For the first time in USC history, admissions for Marshall’s School of Business Class of 2025 reached gender parity: women make up 52% of the school’s student population. In 2019, USC’s Viterbi School of Engineering achieved gender parity for the first time as well, with an equal percentage of males and females pursuing an engineering major.
Still, some believe that percentages aren’t enough to solve disparities women face in the classroom, particularly in historically male-dominated majors.
“Definitely in group project situations or clubs where I have to work with more men, I’ve had situations where I felt like my opinions or words weren’t being respected,” Megan Zhang, a junior majoring in business administration with a Viterbi minor in innovation, said. “I had to fight to get my words heard.”
The issue expands past USC. The Magazine of the Society of Women Engineers reported in 2021 that prior to the pandemic 24% of students who pursued engineering degrees were women. When compared to USC, an official statement released by the dean of Viterbi in the spring of 2020 revealed that the school had the largest number of women engineering graduate students in the nation.
Electrical engineering graduate student Ecrin Yagiz recalled her experience pursuing an undergraduate degree in Turkey, where there were only two other women in her department. Comparatively, there are far more women in her USC masters program this year.
“One thing that I’m noticing is that especially in the [computer science] classes and in general the CS department, I think the number of women is growing,” Yagiz said. “Maybe people are realizing that anyone can do this.”
Still, despite seeing improvement, gender parity has not been achieved for USC graduate students. In 2021, out of the 1,178 students pursuing a masters in Viterbi, 70.6% were males, while only 29.4% were females. These statistics were clear to Yagiz in her classrooms.
“In some cases, I was one of the only girls out of two or three,” Yagiz said. “But it can change depending on the field.”
USC freshman and biomedical engineering major Cydria Harris feels as though men are more likely to speak up in male-dominated classes.
“They’ll interrupt the lecture to correct the professor sometimes,” Harris said. “I think males are more likely to ask questions in my math class, but I don’t know if that’s just because there’s more [of them].”
Zhang, who studies business administration, shared that out of the 10 business requirements she’s taken so far, only two of her professors were women.
On several occasions, she noticed how hard it was to make her voice heard during group projects. Zhang recalled one experience where she was the only woman out of five in her group.
Usually surrounded by friends who made space to listen to her, she wasn’t used to this new type of environment: one where she felt she had to fight to make her presence known, and even then, still feel ignored by her male peers.
She noted that it was only when her male mentor told her classmates she had good ideas that they listened. Even then, she voiced her frustrations over only being respected after the fact.
“Why couldn’t you just have realized the things I said had value in the first place?”