Gender dynamics inform our intellectual experience, whether we know it or not

This semester, half of my classes are comprised entirely of woman-identifying students. This is entirely a coincidence: the courses aren’t titled “Women in X” or “Women in Y”; they aren’t cross-listed with the Gender and Sexuality Studies program, nor do they make any claims in their course descriptions that suggest they would amplify or centralize the feminine experience. We simply show up each week, reading and writing about works by authors of all genders, without a male student in sight. It is entirely distinct from any academic environment I have ever experienced.

Of course, there are myriad spaces dedicated explicitly to women on campus, which specifically encourage members to discuss the feminine experience and role of gender in an academic or career-oriented setting. These opportunities are both a privilege and a sign of progress: many generations of women did not have access to a slew of organizations dedicated to supporting them in their particular academic or career pursuits, from Women in Business to Law to Medicine.

But there’s a difference between designated spaces for women — where the expectation is that discussion will focus on feminine identity and experience itself — and a circumstantially all-women classroom, where gender might not be discussed but is impossible to ignore. The reality of gender in the classroom, especially at a modern and relatively progressive university like Princeton, is more nuanced than a simple shortage of leadership opportunities or the need for a supportive group to confide in.

It’s difficult to institutionalize formal solutions addressing intangible or implicit gender dynamics, but that makes it all the more important to keep these issues in our minds as students and faculty — and to openly acknowledge how they shape our academic experience.

It’s impossible to dismiss the enormous accomplishments of women in academic fields and the opportunities available to women at American universities, particularly at schools like Princeton where extensive academic resources exist. But that doesn’t mean we can forget that the foundations of elite academic institutions are entangled with gender discrimination. Gender-based disparities in our perception of who is intelligent, authoritative, and important are baked into the way we speak, write, and think. The issues at play in the classroom are larger and far older than any of the individuals sitting at the seminar table, making any attempt to assign individual blame unproductive.

But classrooms consisting solely of women manifested a learning dynamic which I had never experienced or even conceived of as possible, despite having taken many classes with a balanced gender distribution and a relatively comfortable and inclusive discussion environment. The fact that such a dramatic change was possible without any alteration in the material or format of the course suggests that the student gender identity has a greater impact on academic environment and experience than we might believe.

It’s admittedly difficult to articulate — and I’m sure isn’t experienced uniformly by my classmates — but there’s undeniably something distinct at play in these women-only environments. Our discussion of readings feels more like an authentic conversation and less like an audition or script, as if we’re giving ourselves more time to develop our own thoughts and permit uncertainty without embarrassment. We also seem less inclined to preface our comments with preamble like “I’m not sure, but” or “this probably doesn’t make sense.”

This intellectual empowerment in classrooms is likely entangled with the sudden absence of implicit gender imbalances that many women, myself included, have internalized since childhood.

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This isn’t to say that men have an inherently negative impact on the classroom, nor that women cannot actualize their full intellectual potential in coeducational environments. But they do show that impediments to women-identifying students’ confidence and comfort in the classroom go beyond whether or not they’re being talked over or are welcomed in the room.

It’s understandable that we might think refraining from discussing gender in the classroom creates a more egalitarian learning environment, especially given the long history of gendered harms in academia. We have no qualms talking about gender when it’s explicitly on the syllabus. But we rarely acknowledge the subtler ways gender shapes a classroom environment and our engagement with the material and with one another.

Princeton, alongside its peer institutions, was late to the coeducational party and has an extensive history of gender inequality. Princeton and Yale first admitted women to their undergraduate classes in 1969, and it wasn’t until 2004 that Princeton achieved gender parity in enrollment.

Even if women aren’t being talked over, excluded, or overtly harassed in the classroom, gender still actively informs the energy and productivity of our intellectual engagement. We seem able to own up to the challenges women have historically faced in academia in their more egregious forms — and create supportive spaces outside the classroom in which to discuss them. But that acknowledgement stops at the classroom door, neglecting the more subtle and implicit impacts that might not warrant their own dedicated support group.

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Classroom gender dynamics can also be misunderstood when they are chalked up exclusively to a matter of social comfort, which undermines their capacity to dramatically alter the nature of an intellectual environment by placing the onus on those they disadvantage. My high school college counselor cautioned me against women’s colleges by presenting them as echo-chambers cloistered from the “real world.” But this narrative negates the significant and lingering consequences of anti-woman discrimination in academia by condescendingly suggesting that women’s colleges are primarily advantageous as less intellectually serious social havens and places to make friends.

I’m not proposing more women-only academic spaces as a perfect fix: it’s as oversimplistic and inaccurate to imagine women-only academic environments as paradises as it is to dismiss them altogether. But the dramatic difference in learning experiences in these classes — which do not concern subject matter specific or catered to women’s identities — indicates that gender plays a consistent role in students’ ability to learn. That’s why we must directly address and explore gender’s impact on the classroom rather than leave it to fester, visibly or invisibly, in an effort to deny its existence in the first place.

It’s dangerous to ignore these dynamics, subtle as they may be. Students are drawn to Princeton in large part because they care about having challenging and impactful academic experiences. But implicit gender dynamics generate insecurity and a constant percepti on of judgment, replacing joy and confidence in intellectual exploration with performativity. Even if we as women don’t need “a room of [our] own” to feel like full participants in Princeton’s intellectual community, it’s up to all of us to address the elephant in the (class)room and have honest conversations about how gender informs our academic experience.

Head Opinion Editor Lily Halbert-Alexander is a prospective English major from San Francisco, who thinks that Virginia Woolf said it best. Reach her by email at lh1157[at]princeton.edu.

A correction was made on Tuesday, Mar. 24, 2026: A previous version of this article included a photo caption indicating the photo was taken in McCosh Hall. In fact, the photo was of Frist 302. The 'Prince' regrets this error.