Skirts, sweaters and saddle oxfords – they rarely wore slacks.

Taxis were 25 cents, but hitchhiking was just as easy – and

cheaper. The Varsity was a small burger stand with only a few outside tables located on the corner of College Avenue and Broad Street.

Freshman girls were sequestered to “Coordinate Campus” on Prince Avenue, where they lived, ate and attended classes.

Visiting the main campus called for special permission. If they wanted to leave their dormitory, girls had to “check out” with their house mother and explain where they were going and who they were leaving with – and curfew was 8:30 p.m.

It was 1946. The war had just ended, and the G.I. Bill sent an influx of young men to college for free. Only 29 percent of the University’s population was female, and if you were one of them, you were privileged.

Fast forward 63 years later, where women at the University hold the titles of SGA president, editor-in-chief, first-honor graduates, Rhodes and Goldwater scholars.

In 2007, freshman female enrollment topped out at 63 percent – the highest in University history.

This trend is not specific to UGA, or Georgia.

It is microcosmic of an issue facing every university in the country, and predictions are female dominance in academia will only increase.

“1989 was the very last year that there were more men than women going to college in America,” said Patrick Winter, senior associate director of marketing and recruitment in the University’s admissions office. “Since then, women have overtaken men.”

* * *

Reflecting on a past of female subordination in education, a heavy, yet inevitable question surfaces: Could this female dominance be the result of compensating for a history of oppression?

Linda Grant, a sociology professor whose specialty areas include sociology of gender and education, said the history of women in academia was worth noting – especially in regard to certain programs still dominated by males today.

“Historically, women were excluded from some engineering schools, or there were quotas. At [my alma matter] University of Michigan, only 20 percent could be women in the ’50s. A lot of the universities had these restrictive quotas – especially in law, medicine and engineering,” she said. “They didn’t explicitly exclude, but they formally or informally limited their presence.”

When those barriers fell, the numbers show the amount of women who applied to college increased almost every year.

“There are some fields – like law – that women immediately started flowing into, but then other fields – like engineering – that people are still talking about how to get more women interested.”

Winter wouldn’t directly link the years when women were restricted from higher education with today’s dominance, but did point to many efforts in between.

“I think the efforts, things like Title IX [the federal law that prohibits gender discrimination in sports and academics], have been fantastic and have had a tremendous impact on what women do post-high school,” Winter said.

“And I think we have done wonders in the last 30 years in increasing the college-going rates of women, where boys have remained fairly flat during that whole time.”

* * *

Before women began dominating the world of higher education – in both population and achievements – they exhibited dominance in the area enabling them to get there: high school.

Grant said women are not only more likely than men to complete high school, but are more likely to have higher grades, take honors courses, avoid negative kinds of discipline, and much less likely to be suspended or expelled.

“Increasingly, overall [women] have had very similar test scores to men. There has been a slight advantage to girls in verbal test scores and a slight advantage to boys in math scores, but that has really almost been overcome. The math difference is almost not there anymore, but [it's] commonly believed that it’s there,” Grant said.

“So girls typically bring higher credentials [from high school]. They are, in a sense, more qualified in terms of the traditional criteria that colleges usually look for, especially colleges like [UGA] that rely heavily on test scores and grades.”

Winter said he wanted to make it clear that the discrepancy between male and female enrollment doesn’t stem from men falling behind.

“Men aren’t doing badly, they’re just not moving ahead like women have been,” he said. “In terms of admission, it’s that women are applying more, and they’re applying to more schools.”

This is also a national trend.

“We receive more female applications than male, and that’s actually pretty consistent with the amount we admit, 60-63 percent female,” Winter said. “And that could be for a lot of reasons, just the total number of high school graduates has been dominated by women.”

So why are women doing so well in high school?

Anne Carlson, the department chair guidance counselor at Walton High School in Marietta, has seen many special programs targeted toward encouraging women to go to college.

“We tend to have our female students apply to more colleges than male students. Our females apply to between eight and 10 schools, while males apply to only five or six.”

Walton, which sees 99 percent of its seniors attend college, sent 93 freshmen to the University this year – the most in the state. Sixty of them were females.

“Some of this has to do with what happens with the dynamics of the classroom, how are boys encouraged, how are girls encouraged – a lot of those things will play [themselves] out in terms of who’s going to apply for admission and go to college,” Winter said. “I think we have done a great job encouraging women post high school, and not a great job of encouraging men.

“We do not take gender into consideration in the admission process at all,” Winter added. “The University has signed a consent decree with a federal judge that we will not utilize race or gender in the awarding of any scholarships.”

* * *

With more women graduating from college, this generation of women in the workforce should be the most competitive and most successful of its predecessors.

But Grant said this simply won’t be the case.

“It’s a real fundamental belief in American society that education is the pathway to economic success, but we really have only a loose correlation,” she said.

“There is still that glass ceiling that women are not, in fact, obtaining those very, very powerful and very lucrative positions. Women are somewhere getting stalled by choice or by restraint and end up working in sectors of the labor market that aren’t very high paid.”

Ed Koc, director of strategic and foundation research at the National Association of Colleges and Employers, said Grant is spot on with her unfortunate prediction.

“We do a student survey every year, and one of the things we ask, is whether or not you’ve applied for a job and whether or not you’ve gotten a job,” Koc said in a phone interview. “We’ve found, in general, that the males responding to this survey have a somewhat better time getting a job offer, than females.”

Although women are running their academic environments, Koc said he doubts women will be running the working world anytime soon.

“We really haven’t seen any great shift, 50 percent of the workforce is female, and the number of female CEOs is frankly, a handful. We haven’t seen a great movement toward increasing those numbers.”

But Grant said another discrepancy – the gender pay gap- is narrowing, but not the way it should be.

“It looked very optimistic for awhile because the pay gap looked like it was closing, but now it’s stalling and reversing,” she said.

“And we looked at that really closely and discovered what’s really going on: [it] is not so much that women are gaining in real terms, but that men’s wages in real dollars have fallen, so that’s what is closing that gap. And I’m not sure if that’s really the way that people would prefer to see it close.”

Koc said though this is true for the labor force in general, it may not be true for recent college graduates.

“Nevertheless,” he lamented, “I’ve been struck by the persistence of

inequality.”