Male/Female Ratio in Public Health

[EpiWin]

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I did a search for this through the archives, but most of the threads seem to peter out before getting into any substantive discussion so...

Public health is strongly skewed towards females, with stats pulled from a past thread saying:

"According to the ASPH annual data report for 2007, 71% of applicants for MPH programs were females. In programs that I had applied for the percentage of females to males in the programs are as follows:
Tulane University:83% female
Emory University:89% female
GW University: 82% female"

Understandably some subfields of public health (e.g. biostats, HPM) may be less like this, but the facts are out there. I'm wondering:

1) To current public health students, are there any advantages/disadvantages that you noticed have arisen because of the gender imbalance in the field? For example, do perspectives seem skewed towards one direction, or do professors treat some students differently as a result?

2) To current students as well, do you know if this trend continues into doctoral level studies?

3) On a more social tangent, do females usually end up dating outside the school? Does the stereotype that males have plentiful options actually play(er) out? Some of the admissions officers I've talked to deflect this question entirely, I'm curious to hear from you all!

 

[Veggie Monster]

I'm not a current student but I've visited Yale and Columbia where it was noticeable that there were more women than men in the classrooms.

Perhaps it might be intimidating to some men but personally I am fine with the ratio. Veggie Monster loves women!

At Columbia, girls joke that guys are lucky but it's hard to maintain a long term relationship when you have massive amounts of work to study. Few women would branch out and reach out to men from different professional schools within the university.

If you can't find a gf in SPH, there's always college.

 

[EpiWin]

If you can't find a gf in SPH, there's always college.

lulz so you're that guy.

 

[Jamiefrances]

Sorry, I'm not a current student, so I wasn't really aware of that, actually. I'm guessing that the numbers don't hurt, though you may find that a lot of them aren't single. Pretty much all of the females grad students I know in the age range of students given on most of the school websites are engaged/married/dating someone, or just too busy.

On an unrelated note, before reading this, I always thought Veggie Monster was female for some reason.

 

[Awapi]

I'm a student at Emory looking for a distraction from studying so I'm happy to answer 🙂 There is a notable difference on paper between the number of girls and guys, but honestly I don't notice it that much at school. I definitely don't think that there is any difference of treatment between the sexes by teachers or anyone (though some guys try to exploit it for things like running for SGA pointing out that there aren't that many guys on campus, but I don't think it really works for them 🙂 ). Most of my friends at school are guys but I'm a girl (I'm also married which takes away the pressure of them wanting to date me and probably makes it easier to be friends, I'm also in one of those "cool" marriages where we hang out with other people and don't make them feel uncomfortable around us and also have a lot of autonomy where we hang out separately)...

Anyhoo, there is definitely some inter-dating here at Emory between students, but I honestly think a lot of the people choose not to date within the school of public health just to have some other topic of conversation in their life, haha. When we are all hanging out we are making public health jokes, SAS jokes, relating everything around us to some 2x2 table in epi, then the jokes derail into a serious conversation about high prevalence of HIV in a prison and whether or not it should be called an epidemic or a hyper-endemic population...and this is at a bar on Saturday night...as you may be able to imagine, it's nice to have a life line to something non-public health related. My husband is an engineer, but he did Peace Corps and can share an interest in some of the things I'm doing, but it's definitely not the dominant topic of conversation that we have, whereas I know if I were dating another student at Emory that's all we would talk about and it would get old. Not to mention that the schools of public health may be at a large university, but they are small within themselves, I see the same people EVERY day and friend groups are inclusive of most everyone (which I love, but I could imagine that it might turn me off to dating another student since I would see them ALL the time and would also be likely to share a friend group with them which could cause some awkwardness if things didn't work out and, as a grad student, you barely have time for a social life let alone worrying about drama).


Hope this helps a little, good luck!

 

[Stories]

1) To current public health students, are there any advantages/disadvantages that you noticed have arisen because of the gender imbalance in the field? For example, do perspectives seem skewed towards one direction, or do professors treat some students differently as a result?

2) To current students as well, do you know if this trend continues into doctoral level studies?

3) On a more social tangent, do females usually end up dating outside the school? Does the stereotype that males have plentiful options actually play(er) out? Some of the admissions officers I've talked to deflect this question entirely, I'm curious to hear from you all!

1.) Never noticed much difference in treatment at either school I've attended (Yale and BU)

2.) The numbers tend to even out a bit at the doctoral-level. It's not quite the 7-3 split, probably closer to 6-4 would be my guess, but still more girls than guys.

3.) From what I've noticed, most girls I knew were already with a guy or dated outside the SPH. There's obviously going to be SOME dating within the SPH, but I didn't notice nearly as much as you might guess based on numbers alone. If you're like me, you don't have a ton of interest of dating someone within the SPH if only for the fact that you see a lot of these people (or teach in a doctoral-student's case) in nearly everything. It's nice to branch out a bit.

 

[Veggie Monster]

On an unrelated note, before reading this, I always thought Veggie Monster was female for some reason.

Real men eat veggies

 

[mystal]

Great topic! As a single girl, I definitely wonder about this too. How do you normally meet people outside the SPH?

When we are all hanging out we are making public health jokes, SAS jokes, relating everything around us to some 2x2 table in epi, then the jokes derail into a serious conversation about high prevalence of HIV in a prison and whether or not it should be called an epidemic or a hyper-endemic population...and this is at a bar on Saturday night...

Hahhah!

 

[Awapi]

Great topic! As a single girl, I definitely wonder about this too. How do you normally meet people outside the SPH?

Mystal, at Emory there are A LOT of ways, here are a few:

- The medical school hosts speed dating (which public healthers are invited to) and our new SPH SGA reps are planning to do that as well. The law school sends us invites to their mixers and stuff as well
- Playing intramural sports, there are a lot of mixed teams, there's a popular kick-ball league and each team is required to have a certain number of people from each gender, most of my friends play on teams with guys (and girls) from the business school
- Taking a course at any of the graduate schools (law, medical, nursing, theology, business, etc) are included in our tuition and we are often told about applicable classes offered in another school, several of my friends are taking classes in the theology, business, nursing, or law school next semester
- You also may meet people from other schools if you get a practical experience/assistantship at the CDC, Emory Healthcare, or many other organizations

I'm sure there's lots of ways at other schools as well, but those are a few of the specifics for us!

 

[Veggie Monster]

How do you normally meet people outside the SPH?

hey, pumpkin, how you do'n?

 

[EpiWin]

Mystal, at Emory there are A LOT of ways, here are a few:

Can I just add that when I visited Emory, everybody was gorgeous? So many good looking people...

Not gonna lie, that has helped boost Emory way up on my list (yeayeayea CDC, great program, tons of networking opportunities i know i know).

 

[mwdl4life]

hey, pumpkin, how you do'n?

 

[mystal]

Mystal, at Emory there are A LOT of ways, here are a few:

Cool! I always sort of imagine grad school to be more work and less socializing, so it's good to hear that fun things happen. 🙂

hey, pumpkin, how you do'n?

To quote EpiWin, "so you're that guy." hahah.

 

[Stories]

Cool! I always sort of imagine grad school to be more work and less socializing, so it's good to hear that fun things happen. 🙂



To quote EpiWin, "so you're that guy." hahah.

More socializing because of a thing called happy hour, which everyone is old enough to go in grad school 😉

 

[mwdl4life]

Cool! I always sort of imagine grad school to be more work and less socializing, so it's good to hear that fun things happen. 🙂
.

I'm not so sure how applicable this would be to SPH, but in law school, there was a TON of dating within the student body. Granted, there was more of a 50/50 ratio, and the general consensus was that dating another law student was "icky", but that sure didn't stop anybody🙄. School work did have a big effect though, as most of dating didn't start until second or third year (1L year of law school is notorious for being especially brutal).

 

[codym]

lulz so you're that guy.

HAHAHA

 

[nietzsche754]

When I was taking social foundations of education prior to entering my MPH program I actually wrote a paper summerizing the various research on what types of classroom learning activities favor males versus females in achievement. It can be summarized by basically saying that in general males preform better in classes that provide opportunities to compete and females do better in courses that provide more opportunities to cooperate and collaborate. In that respect I do think the sorts of learning activities I am given in my program inherently give females a competitive advantage in regards to grades because there is a great emphasis on using problem based learning groups. These groups seem to always value forming consensus opinions over producing quality work and I'd much rather just be given a research paper to write. So while it's very subtle I do think there is some bias towards men in grading but if you didn't understand educational theory you'd never spot it it's very under the surface and I don't believe it's at all intentional.

 

[EpiWin]

That's really interesting, and I think that's the type of response I was curious about from my original question. No one will overtly claim that faculty bias in a particular direction, but different learning approaches can certainly play to one side more than another.

 

[japhy4529]

Real men eat veggies

I agree! 😀