 From left to right: Tom Logan, Alex Safransky, Adam O'Connor and Nonda Hanneman
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 From left to right: Alex Safransky, Adam O'Connor, Nonda Hanneman and Tom Logan
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Lara Sandygren just wanted to go fishing. "We gardened instead," the senior psychology major recalls.
By "we" Lara is referring to herself and the other young women who spent the 2006 fall semester studying in Thailand as part of the CIEE Khon Kaen program. At one point in the semester, program participants spent time living in different Thai communities. Sandygren and fellow female participants lived in a river community in close proximity to one with male program participants. When the male students were being taken on a fishing trip, their host families told the women students that fishing was simply not something they could do based on traditional Thai gender practices. Even when Sandygren and her peers explained to their host family women fish regularly in the United States, they were turned down. The young men who did go fishing apologized to the women, but as Sandygren reflected, "apologies only go so far."
Prior to the trip, Sandygren was hesitant when she saw the program's rules for female dress while traveling in Thailand-finding warm-weather clothes that did not expose shoulders or end above the knee proved to be a challenge. When she got to Thailand with these new clothes, she saw local girls and women wearing tank tops and short shorts, and questioned why she had been told to dress so conservatively.
"It's an entirely different set of rules," Sandygren said. The CIEE program strives to help participants prove the "party-hearty American" stereotype wrong, but Sandygren observed, as a woman, she "personally felt a lot more judged among adults." Although local women wore shorts and tank tops, it seemed that the local society expected visiting Americans to dress more conservatively, perhaps out of respect for their new surroundings.
Virginia Miller, a senior theater major and ECLS minor, who spent the 2007 spring semester studying at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England, experienced similar discrimination. She recalls getting a sense of the stereotype that American women are sexually promiscuous by nature, a stereotype that seems to transcend most geographical boundaries.
No matter where they studied abroad, many female returnees articulated a similar feeling. Senior history major Caroline Bunnell spent the 2006 fall semester in Rome as a participant in Trinity College's program. She experienced a harsh culture shock simply walking down the street: "Italian men were usually more aggressive; as I'd walk through the streets of Rome by myself, men would often whistle, blow kisses, or yell 'ciao bella.'" To Bunnell, this cultural difference seemed flattering at first "because it was new and different, but when I thought more about it, I became increasingly more offended-and hurt-that they weren't thinking about me as a person with value, but as some sort of sexual object."
Bunnell's observations about gender dynamics in Italy contributed to an overall sense of her "Americanness" during her time abroad. She, like many other Americans traveling abroad found herself wanting "fix everyone else's issues". Specifically, Bunnell wanted to fix Italians' gender problems.
The experiences of Sandygren, Miller, and Bunnell are shared in one way or another with college women across the country. International Programs Office Director Susan Popko noted that the ratio of women to men who study abroad is approximately 65:35, and Oxy's ratio tends to be on par with this national average.
The study abroad experience was historically meant to be a "finishing school" experience for young college women, Popko said, and they typically went to cosmopolitan European cities such as London and Paris. Women are now selecting locations and programs that are more diverse and adventurous. Studying abroad no longer holds the "finishing school" purpose, so the rest of the world has opened up to women seeking to study in other countries.
Popko has seen Oxy women encounter many of the observations and problems articulated by the three women mentioned above. They often encountered "a sense of reinventing themselves" while abroad because the cultural norms and expectations are often so different for women's appearances and behavior in the United States. This can be a positive experience but also a difficult one; Oxy women are so strong that Popko says they frequently have trouble modulating identity with their new surroundings.
One common issue that Oxy women report back from their experiences abroad is that of cross-gender friendships. While it is perfectly normal for American women and men to be platonic friends, this is often unheard of in other countries. A word for a non-romantic male friend, Popko notes, does not even exist in the German language, a linguistic detail that demonstrates how deeply embedded gender norms can be in a culture. Many Oxy women come back to campus relating stories to Popko about their experiences trying to reconcile their own cultural practices-such as naturally having platonic friendships with men-with the customs set forth by a foreign culture.
For Oxy women in particular, there are many mechanisms of support to help women prepare for a trip abroad and to debrief upon return. The IPO has books on individual countries as well as themes in travel (including women and travel) that students can check out for two days at a time. The IPO also sponsors panels on different study abroad issues, including a Gender and Sexuality panel that will take place in the spring of 2008, similar to the panel on race and study abroad that they sponsored this past October. These panels are both opportunities for returning students to discuss and share their thoughts with each other as well as a chance for students planning to go abroad to hear about their peers' experiences.
Oxy students have traveled everywhere from Buenos Aires to Bangkok, and gender is a central platform through which they can later relate and continue learning from their experiences abroad. I do not want make sweeping generalizations about women's semesters abroad, I simply seek to show how different each woman's experience can be depending on who she is, where she studies, and the structure of the program she chooses. No two experiences are alike, but many women do face challeneges abroad, and it's important to learn from each other's stories.
2008 Woodie Awards
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