In the 2009-2010 academic year, women accounted for nearly two-thirds of the 270,600 American students going overseas. Indeed, the proportion of men studying overseas has remained the same--or flatlined, to put it less charitably--for more than two decades. Sending a broader cross-section of majors abroad has not made a dent in the gender gap…

For decades, women have enrolled in college in greater numbers than men, and, by many measures, have outperformed them in the classroom. But in recent years, as social scientists and student-affairs offices have focused on other differences between the genders, they have documented patterns that could explain how engagement influences student…

The role of gender in the global economy is not represented particularly well by old-school "pipeline" theories of women entering particular industries, whether it is manufacturing, medicine, or college teaching. The pipeline analogy suggests that if women enter a field in equal or greater numbers to men, they will somehow automatically be "piped"…

As colleges add services for the growing number of student veterans, they find that many women in that population seem reluctant to participate. On many campuses, officials find that only a sprinkling of women take part in programs and services designed to support veterans. The low turnout appears to be at odds with the number of female veterans…

Since at least the early 1990s, Arab governments have made women's participation in higher education a priority. Across the region, young women fill the crowded lecture halls and bustling courtyards of universities. On many campuses, they outnumber men. But women's increased participation in higher education does not necessarily translate into…

About 16 percent of veterans use the GI Bill to attend private institutions, roughly the same proportion as students generally. But at the most highly selective colleges, veterans using the Post-9/11 GI Bill barely fill a single classroom--38 at Penn, 22 at Cornell, and at Princeton, just one. The sparse numbers do not go unnoticed, veterans say.…

The author's experiences and those of the students he encounters at elite campuses no longer resemble the common experience of many college students today. What people used to call "nontraditional" students--older, working, married, and maybe still living at home--now constitute a large and growing percentage of those attending college in the…

As more women choose careers in the sciences, the stakes are higher than ever before. Having women in key decision-making positions in the scientific and technological work force is critical to the future of society. Successful senior female scientists serve as a prime source of leadership for top academic administrative positions. A more diverse…

Engineering and teaching are among the most lopsided disciplines in academe's gender split. In 2010, women received 80 percent of the undergraduate degrees awarded in education, the U.S. Education Department reports. And they earned 77 percent of the master's and 67 percent of the doctoral degrees in that field. In engineering, by contrast, women…

Although the percentage of female authors is still less than women's overall representation within the full-time faculty ranks, researchers found that the proportion has increased as more women have entered the professoriate. They also found that women cluster into certain subfields and are somewhat underrepresented in the prestigious position of…

There have been many efforts in recent years to draw more women into STEM fields. While women have made gains, they are still far less likely than men to major in such fields, especially engineering and computer science. Why? This article presents the responses and the thoughts of a group of scholars and experts.

A recent report from the Modern Language Association, "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey," unfortunately passed over an important aspect of women's rise through the professorial ranks: how they move through the process of monograph publication, especially in comparison with male colleagues. As an acquiring editor in the scholarly and…

By academic standards, Rebecca R. Richards-Kortum has it made. She is a full professor of bioengineering at Rice University, runs a thriving cancer-research laboratory, and is a member of the prestigious National Academy of Engineering. But with four children at home, she sometimes feels like an academic outcast. In fact, Ms. Richards-Kortum says…

What if men and women actually live on the same planet? Turns out they don't communicate so differently after all, argues Deborah Cameron, a professor of language and communication at the University of Oxford. In her new book, "The Myth of Mars and Venus: Do Men and Women Really Speak Different Languages?" (Oxford University Press, 2007), she…

American colleges are undergoing a striking gender shift. In 2015 the average college graduating class will be 60-percent female, according to the U.S. Education Department. It appears that the stark gender imbalances in American colleges nowadays is acting as an accelerant on the hookup culture among students. As a result of the rising gender…