This article is written by a student writer from the Her Campus at Duke chapter.
In a survey published by Duke Inquiries in Social Relations in 2014, it was discovered that at Duke, “women are more likely to feel insecure about their appearance and intelligence, and less likely to feel confident running for Duke Student Government positions or securing the job of their choice.” How comforting to know that even though I’ll be graduating from one of the top universities in the nation, I probably won’t feel all that great about it, statistically speaking.
Having come from an all-girls high school, I’ve definitely felt the impact of being in a male-dominated campus since having arrived here. I’m much less daring and talkative in class, and even in social settings, I hold back from putting myself out there out of fear of embarrassment.
A friend of mine who rushed SLG’s told me that whenever she was surrounded mostly by men in a group during the rush process, she feared that her opinions would be invalidated simply because she was female. When her group would be prompted to talk about music, she didn’t feel comfortable opening up about how her first musical idol was Hilary Duff when the boys were all raving about their early days of AC/DC, because who would have taken her seriously after a Hilary Duff confession?
It’s hard to pinpoint exactly why this sort of thing still happens at a place like Duke, but then again, why should we expect this campus to be exempt from something that’s still a problem everywhere else in the world? Despite how far women have come, it’s still very much a man’s world, and college campuses are no exception. If anything, they provide perfect examples of how men are still on top.
Take Greek Life. Men are the ones that throw all the parties and decide whom to invite. As a result, fraternities give the guys a certain sense of dominance and entitlement that women do not have access to in sororities. One in five college women are sexually assaulted, and, not surprisingly, frat guys are more likely to commit such assault.
As women, we know all these facts and feel the daunting impact of them, but are doing very little to change it. Is it entirely out of our control how we are perceived? Will we really be judged if we are anything but a perfect mix of studious, sociable, friendly and reserved? Is it even our responsibility to fix these injustices? Is it even possible?
If you ask me, the biggest problem facing Duke specifically is that there is very little conversation being had about this huge social discrepancy. We’re talking about racism, about the LGBTQ community, about the Latinos, et cetera, but we’re not talking about the classic man versus woman struggle anymore. It seems as though everyone thinks that this has been fixed, it’s okay, women can vote now, there are more progressive issues to talk about. But this is just horribly untrue.
It’s still a man’s world, and Duke is very much still a man’s campus. How many more women need to get raped for us to start talking about it again? How many more generations of insecure female graduates is Duke going to send out into a man’s world?