Is our housing lottery sexist?

Is our housing lottery sexist? The answer in short: yes or no, you can decide for yourself. But I am still appalled, weeks after having experienced firsthand the repercussions of a housing lottery that not only sucked in general for all rising juniors, but disproportionately so for the female half.

While I linger on ResLife's waiting list, I can not help but wonder how it is allowed that some students with lottery numbers well below the "Most likely to be placed on the wait list" and "Not likely to be assigned on-campus housing" categories were still more able to get housing than other students with the top "Most likely to have options" numbers -- solely by virtue of being male, or so it seems.

Yet I discovered from talking to current juniors and seniors that this apparently has played out the same way year after year. It seems more female seniors opt for on-campus housing each year, which leaves next-to-nothing -- or just nothing like this year's case -- by the time female juniors are next in line to choose. Though it was not news to them, it was definitely the first time I had heard of anything like this, and if I am at all representative of Tufts students in general, I would guess that many still do not know that this stuff goes down.

Likewise, I am incredulous as to how it is possible that no one else seems to have noticed this phenomenon seriously enough to question and demand that something gets done about it. I suppose one factor is it is just too easy for the University to overlook since it only happens to a new wave of unsuspecting students who continually shrug it off each time as something that personally will not plague them again. However, I can not help but suspect that had this happened around the hot issue of race, more voices would have been raised immediately, loud and clear. But because this hints at the less visible symptoms of institutionalized sexism, it is somehow more acceptable to let it go without further investigation.

I realize that housing is a difficult situation every year and that ResLife does make efforts to help rising juniors, efforts that should not go unrecognized. An example was the early release of lottery numbers last semester so juniors, presumably in the "not likely to be assigned on-campus housing" range, could have more time to start the usually stress-laden search for off-campus housing sooner. But changes in policy always come with inadvertent outcomes. The implication for releasing numbers early reinforces the pervasive myth that if a student is lucky enough to be assigned a high lottery number, then s/he would have less need to start the search and should instead be rest assured that on-campus housing will indeed be likely.

What I am suggesting then is that ResLife and the University should also find ways to deal with this de facto discrepancy which results when only certain students are being shut out of housing because of a system that allocates on-campus rooms by sex. Additionally, I would like to see a formal investigation on why more females prefer living on-campus so the University can either rule out or appropriately address factors, such as concerns over personal safety of living off-campus, that typically affect more females than males.

Even if the University were to do nothing to change, I hope this at least serves as a heads-up to current and future underclasswomen of what they are up against for future housing lotteries. Perhaps after having read this, they will not have to be as shocked next spring, as I was a couple weeks ago, when they find themselves anxiously waiting over an hour at Cousens Gym only to find nothing left because they are female.

Karen Lin is a sophomore majoring in Engineering Psychology and Community Health.