The score’s in and it’s a win for us. College women are becoming more and more ambitious and successful: they’re holding the most spots at top schools, participating in more college extracurriculars and are quickly outpacing their male counterparts. Eat our dust, ex-Harvard pres Larry Summers (who claimed that women don’t have the same math and science abilities as men)! Looks like the numbers are on our side after all…

Making the Grade.
Over the past three decades, women have gone from being a minority—and even forbidden on many college campuses—to the majority. Says Dr. Catherine Hill, the director of research at the American Association of University Women: “Women now represent over half of all [college] students (56 percent), up from 42 percent in 1970.” We’re now the majority at some of the most prestigious schools, like Columbia University, Northwestern University and Amherst College (among many others) and graduate with the most honors degrees.

Motivated Grrls.
Tracie Palmer, a junior majoring in Women’s Studies at Harvard University, exemplifies college women’s prowess: Palmer is a campus leader, participating in progressive and political organizations. And she’s noticed that many of her well-rounded peers are female. “In academics and extracurriculars… women push themselves to succeed in every area. I feel like women may be less apt to take their successes for granted.”

Do as I Do.
So how did young women today develop such go-get-‘em flair? Some believe it’s from seeing strong, powerful women in the mainstream media, like power-lawyer Miranda Hobbes on Sex and the City and Ms. President on Commander-in-Chief. On a more serious note, perhaps today’s college girls have been influenced by the ten women serving as CEOs of Fortune 500 companies or super-strong gals like Katie Couric and Jill Carroll taking on the media and communications. Dr. Hill offers other reasoning: “Before Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, employers could—and did—refuse to hire women for occupations deemed ‘unsuitable.’ They fired women when they became pregnant or limited their work schedule because they were female. Schools could—and did—set quotas for the number of women admitted or refused admission to women altogether. In the decades since these civil rights laws were enacted, women have made remarkable progress in fields such as law, medicine and business, as well as in nontraditional ‘blue-collar’ jobs like airplane pilots, fire fighters and auto mechanics. Collectively, women have demonstrated that they have the skills and the intelligence to do any job.”