Viraja Khollam, graduate student in aerospace engineering, was the first in her family to leave India to study abroad, an opportunity she said only 2 percent of Indian women ever get.
When she came to Auburn in 2014, she was the only international female aerospace engineer. Now there are four.
For her, the United States was a nation with more opportunity than her home country, and she credits Auburn for making her more than just another engineering major.
“If I would have stayed in India, as a person I don’t know how much I would have grown.” Khollam said.
Khollam is a graduate assistant at Auburn Global and president of the Indian Student Association.
“Before coming to Auburn, I was always known as an engineer, and I was very proud of it. But after coming here, I’m just not known as an engineer, but as a part of the Auburn Family, as… a leader.”
Auburn men and women exist on campus in about the same numbers overall: half Auburn men, half Auburn women. But when those Auburn men and women are international students, women are outnumbered 2-to-1 by men.
Just last fall, the University founded Auburn Global, an office tasked with bringing an influx of undergraduate international students to campus.
Before Auburn Global, the main way international students came to Auburn was through graduate programs, athletics and other campus departments that recruited their own international students, according to Associate Provost J. Emmett Winn.
Previously, there hadn’t been one program specifically dedicated to globalizing the University.
“The difference between now and a year ago is Auburn Global has an international recruiting system, and Auburn prior to that did not have a fully established recruiting system,” Winn said.
Auburn Global had established a plan to increase the number undergraduate international students from 317 in 2015 to 1,000 students by 2020, Winn said last year.
With a “centralized recruiting effort” newly founded, data to act on the gender gap is not available yet, Winn said last week, though he said it’s “certainly important.”
“I had not been aware of the gap, but I think it’s fair to say we’re at the very beginning of things,” Winn said.
From last spring’s 1,384 total international students, Auburn has increased the international population by 19.8 percent, or just shy of 300 more international students, according to data from the University Office of Institutional Research.
However, with the increase of students came a slight jump of gender disparity as well, with 353 more males than females last year as opposed to this year’s increase to 540 more males.
And though the University has set a strategic plan that includes enrolling more students from around the world, some cultural aspects may make recruiting international women challenging.
“In China, parents worry more about girls’ safety than boys’. …I think parents are not willing to let girls study abroad far away from them because they worry about their safety,” said Dan Xu, graduate student in civil engineering.
And with women in Chinese culture, there’s a unique pressure and weight placed on a woman’s age, Xu said.
“In China, some people keep the thought like if the girl doesn’t get married before 30 years old, it’s a shame,” Xu said. “So if a single female comes here to pursue a Ph.D. degree and needs at least five years to graduate, some parents will really worry about their daughter’s age after graduation and when they go back home.”
When admitting international students, Auburn Global does not consider gender as a decision-making factor, according to Sean Busenlener, assistant managing director of Auburn Global. Rather, candidates are admitted on overall quality.
“We’re really first cohort, so it’s hard for us to see any patterns of students that are coming in — whether it’s male, female or things of that nature — because we’re so new,” Busenlener said. “It’s definitely something that we’re interested in. We want to continue to closely monitor as we bring in more and more cohorts and classes of students.”
China, India and Saudi Arabia are the top three countries enrolling students at Auburn, respectively — all sending more men than women — according to data provided by Karen Battye, senior institutional research analyst with the University Office of Institutional Research.
Xu traveled to Auburn from Nanchang, China, where she saw a similar disparity between men and women in her field.
In a class of 40, only about five are women, Xu said.
But in the United States, Xu said she feels more freedom to study and learn, and the friendly people in Auburn make it feel like a “sweet world.”
Gender disparity also exists in India, where the developing country poses several obstacles for opportunities for women, according to Khollam.
About 50 percent of India’s population is women, and only 50–70 percent of women attend college or graduate school, Khollam said.
Even fewer study abroad.
“Most of the women, even if they are smart and intelligent, they don’t get this type of opportunity because of their different family backgrounds,” Khollam said.
This could include parents’ concern for women’s safety, income or societal reservations about women studying STEM fields.
International students tend to disperse among these science, technology, engineering and mathematical fields of study, which reflect gender gaps as well — not just in international students — according to Jessica Holley, director of International Student and Scholar Services.
The Samuel Ginn College of Engineering, the College of Sciences and Mathematics and the College of Agriculture are the top three colleges for international student enrollment, respectively.
In each of the three colleges, less than half of the international students are women.
The top three majors of international students are all engineering majors: mechanical engineering, electrical and computer engineering and industrial and systems engineering.
Nevertheless, the college of engineering’s international women comprise only 23 percent of total international engineering students.
Whether international or not, women make up less than 32 percent of the students in those three engineering majors.
In mechanical engineering, 17.3 percent of the 127 international students are women, a higher percentage compared to the 13.8 percent women of the total 1,389 Auburn mechanical engineers.
“These gaps [in STEM fields] are closing, but there are still big gaps,” Holley said. “Most of our international students are graduate level, and most of them are going for a STEM field, so I’m thinking that might be one of the reasons why there’s the gap there.”
However, Auburn wants to have international students in every major across campus, not just STEM fields, according to Busenlener.
That is the first step: growth.
And whether or not international gender trends should or will reflect the overall university’s nearly equal divide is yet to be fully evaluated.
“We want to increase our diversity, and we want to bring in a larger applicant pool, which could reflect (the overall gender demographic of Auburn), but I don’t know what that’s going to reflect,” Busenlener said.
For Khollam and her home country, the concept of family could go a long way, because in Asian culture, family holds heavy significance.
“If Auburn, or Auburn Global, could promote Auburn as a family,” Khollam said. “Most of us Auburn students say we are family. So if we are able to use that sentence … and be able to promote an international market, it might have a good impact.”
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