Last Thursday, I walked over to the Draper Center for a meeting about Learning in Collaboration (LINC), a Pomona-organized volunteer program that sends 5C students to two local, under-resourced high schools to tutor grade school kids. Arriving a few minutes late, I sat down toward the back of the room. As I surveyed the room, I was shocked. Surrounding me were approximately 35 women. And no men. Ten minutes later, one other straggler with a Y chromosome had dropped in, but that was it.

The following week I returned to the Draper Center, this time to attend a meeting for the ESL tutor program (I was still in the process of deciding which tutoring program to get involved with). Again, I sat down and looked around. Same story. This time, a few more of my male compatriots had decided to get involved or at least attend the info session. Nonetheless, the gender breakdown was still strongly skewed toward females.

Rarely during my time at Pomona have I been so dismayed, so I decided to talk to Maria Tucker, the director of the Draper Center, to get an expert opinion on the matter. Why, I asked, are men not volunteering? Gender imbalances, she told me, are particularly noticeable in the tutoring and ESL programs, but across the board there is a distinctly greater female presence in volunteering activities. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 26.8 percent of the U.S. population volunteered in some capacity in 2009. More tellingly, approximately 23 percent of men were involved, compared to over 30 percent of women. While the Draper Center has not systematically tracked program statistics, it’s safe to say that Pomona follows the trend. Beyond the aforementioned ESL and tutoring programs, Alternabreak has historically been dominated by females. Outside the 5Cs, tutoring programs run by non-Pomona College-based organizations like Uncommon Good have reiterated the relative paucity of male figures, saying that they “always need more men.”

There are, however, a few good signs. Last spring, a group of Pomona students decided to tackle the issue of male involvement, forming the organization Building Leaders on Campus or BLOC. According to Martin Barrera PO ‘13, one of the founding members, BLOC seeks to “involve men capable and interested in becoming leaders in the world by empowering them to begin their leadership roles on campus.” One of the programs initiated by BLOC was a tutoring program at a local high school, Sierra Vista High School in Baldwin Park. Though a new organization, BLOC already has between ten and fifteen members and hopes to recruit freshmen to the program.

More broadly, 77 percent of the Pomona Class of 2013 had been involved in community service in high school. While not all freshmen will continue to volunteer or join other community engagement programs, a significant number will. Indeed, at the two tutoring meetings I attended the overwhelming majority of attendees were underclassmen, usually freshmen. This is not surprising: as freshmen and sophomores become juniors and then seniors, they take on more campus responsibility and get bogged down in independent research or theses, leaving them with less time for volunteer work (also, many juniors are abroad for a semester or year, skewing the class breakdowns). Whole sponsor groups, too, often get involved as a group, volunteering for an afternoon at a local homeless shelter or soup kitchen.

Still, nothing yet said really explains the relative disinterest or non-involvement of Pomona’s men in volunteerism. During our conversation, Maria mentioned that in the past few years, various studies have been conducted to better understand how to engage men on college campuses. A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Education reported on the release of a report, sponsored by the Lilly Foundation, titled “Engaging College Men: Discovering What Works and Why.” The study, published by the Men’s Studies Press, revealed that certain tactics can help attract men to get involved in service-related activities. First, peer leaders running trips and encouraging friends to get involved appeared to be the most effective mechanism. Second, personal invitations from faculty or staff seemed to work well. Third, follow-up e-mails, especially last-minute reminders, typically led to greater male turnout. Interestingly, changing the name of a course or program—for example, moving from “Social Justice: A Service-Based Exploration” to “Working Toward Social Justice”—also seemed to attract a greater male presence.

Another possible solution is that men are more inclined to become involved when a program is framed as high profile or selective. When applications are based on skill sets and require an interview, men appear to become more willing to engage. Three of the four recipients of the Draper Center’s $10,000 grants for summer work, for example, were males. Nationally, the US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports ‘provide professional or management assistance’ as the third most common volunteer activity for males, representing 9.4 percent of the sample. And for women, coming in the third slot with 11 percent: tutoring or teaching.

The most likely solution, however, is also perhaps the simplest: money. At the Draper Center, paid programs like the Pomona College Academy for Youth Success (PAYS) attract a diverse, gender-balanced group of volunteers. Eight of the 15 Draper Center student coordinators are men. Gender breakdown for mentors or TAs in science labs or econ classes, both paid positions, are undoubtedly less skewed. PCIPs for non-profit organizations, I would imagine, show equal gender representation. Even when students are only marginally compensated for their work, the regular paycheck seems to be incentive enough to get on board.

At some level, the problem still remains unresolved. Granted, the Draper Center only represents a portion of volunteer or community engagement programs. Many efforts are organized through outside organizations, and some forms of volunteering, like working at the McAllister Center, have not been accounted for. Religious or spiritual-based involvement, however, I would not suspect to be gender-imbalanced given the unique and intensely personal nature of religious practice.

Perhaps eye-popping, resumé-building activities are the only way to get males actively involved in volunteerism or engaged in the community. Maybe men are more likely to get active when they can get paid. Some legitimately need to use volunteering in order to eke out their work study allotments (maybe volunteerism really becomes a question of class: who has the free time to volunteer?). While I cannot say definitively and with overwhelming statistical support that men are less involved on Pomona’s campus, anecdotally I do believe it to be true. To those men not involved, all I can say is: “Man up.”