It is a man’s world — at least for the women pursuing degrees in a science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) field at the University of Mississippi, despite the growing number of women in academia.
As of fall 2024, 57% of the University of Mississippi students enrolled were women and 43% were men, according to U.S. News & World Report.
Even though women make up a majority of the student body, they are a minority in many STEM degree programs on campus.
According to UM’s Office of Institutional Research, Effectiveness and Planning (IREP), men made up 74.1% of the students enrolled in the engineering department, while women made up 25.9% as of fall 2025. The computer science department has an even greater disparity, as men made up 78.9% of the department while women made up 21.1% as of fall 2025.
Teresa DiMeola, a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Computer and Information Science from Berkeley, Calif., has served on the board of the Association of Graduate Women in STEM.
DiMeola explained women’s historical relationship with computer science, how that has changed over time and why the industry is male-dominated in the modern era.
“(Computer science) wasn’t always (male-dominated). Women have been instrumental and influential in computer science since the beginning,” DiMeola said. “Ada Lovelace wrote the first algorithm in the 1840s. Grace Hopper developed the first compiler and was a driving force behind COBOL, one of the earliest programming languages. The six women who programmed ENIAC, the first general-purpose electronic computer, essentially invented software programming as a discipline.”
Despite these advancements, computer science is, indeed, a male-dominated field. The reason behind this trend, DiMeola said, stems from perceptions regarding the industry.
“The reasons these achievements are often overlooked are layered and self-reinforcing,” DiMeola said. “Access is part of it: Studies have consistently shown that boys are introduced to computers and coding earlier, often through gaming and hobbyist culture, (which) has historically been marketed to males. There’s also a cultural narrative problem. Computer science has been implicitly marketed as masculine for decades, despite its female origins.”
Because student environments in STEM departments are influenced by their male domination, women are underrepresented in the classroom. This phenomenon can result in negative experiences for the women in those programs.
Emma Donovan, a junior geological engineering major from Nolensville, Tenn., reflected on her experiences in a male-dominated field.
“A lot of the time, it feels as if my answers to questions are overlooked because I don’t interrupt others when they are answering,” Donovan said. “If I do better than my male classmates, there must be some sort of favoritism going on.”
Donovan explained other ways she has felt out of place or overlooked in the classroom.
“I think it is a generational curse of feeling like women may not be as smart; therefore, they do not need to answer or contribute,” Donovan said.
Brenda Prager, an associate professor of chemical engineering and faculty fellow for the Center for STEM Learning, has worked at UM for 11 years after moving to the United States from Australia, where she worked in the chemical engineering industry and in academia.
Prager is the only female professor in UM’s chemical engineering department. In her position, she is seen as a role model by her students, even if that was not her main goal when going into teaching.
“I did quickly realize that there were a lot of female students, especially, that were really excited that I was here because they felt like they could talk to me and ask me the dumb question they might have been too scared to ask somebody else,” Prager said. “Even so, I don’t really know that I do anything particular to be a role model, but I think just sort of by default, I am a role model. I’ve certainly had a lot of discussions with students over the years about (how) just because you’re a woman, it doesn’t mean you can’t go off and be an engineer and have a career.”
Inversely, there are departments where women make up the majority and men are the minority. In UM’s Department of Education, men make up 14.6% of students enrolled, while women make up 85.4%, according to IREP.
Ethan Campbell, a freshman secondary English education major from Pass Christian, Miss., described his experience as a man in a female-dominated department and field.
“People told me whenever I talked about my future career path, ‘Do you really want to be a teacher?’ But never because I was a man,” Campbell said. “In fact, everybody that was on board with me being a teacher. It was because they think that we need more men in education just because of how lopsided the ratio is.”
Despite the fact that men are the minority in departments such as education, some say they do not have the same experiences that women in male-dominated departments do.
“(Being a gender minority in the classroom) has benefited me because being the only guy, if we’re in class and there’s a streak of girls, the first person that they’re going to go to for a different opinion is me,” Campbell said. “So I feel like (I) probably participate more for that reason.”
Where men in female-dominated fields seem to have more opportunities to participate, women in male-dominated fields have less. Women in male-dominated fields also tend to feel overlooked and underappreciated by their peers.
“At Ole Miss, I have been treated fairly, and I don’t think being a woman has made much difference. However, I worked in industry for a long time before returning to finish my Ph.D., and that was tough,” DiMeola said. “The challenges weren’t competence — I knew my work was solid. The challenges were social and structure. Having your credentials quietly doubted. Finding that colleagues who seemed supportive would suddenly distance themselves. … It’s cumulative and designed to make you question yourself rather than the environment.”
