Sex Segregation

But the change has had an “unintended side effect” as well, as Currier House Master William A. Graham puts it. While coed blocking was once the rule, single-sex groups have become increasingly dominant as students have found the new limit too low to accommodate both male and female rooming groups—evidence, Rampell says, that the decision was not well thought out.

Rampell had claimed that the decrease from 16 to eight would discourage coed blocking groups, arguing that most of the new groups being formed by his classmates were all-male or all-female. Though he had no hard evidence to back up his claim at the time, data from the past four years shows that coed blocking has effectively been cut in half and is becoming less common over time.

In 1999, when blocking groups could include up to 16 students, nearly 60 percent of the blocks formed by the Class of 2002 were coed, comprising over 80 percent of the class. Thirty-eight of the 75 single-sex blocking groups were not groups at all, but merely floaters. Among the largest groups, those with over 12 people, almost all were coed—more than 93 percent.

In 2000, when the Class of 2003 was restricted to eight per group, the numbers were reversed. Instead of 60-40 coed, more than 60 percent of blocking groups were either all-male or all-female, though the majority of the larger blocking groups—those with more than four students—were still coed. Next fall, when the Class of 2006 moves into the Houses, over 70 percent of their blocking groups will be single-sex, and single-sex groups will exceed coed groups at all eight possible sizes.

Lewis, who next month will return full-time to his duties as McKay professor of computer science, notes that the decrease in coed blocks is statistically all but assured.

“It is, of course, combinatorially harder to get homogeneity with larger groups,” he writes in an e-mail. “No one would suggest that a random model would be accurate here, but it’s fair to note that you have to be a lot more selective to get 16 of one sex than eight of one sex, drawing from a population that is roughly 50-50.”

Rampell says the issue is not selectivity, but the simple law of rooming: rooming groups, except in unusual circumstances, must be single-sex. So, to maximize rooming configurations in smaller blocks, it is necessary to block with as many students of one’s own gender as possible. Lewis says he has not heard any “reports of a diminution of male-female friendships at Harvard” and thus believes the decrease in coed blocks to be inconsequential.

But some students say they resent being limited in effect to blockmates of their own gender. Kathleen A. Urbanic ‘03, whose all-female group lives in Quincy House, says she feels her relationships with her close male friends have suffered as a result of the eight-person maximum.

Palfrey says “it’s possible” that coed friendships may have diminished as a result of the change, noting that she sees many single-sex groups eating together in the dining hall.

As single-sex blocking has increased, so have floaters. Thirty-eight members of the Class of 2002 chose to live alone, a number that rose to 44 the following year and 54 this year—a four-year increase of more than 40 percent.

“Wherever you draw the line, there will be people on the line who will be unhappy,” Georgi says. But with more lines being drawn, he adds, more people get left out.

Hard to Assess

Whether the reduction from 16 to eight has alleviated the other problems cited by advocates of the change is harder to tell, as many of them are difficult to measure or else fairly subjective.

In addition to the pure desire for randomized Houses, administrators and masters hoped that the change would make it easier for rooming groups within blocks to live near one another. They also wanted to stop first-year entryways from forming large blocking groups that inevitably excluded a few students, as entryways are typically larger than 16.