Well, it’s official. I am a researcher!! (And no, not the scientist kind).
Me doing all my research
I was able to conduct my own research through a survey that I talked about in a past post. My survey was about women’s inequality on college campuses. Through this research, I wanted to discover how other people felt about the inequality between genders on college campuses and to get their ideas for ways that women could stand up for themselves and their rights. I made the survey online so that many people could answer it, and made sure that the survey was fast and easy to answer so that people would actually take it. The questions that I asked were…
- How do you identify?
- [Male / Female / Other]
- There is inequality for women on college campuses
- [Strongly Disagree / Disagree / Agree / Strongly Agree]
- When coeducation was first introduced, there was inequality for women on college campuses
- [Strongly Disagree / Disagree / Agree / Strongly Agree]
- What are some ways that women can stand up for themselves and their rights?
- What are some examples, if any, that you’ve seen of gender inequality on campus?
- Should colleges be coeducational? Why or why not?
All of my responses were from Santa Clara University (SCU) students which made me able to see how people in my immediate community were reacting to these issues of inequality so that they could potentially be solved one day. From these responses, I collected data and quantified it. For example, most people agree that there is inequality for women on college campuses.
TABLE 1: There is inequality for women on college campuses
| Answers | Percent of Responses (n = 24) |
| Strongly Agree | 25% |
| Agree | 37.5% |
| Disagree | 33.3% |
| Strongly Disagree | 4.2% |
It wasn’t that surprising to me that most people did not strongly agree or strongly disagree because, since times are changing, there are less and less very obvious examples of female inequality, especially on college campuses in California. However, what did surprise me was that one person strongly disagreed. As I investigated that answer, I found that the person who strongly disagreed was a male. However, in Graph 1 this same person responded that he had seen an example of gender inequality on campus. This could be very indicative of a larger trend of people seeing inequality, but perhaps dismissing it as not important enough to prove that a whole campus has gender inequality.
While many people stated in Graph 1 that they have seen inequality, a significant number of people (23% of respondents – the orange part) stated that they had never seen examples of gender inequality on campus. Now I am not sure if this is true, or if the people just did not want to fill out another short answer question…
This graph and data relates to Table 1 because although 37.5% of people did not agree that there was inequality on college campuses, only 23% reported that they had never seen examples of gender inequality. So, why is it that 4.5% of those people thought that inequality did not exist when they have seen it firsthand? It is possible that they thought this specific question was geared towards men, but since my survey is titled Women Inequality on College Campuses, that seems unlikely. Therefore, this data seems contradictory. After all, these respondents said that they did not think that there is inequality for women on college campuses, even though they have seen it firsthand.
After collecting this data, I found that people really needed to be educated on what women really go through, because although times are changing, there is still a lot of inequality and change that needs to happen. However, I really only surveyed 24 people, so my data will be more conclusive the more people that take it. It was fun to get answers and different opinions from my research questions though, because I liked the fact that I was actually getting real answers from my peers and people that I knew; not just random facts that I found in scholarly articles and the internet. This little research project actually turned out to be very interesting, so…
Image:
Image 1: http://i.giphy.com/Yiw4aLjpxldhC.gif
Image 2: https://stepenterprise.files.wordpress.com/2014/01/tumblr_mycbt1wm8k1slteg1o1_250.gif