There is a staggering gender gap in advanced STEM and humanities classes at M-A. However, students experience these gender-gap classes very differently.
For the few women taking AP Physics C, for example, being in a male-dominated class comes with discomfort, and sometimes feeling isolated or ignored. However, for men interviewed in female-dominated humanities classes, being a minority is neither negative nor top-of-mind. In some cases, it is even positive.
For every six men in AP science and math classes, there are only four women. Simultaneously, for every six women in AP English and History classes, there are only four men. The divide has seen little to no improvement over the past seven years.
These gaps, which begin at the high school level, continue into college and beyond, creating a starkly divided workforce. In recent years, women make up only 14% of engineers and 41% of mathematicians, while men make up only 42% of authors and 27% of teachers.
While noticeable at M-A, the gender gap is also much larger outside of the Bay Area and the Silicon Valley bubble.
How do women experience being minorities in STEM?
There are 30 men and only 11 women in AP Physics C this year.
“I’ve had a few times where I felt really ignored by a lot of my partners. Because there’s a lot of guys that are friends due to sports, I’ve ended up in an unlucky group where they’re all friends and they’re like ‘you can draw the diagrams,’” senior and AP Physics C student Kim Pols said.
Seniors Meghan Lam and Nia Sadrzadeh are two of just four girls in their AP Physics C class of almost 25 people. “We’ve formed a community of women in STEM because of how it’s set up,” Lam said, describing how the four girls have become friends.
“There was one time when four of us girls were talking and someone made a comment, ‘they’re gonna stage a rebellion. They’re congregating in the back, and they look like they’re plotting something,’” Sadrzadeh said. Those four girls that were “plotting,” were the group of friends that came together because they were a minority in a class of men.
In college, these divides can be even stronger. In 2024, women made up just 24% of physics majors.
“I’m not interested in going to an all-girls school. I’m also not really interested in taking classes where there’s gonna be three other girls in them as my only college experience,” Pols said when asked about her decision to pick a college major. She is considering both psychology and physics, and when applying to colleges and selecting majors, she considered the demographics of her classes.
Of all the subsectors of STEM, physics and engineering are the most male-dominated, meaning that the issues around the gender gap are most prevalent.
How do men experience being minorities in humanities?
For men taking advanced humanities classes like AP Lit, AP Art History, and AP Lang, the story is the opposite.
Over the past four years, AP Art History has had an average of 35 men for every 100 women. This year, while it is unusually evenly split, there is still a divide. “When Ms. Strub asks people to discuss an artwork, it’s almost always women who are raising their hands,” senior and AP Art History student Holden Thomson said.
Junior Niklas Klemmer is also an AP Art History student this year.
“I think that I’ve never seen any instances of men feeling uncomfortable in the class or feeling like they’re the odd one out. It’s a very tight-knit class because there’s one period and one teacher, and everyone gets along. For me, especially as a gay person, I didn’t ever feel uncomfortable. I get along really well with women,” Klemmer said.
“I joke, my graduate school is 80% female and influenced my decision, as in dating. That was a positive. 100%,” Rosenberg said.
“I’ve seen a gender divide. There’s a lot more girls in the humanities classes I’m taking compared to guys, but it hasn’t affected me. I don’t really care,” senior Bennett Zadig, a student in AP Art History and AP Literature, said.
“I think that I’ve definitely noticed the gap, but I think that in the instance of art history, being female-dominated, the curriculum is almost empowering,” Klemmer said. “I’ve learned a lot about women’s history as well as art history, and it’s actually something I appreciate.”
Why?
These two experiences are starkly different despite similar proportions of men to women in humanities and STEM classes. Historically, men have dominated academia, so women are fighting deep-rooted biases in STEM that do not exist for men in humanities. In both AP Lang and AP Lit, most of the books students study are still written by male authors, often historical and published during a time when female authors were suppressed.
Spencer Strub, an Associate Research Scholar at Princeton University in Medieval Literature, discussed how at the collegiate level, academia being historically male has left its mark, even though most students in humanities majors are female in similar proportions to M-A’s gender divides.
“There’s still a lot of male power in the humanities, like my subfield,” Strub said.
Even in fields that are construed in some way to be feminine, like in many humanities fields with the exception of philosophy, there’s still the professoriate,” Strub said, discussing the high proportion of male professors at Harvard in the 2000s. “The people who are teaching, especially at top universities, don’t necessarily reflect the compositions of classes”
Closing the gap(s)
In the past few decades, there has been a huge push for women in STEM. At M-A, students have founded numerous affinity organizations to bring women into STEM fields and classes: Women in Coding, Girls Who Code, Women in Business, Women In Medicine, Business, and Technology, and more.
“In robotics, we’ll have more women go to the outreach events so that girls will feel more comfortable joining,” senior and robotics team leader Molly Kilburn said.
Less effort and fewer resources are put into the issue of the humanities gender gap, both at M-A and nationally.
As a result, the national gap of women in STEM is shrinking: between 2011 and 2021, the number of women in STEM fields increased 31%, while the number of men only increased 15%. On the other hand, since 1987, men have been 40% of college students majoring in literature, history, anthropology, and similar subjects with little to no variation year to year. There is not a push in the other direction.
This is the case for several reasons. First, since men do not necessarily feel uncomfortable in humanities classes in the same way women in STEM do, there is less motivation to create these programs, especially at the high school level.
“The gender divide hasn’t ever been top of mind really. I feel like it’s pretty evenly distributed in the classes that I’m currently taking,” junior Gustav Singel said, taking AP Art History and AP Lang this year.
Also, since men have historically been in positions of privilege, creating spaces that specifically support men can feel counterintuitive–there are much deeper roots, and therefore a much stronger narrative, about women being excluded from academia.
The bottom line
Despite the fact that these gaps are experienced differently, especially at M-A, both have real implications beyond education.
Because women are underrepresented in scientific research and medicine, women’s health and issues are under-researched, and this gap is worsening. “Cardiovascular disease, for example, is the number one killer of women in the USA, but only about a third of participants in clinical trials for new treatments for cardiovascular disease are female,” Chloe Bird, a professor of policy analysis at Pardee RAND Graduate School, said.
Simultaneously, men have been leaving HEAL (health, education, administration, and literacy) jobs since 1980, down from 35% to 26% as of 2019.
Men are four times more likely to struggle with mental health and commit suicide and 6% more likely to drop out of high school, yet people who are role models and counselors–teachers and psychologists–are majority women.
“Social workers, psychologists, and elementary/middle school teachers are professions where a big gender gap really matters. Seeking help can be difficult for many people, and it often can be even harder for men. We know that men are less likely, for example, to seek mental health counseling,” wrote Richard Reeves in his book about modern masculinity Of Boys and Men.
How men and women experience gender gaps are different, but the detriment of a divide goes both ways.
“When men avoid humanities careers, we lose essential perspectives in literature, history, and education—fields that shape how we understand culture, ethics, and human connection. When women are absent from STEM fields, technology and research may fail to address issues relevant to half the population. Innovation and problem-solving miss out on diverse viewpoints, which are essential for tackling complex global challenges.” Hunt said.
