by Ashleigh Bonina
There is so much that goes into the history of The University of Akron. However, the topic of my blog posts this week was the difference between men and women concerning their areas of studies at the university between 1950-1969.
I chose to narrow down the data and only compare 3 years. Those years were 1955, 1962 and 1966. This allowed me to show the differences from the beginning of the 50’s, beginning of 60’s and end of 60’s. To obtain this information I had to weed through a lot of information and spend time sorting through data from each individual year.
The process in detail: I visited the University of Akron Archives earlier in the month and took pictures of all the commencement books that they had available during this time range. Once I got home and looked over the information, I set up a table that separated men’s majors from women’s majors and then separated those into specific areas of focus. I went through each degree and counted how many people who graduated were men and how many of women. This gave me insight as to the difference in enrollment, what majors attracted women and which attracted men and then allowed me to look at that information and see how it changed over time.
I found that there was a significantly larger number of men enrolled at The University of Akron during this time period. That is evident based on the graph above. In 1966, 639 men graduated with a bachelor’s degree compared to the 289 women. Also, you’ll see that men make up the majority of the engineering and science graduates. Women made up the majority of those who graduated with degrees in secretarial science, education and other “expected” areas of focus for women. Check out my instagram blog to see the graphs from the other years, at https://www.instagram.com/uawomengrads/
This was important for me to look at because it is one of the questions that I have always asked about the university–when did enrollment of women increase and how did their areas of focus change over time? I am still working diligently towards finding the answer to this question.