To be a male at Ewha
Ewha, with a student body that is nearly 100 percent female, is not just one of the many large co-ed universities that are primarily equal in gender.
However, this does not mean that there are no male in Ewha. There are male professors, male workers and male exchange students around campus.
What would it feel like to be the only male, surrounded by so many women?
“On the first day, I felt really weird,” Alejandro Rubio Garcia-braga (Universidad Alfonso x, 4) said. “I thought, ‘What am I doing here?’”
On the other hand, Duc Long Tran (University of Koblenz, 3), a student from Germany, feels “discriminated” against in a women’s university. With his masculine qualities and physical characteristics, he is conspicuous amid the female students in class, and on campus.
Male students are not the only ones who notice differences being on a women’s university campus compared to other experiences.
“I needed some time to adjust myself into Ewha since most of the customers are female,” said Jo Seong-kuk, a worker at GS25.
While some of the male students and workers at Ewha took pains to note that they feel awkward being the minority gender, professor Frank Smith (Media Studies) is neutral with the status quo. In regard to professor Smith’s experience in teaching at Ewha, being a male professor is not a problem.
“To be honest, I do not really notice it that much and it does not make much of a difference in my work,” Smith said. “However, I find that there is no separation in the classroom. In other universities I thought there was usually an invisible line between the two genders, but obviously in Ewha, there is no such thing.”
As a women’s university, Ewha is different from other universities with its own unique tradition and goal.
“I think that this is one of the primary purposes of why a women’s university was created in the first place; to eliminate that kind of gender tension on campus, and I think it has been pretty successful so far,” Smith said.