Day Twelve - Education
Four years ago rageprufrock began the first 14 Valentines and she spoke of how women are praised in song, worshiped in poetry, and derided in culture. She spoke beautifully and elegantly of women, comparing our bodies to luminous flowers. She spoke of the state of women, and the need to remember what we go through, what women throughout the world suffer through.
We are daughters, sisters, mothers, and lovers. If we choose, we can bring life into world with our blood and nourish it with our bodies, but the world that we helped create, that women have bled for and fought for and cried for, doesn't recognize us. Our history is one of abuse. We are not safe.
Women suffer from domestic violence and rape. We are devalued. We are taught that we are lesser. There is still so much work to do, so much for us to accomplish.
Women are being killed the world over, suffering from infanticide, dying from lack of medical care, killing themselves in the fight to be what society tells them they must. One in three women will still experience sexual assault in her lifetime. So much has changed and so much has stayed the same.
Forty years ago we declared that Sisterhood is Powerful, and it still is. We must remember that, must continue moving forward.
It's 2010 and we've come so far, but there is still more work to be done. We deserve better, and we can do more. We're strong. The next fourteen days is meant to remind us of that. It's our time to take back our bodies.
V can stand for vagina, like Eve Ensler's groundbreaking monologues. V can stand for violence, under whose auspices all women continue to make a home.
V can also stand for victory.
Education
Since the mid 1980s, women have been outnumbering men on the majority of college campuses in the United States. Four years ago, we accounted for fifty eight percent of students seeking undergraduate degrees, at both 2 and 4 year colleges - and there are many campuses where we account for up to two thirds of the student body.
Of course, this has prompted a certain amount of backlash. Some private colleges have begun to give men a slight edge in admissions - for instance, while forty percent of the applications that Brown University received in a recent year were from men, the class that they accepted was forty seven percent male. There are currently dozens of studies and initiatives aimed at motivating young men to attend college.
You would think that men were suddenly and abruptly on the verge of becoming invisible in the hallowed halls of learning.
Not so. While women are earning most of the associate, bachelor, and master’s degrees in the United States, they account for the minority of degrees in science and math related fields, from physics and engineering to physical sciences and chemistry. While these numbers have been slowly and steadily increasing since the 1970s, the gap between females and males in these high paying fields is still undeniably wide.
Additionally, women are still grossly underrepresented in most other areas regarding higher education. Only twenty percent of all college presidents are women, and while women make up forty one percent of college faculties, less than thirty percent of all full-time faculty at research universities are women. Female professors are paid less than their male counterparts, and are twenty three percent less likely to earn tenure. If a woman is fortunate enough to earn tenure, she is thirty five percent less likely than her male colleagues to be granted the status of full professor: women account for forty two percent of full professors at 2 year institutions, twenty three percent of full professors at 4 year liberal arts colleges, and seventeen percent of full professors at research universities.
The National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education "educates the public about issues concerning equal rights for women and girls in education; they monitor the enforcement and administration of current legislation related to equal rights for women and girls in education; performs and publishes research and analysis of issues concerning equal rights for women and girls in education, and to take the steps necessary and proper to accomplish these purposes." For more than thirty years, this non-profit organization of over fifty groups has worked tirelessly to advocate for women in all levels and branches of academia.