Although the Tufts student body is only slightly more than 50 percent female, far more women than men study abroad at Tufts.
Program and Marketing Coordinator for Tufts Programs Abroad Melanie Armstrong said that 524 Tufts students are studying abroad for the 2005-2006 school year. Of these, 332 are female and 192 are male, a 1.73-to-one ratio.
According to Daniel Obst of the Institute of International Education (IIE), a non-profit group that promotes "the exchange of people and ideas," the national ratio is generally about two-to-one, making Tufts students a bit more equally distributed than the national norm.
Associate Dean of Tufts Programs Abroad Sheila Bayne said that "nationwide, men are considered to be one of the underrepresented groups in study abroad. And we would like to have it balanced in every sense - all majors, all ethnicities and both genders."
Bayne said that one possible explanation for the disparity is the pressure men feel to meet certain professional goals.
"Men may feel more that they have to go into something that's really structured, and have to come out of their undergraduate years with a job readily available," she said.
Women, in contrast, tend to be more adventurous during their college years, she theorized.
"Women are maybe a little bit more experimental in the way they look at their education," Bayne said.
Men are also more likely than women to choose majors that make it more difficult to study abroad, Bayne said.
"There are many male students who are engineers, and because of the structured nature of the engineering program, it certainly is more difficult [for engineers] to study abroad," she said.
But Bayne stressed that her suggestions were only personal theories and had no basis in research.
Sociology Professor Susan Ostrander does not assign any particular relevance to the male-to-female study abroad ratios.
"When we keep looking for differences between women and men, then we inevitably find them," Ostrander said. "Then we scramble around to invent an explanation for a difference that is probably meaningless. I suspect that is true of this one."
At Tufts, the ratio disparity is much more pronounced within University-sponsored study abroad programs. For 2005-2006, there are 364 students studying on non-Tufts programs: 226 are female and 138 are male, a 1.64 to 1 ratio.
Of the 160 students traveling through Tufts programs, however, there are 106 females and 54 males - a ratio of almost two-to-one.
Bayne suggested that language might be a factor in this difference.
"Many of our programs are very language-heavy. We require a lot of language [background] for those programs where the foreign language is spoken, so there might be a correlation there," she said.
As for the question of whether men and women choose to study in different countries, Bayne said that "off the top of my head, I'd say that men tend to go more to countries where English is spoken."
She added that "[at Tufts, this] might have to do with the fact that we have systematically tried to make it easier for engineers to go on our London program."
Senior Justin Carlson spent a semester in Spain, where about one fourth of participating students were male. He spent another semester in Chile through a small program in which males actually slightly outnumbered females.
Carlson spent the spring of 2005 in Alcala, Spain, where he was the sole male student studying there for the semester.
"It was me and about 12 girls," he said, a disparity that he said was "not ideal."
However, "it doesn't ruin your experience, because the bottom line is that men live in Spain, [and] it encourages you to make friends with them," he said.
Ironically, Carlson added, a lot of the native friends he made in Spain he met "were guys who were interested in the girls that I hung out with."
Sophomore Steven Constantino is an engineer who will not be studying abroad next year. "As an engineer, my requirements are somewhat restrictive, and I feel like a lot of the programs are more geared towards liberal arts students," he said.
Constantino said that if he had studied abroad at all, he would have done so in England, because "I'm not prepared to speak another language... the engineering school doesn't really care if you learn another language or are a world citizen."
He agreed with Bayne's proposal that men tend towards a more structured conception of education.
"For me, my idea of college is four years at one place where you study and get your degree... there isn't some tangent year where you go and do something awesome," Constantino said.
