Some majors divide along gender lines

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    By SHAWN DICKERSON

    While BYU offers a variety of career choices to both men and women, female students tend to dominate some majors while being largely unrepresented in others.

    Statistics for BYU graduates from December 1995 through August 1996 reveal that the fields of study most dominated by women were clothing and textiles (98 percent of its graduates were women), elementary education (95 percent), nursing (89 percent), food science and nutrition (85 percent), and health sciences (85 percent).

    Nora Nyland, dietetics program director for the department of food science and nutrition, said the food science and nutrition department contains three programs: food science, nutritional science and dietetics. Of those three she said dietetics is the most dominated by women.

    Of the 65,000 dietitians nation-wide, 96 percent of them are women, she said.

    Nyland said that much of the reason that so few men are in dietetics program is that they don’t know about the field at the time they make career choices.

    “It’s kind of where nursing was a decade ago in terms of male interest in the field,” she said.

    Nyland said she expects male interest in the program to increase, as it did with nursing, in the future.

    The majors with the least female representation, of those with at least ten female graduates, were electrical and computer engineering (6 percent), technical education and construction management (6 percent), biology (7 percent), civil and environmental engineering (7 percent), and mechanical engineering (7 percent).

    Kyle Rollins, a BYU associate professor of civil engineering said that few women enter the field of engineering largely because of tradition.

    “I suppose because the major has been traditionally associated with construction and women are traditionally involved less with construction,” he said. “The thing that we are finding is that women have a special role because they tend to be more artistic and creative than men tend to be.”

    “We have seen an increase (in the number of women in the program) but it is still lower than we’d like to see,” he said.

    Rollins said that he has been an adviser to a number of female graduate students and has seen female students routinely in the top of the class.

    “It’s not that they can’t do it, but that they perceive that it might not be the career path for them.”

    Rollins said that there was a lot of opportunities in the field available to women.

    Steven Shumway, a BYU instructor of technology education, said that while there has been an increase in the number of women in the technical education and construction management major they are still quite unrepresented.

    Shumway said that is probably because both in the LDS and American cultures, there is a stereotype that females don’t fit into the field.

    “It would be cool to see more young ladies enter the field,” he said.

    “There are lots of opportunities available for (women), but we are unable to attract them,” he said.

    “We have 100 percent placement for our graduates and each graduate might have 4 or 5 job offers. Elementary education can’t say the same. We would really like people to know about the opportunities.”

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