What We’ve Discovered

Jane McAuliffe

Jane Dammen McAuliffe a scholar of Islamic studies, is the president of Bryn Mawr, a liberal arts college for women.

Updated October 28, 2011, 7:04 PM



Cultural forces lead many young women to believe that there are some fields of study that just aren’t for them.

At Bryn Mawr College, our students are six times more likely to graduate with a degree in chemistry than college students nationwide and nine times more likely to do so in math. Indeed, we are second in the nation in the percentage of female students receiving degrees in math, beating out science-oriented coed universities like the California Institute of Technology and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Do a lot of our students enroll with the idea of being math and physics majors? Yes, many do.

But there are also a great number who at some point during their first or second year take a course in computer science and discover a love for programming language that’s even greater than the love they had for a Romance language.

We recently profiled a student on the college’s Web site who graduated a few years ago with a degree in computer science after initially intending to get a degree in anthropology.

She wrote in an e-mail: "Studying computer science at a women's college meant that I could concentrate on learning instead of being the representative of a gender. Gender became irrelevant instead of being something that defined me."


Topics: Education, schools and schooling

Single-Sex Schools: Separate but Equal?

A new study debunks the benefits of segregation by sex in the classroom, and says the practice does more harm than good. Should it be illegal? Read More »