course with more men then women? I haven’t. In both Norway, Germany and Switzerland (pluss many other places incl South Africa, I heard), the gender balance between men and women is around 25-75. Eli Thorkelson, graduate student in cultural anthropology in Chicago, gives us some statistics from American universities that present a similar picture. But as he shows, it hasn’t always been like this. And according to him, we witness both an increasing feminization of anthropology and an ongoing masculine bias.

Here are some of his comments:

- The number of doctorates awarded to women has been greater than the number of doctorates awarded to men since 1992. Males were demographically dominant in the production of doctorates until 1984, after which there were eight years of approximate equality followed by divergence.

- The number of men enrolled has been falling slightly since 1995, while the number of women enrolled has continued to increase.

- While men are no longer demographically dominant, and are even a minority (remarkably so at the undergraduate level, where women receive nearly 70% of anthropology degrees), there are still gendered principles of selection at work in the field.

Nevertheless, the most demographically striking thing here is in his opinion the overall population growth of anthropology, hundreds of percent over the decades.

>> more in Eli Thorkelson’s post “Gender imbalance in anthropology”

There are by the way many other interesting posts in his blog about academic culture and on the anthropology of anthropology!

SEE ALSO:

India is not USA : The Scientific Gender Gap Should Be Understood Comparatively