With Gender Gap, A New Dating Game

When UC Berkeley junior Leigh Anne Silverio looks for a Filipino man to date, she goes home to San Diego.

Complaining about a "lack of options" on campus, Silverio, a Filipina, says she doesn't even bother looking on campus for some one to date.

Out of the 978 Filipino UC Berkeley students, 610 are women-and the gap is not unique just to Filipino students. In every ethnic group on campus except among whites and South Asians, women outnumber men.

Although it makes the odds better for straight men, the UC Berkeley gender gap among minorities changes the dynamics of dating for many on campus.

For women who want to date men from their ethnic background, many look for love outside of UC Berkeley.

A black UC Berkeley student who called herself Lily says dating black men on campus is tough because there are "so few to pick from here."

"The ratio between black men and women is out of whack. It's hard not to notice," she says.

Indeed nearly 800 of UC Berkeley's 1,200 black students are women.

With low ratios of men to women graduating from college, this gap can be an even greater issue for women who want to date men from their ethnic background with similar levels of education, says Connie Gores, vice president for enrollment at Randolph-Macon Woman's College in Virginia, who has examined race and gender issues on college campuses.

"There aren't even any black men in my major," says Lily, who studies molecular and cell biology. "I don't think it's easy to date on campus."

The gender gap also fosters an environment of a growing number of interracial couples-even against parental expectations.

Filipina fourth-year student Melissa See has dated mainly Latino men. She says she feels "comfortable" with Latino culture.

But her Filipina mother has pressured her to date white men, See adds. She says parents within some Asian groups, especially recent immigrants, equate white with success.

For others, the expectation is reversed in favor of tradition.

Rhetoric major and senior Kristine Lee, who is Chinese, is dating a Vietnamese UC Berkeley student. Her father remarked once that he did not want her to "taint the bloodline," Lee says, rolling her eyes.

Many traditional Chinese parents encourage their children to marry Chinese to keep the community cohesive, she says.

But she dismisses that belief as racist.

"I don't see the point in dating just Chinese," she says.

The unbalanced numbers have also helped cultivate the campus's most visible interracial pairing-white men with Asian-American women.

The number of white men is virtually even with the number of white women at UC Berkeley, but there are 1,200 more Asian-American women than Asian-American men.

The coupling could simply reflect the large numbers of both groups.

Korean fourth-year student John Park, also a molecular and cell biology major, likes to date Asian women, but even with more than 6,000 Asian females on campus, Park says he cannot find a date.

"It's sad for me," Park says. "Whenever a white guy dates an Asian girl, my pool of girls to date gets smaller."

Whether they date men within or outside their ethnic groups, many UC Berkeley students say the preference reflects the influence of their families and personal comfort.

Amy Schleeter, a mass communications major, is the child of white and Asian parents.

Hapa students, who identify as both white and Asian, often talk about interracial dating at Hapa Issues Forum meetings, she says.

Schleeter says she dates white men, though she embraces both sides of her identity.

"It's cute to see white and Asian couples around campus," Schleeter says. "I see them and think, ‘That's how my parents looked.' But, it also makes me wonder: what did other people think of them?"

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