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," Khollam said. "But after coming here, I’m just not known as an engineer, but as a part of the Auburn Family, as … a leader.”
Though Auburn University women are outnumbered by only 129 men, international women are outnumbered by men 2-to-1, a ratio likely linked to cultural customs and gender issues rooted in women's home countries.
Last fall, the University founded Auburn Global, an office tasked with bringing more 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 wasn't one program specifically dedicated to global recruitment.
“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 established a plan to increase the total number of undergraduate international students from 317 in 2015 to 1,000 students by 2020, Winn said last year.
With an newly founded centralized recruiting effort, 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 its international population by 19.8 percent, or just shy of 300 more international students, according to the University Office of Institutional Research.
However, along with the increase of students came a slight jump of gender disparity too, with 540 more males than females this year, as opposed to least year's imbalance of 353 more men.
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 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.”
Xu hails from Nanchang, China, where she saw a similar disparity between men and women in her field.
In a class of 40, only about five were 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.”
But just southwest of China's border lies a country with a similar tone.
Gender disparity also exists in India, where the developing country poses several obstacles in the path of opportunity for women, according to Khollam.
In 2013, the gender parity index for gross enrollment in tertiary schools in India rested at 0.94, indicating a slight favor of men, according to the World Bank.
And few women ever study abroad, Khollam said.
“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 their daughters' safety, lack of income or societal reservations about women studying science, technology, engineering and mathematics, or STEM fields.
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.
International students tend to choose STEM fields, which have gender gaps of their own — and 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, fewer 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 computer science and software 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, about 17 percent of the 127 international students are women, a higher percentage compared to the 14 percent women of the total 1,389 Auburn mechanical engineers.
“These gaps 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.”
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 according to their merit.
“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.”
That is the first step: growth.
And whether international gender trends should or will reflect the University’s nearly equal divide overall 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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