I don't know which way this poll will swing ...

[GlottalGreekGeek]

... but I am going to find out, I suppose. However, I have wondered for a while if one gender held a majority in the online classics community, and if so, which.

[mariek]

Are the results as you suspected?

[GlottalGreekGeek]

Now that I'm pretty sure it's established who has the majority, it is the way I expected intuitively by spending over a year at this forum. However, when I asked a classics professor whether there were more male or female classics majors, she said that there were far more female classics majors than male I wonder why this forum has so many more males, yet the Classics classes at that college has more females. Also, of the people I know face-to-face, the only three people who have/will major in Classics (one got the degree decades ago, one is working on the degree now, and one is a junior in high school) are female.

[Agrippa]

However, when I asked a classics professor whether there were more male or female classics majors, she said that there were far more female classics majors than male :?Also, of the people I know face-to-face, the only three people who have/will major in Classics (one got the degree decades ago, one is working on the degree now, and one is a junior in high school) are female.

That's really strange. For some reason I assumed it was a field dominated by guys. I'm very happy it's not!

[GlottalGreekGeek]

The fact that the students are mostly female just means that female students at that paticular college are, for whatever reason, more interested in classics than the male students. In my opinion, the better indicator of who dominates the department is the female-male ratio of the faculty, and out of the 10 full-time Classics professors at that college, 4 of them are female (incidently, I talked to one of the female professors). Of the 11 graduate students, 5 are female. Two of the three PhD students are female. So perhaps at the undergraduate level there are more females, but as the work gets deeper the gender ratio evens out.

[Carola]

Maybe the Textkit users are more of a reflection on the number of male computer users rather than Classics students. Or are there more men who post comments to computer user groups? I don't know the figures for this - maybe most women like to communicate in person rather than on-line. An interesting topic for investigation here!

[Kopio]

I know that for Koine students...the majority at my school is male. In the 7 years I have been there (sadly working toward my undergrad) there have only been 1 or 2 women who have gone all the way through our program and taken 4th year Greek. Small disclaimer though....The 4th year Greek class usually only has an attendance of 2-5 people, because it is extremely brutal.

[bacon]

Only two choices?

[vir litterarum]

More men probably are enrolled in Koine classes probably because they are taking the language to read the New Testament in its original language and become pastors. Only to become ministers in more liberal Protestant denominations would women be taking such classes for this purpose. Hence, because this site does include Koine as one of its major forums, a dialect which developed after Attic and Epic, your poll may only reflect a composite of interests including Classics and Scriptural scholarship.

[cdm2003]

Only to become ministers in more liberal Protestant denominations would women be taking such classes for this purpose. Hence...

I disagree with this generalization. The only people I've personally known who studied ancient Greek in college were women who were interested in reading the New Testament. I've also know men and women who have gone through seminary having never studied a word of Greek, Hebrew, or Aramaic. Just because some ministry discriminates against women doesn't mean that women automatically disallow themselves access to the knowledge.

I would be interested in seeing some actual statistics of men and women in classics programs around the world, but I don't think they would be relevant here. People in these forums are interested in things Latin and Greek, yes, but we're also interested in "talking online" about them.

Chris

[vir litterarum]

I was referring only to individuals who study the Attic dialect exclusively, not Ancient Greek in general, for it would be counterintuitive to limit oneself exclusively to a simplified dialect of Greek unless your sole purpose was study of the New Testament and/or Greek culture during this time period; hence, in no manner was I insinuating that women in general that women should not study Greek because they typically are not permitted to become ministers; rather, I was stating that the women who do study Greek expand their studies further than the Koine dialect because they have no plausible reason to stop at Koine.

[Kopio]

I was referring only to individuals who study the Attic dialect exclusively, not Ancient Greek in general, for it would be counterintuitive to limit oneself exclusively to a simplified dialect of Greek unless your sole purpose was study of the New Testament and/or Greek culture during this time period; hence, in no manner was I insinuating that women in general that women should not study Greek because they typically are not permitted to become ministers; rather, I was stating that the women who do study Greek expand their studies further than the Koine dialect because they have no plausible reason to stop at Koine.

Man!! That was a phenomenal sentence! I'm guessing that you've studied Greek for quite a while I don't think I've seen that long of a sentence with so many subordinate clauses, causal/purpose clauses and the like. I envy your use of the semi-colon...something I've never quite got the hang of.

Good show, good show indeed!