Merve Cura - 7

Universities should accept equal numbers of male and female students in every subject.

To what extent do you agree or disagree?

An argument which is commonly put forward about gender equality is that in higher education, the same number of men and women students should be accepted for each department. Although this opinion can be useful in numerous ways, I do not agree with it.

Promise to provide equity in numbers can encourage young people to choose a major that they did not consider before because of the major's label. For example, a young woman can enroll in an engineering program, which is labeled as man's area, while a young man can decide to study child development which has a "girly" stigma. In addition, this kind of settlement can contribute diversity to courses. For instance, because society has different child-raising attitudes for different genders, during group study men or women students can bring fresh aspects to the subject.

On the other hand, it is important not to forget that this arrangement can cause many injustice situations. To illustrate, when I was studying psychology, there were twelve men students and sixty women students in the class. With this arrangement, even if they had higher scores than men's scores, twenty-eight women students would not be accepted because of their gender. Furthermore, in some departments, while trying to maintain equality, fewer students than anticipated capacity could be accepted. Lastly, men and women's brains are not very differentiated from each other actually, and as a result of this, having gender diverse classes would not be as enlightening as expected.

In conclusion, social, educational, and financial settlements to provide equality are not novel solutions, and since they are expedient for the development of disadvantaged parts of the society, new arrangements are inevitable. It is vital to make viable and fair settlements for every part of the society, and I believe there exist some other options to provide gender equality, other than balancing student numbers.