"Obviously They Were There, But . . . ": Men's Presence in Women's Studies—An Israeli Perspective

by Sharon Halevi and Orna Blumen

In the course of conversations related to a study on the impact of Women's Studies (WS) on women students who are Palestinian and Jewish citizens of Israel, we noticed that when discussing matters pertaining to the makeup of WS classes, interviewees often made distinctions between students on the basis of personal characteristics, but never referred to gender. The persistence of this unexpected "blindness" led us to explore further the issue of men's presence in the WS classroom at a research university in Israel. When asked explicitly about the men attending WS courses, the respondents answered typically "Oh, yes, there were a few men in the class."1 When we asked the women to estimate the percentage of male students, they estimated their numbers between 2 and 6 percent, or a handful of students ("not more than three or four in a course"); these estimates are far lower than the actual number, which remains a steady 10 percent.