Fraternity Recruitment - Harder Than Sorority Recruitment?
 

I've been thinking about this for a while, and I have to wonder - Do the sororities have it easier than we do?

I like to think that, when it comes to recruitment, girls have infinitely more rules. All of our best tactics on meeting people and making friendships would be squashed if we had to follow their rules, but EVERY SINGLE YEAR they manage to get more members than we do.

Each sorority manages to pull in more than double the average Fraternity class with no problem at all, and from what I understand, it's the same way at almost every school.

So what's the deal? Are women wired to be more likely to join a sorority? Do sororities have better reputations than fraternities? Is their seemingly wacked-out recruitment process actually MORE conducive to recruitment?

What do you guys think?

I have read in a few places that nationally, about ten percent of students "go Greek," but I cannot find the percentage of men versus women. Indeed, on some campuses, the average number of members in sororities outnumber the number of men in fraternities, but often, there are many more fraternities on the campus than women's organizations. You have to consider the total numbers. I'll keep looking for the statistic for the percentage of men vs. women participating.

Now, the percentage of female students is about 57%. I don't know how that translates into Greek membership; it may or may not be a factor.

So is the total number of female sorority members greater than the total number of male fraternity members on your campus? My campus experience was that there were 5 sororities and 13 fraternities. A few of the fraternities were rather large but some were very small. I'm just wondering if, due to the expansion rules for sororities, you have smaller fraternity pledge classes on average but still a similar number of students.

I was going to bring that up. Most of the campuses I've looked at had far more fraternities than sororities. It would make sense for the classes to be larger.

I think ree-Xi, Drolefille, and knight shadow all brought up a good point in that women often have fewer choices in recruitment which may skew the numbers you're looking at. This is not true for all campuses, but many have significantly more fraternities than sororities. Additionally if the NPCs on campus participate in formal recruitment they are set up to have some sort of new member class whereas a fraternity could have no one come through rush at all (discounting the few school that have formal IFC rush).

That being said, I don't think one system is easier or harder than the other; they're just different.

You can also compare this to women's rush in a large school in the North (Penn State) vs a large school in the south (U of Alabama). The pledge classes in the north are smaller than the ones in the south, but you'd have to be on crack to suggest that PSU's rush is harder than Bama's. The fact of the matter is, it is a regional thing - people in the north prefer more choices and smaller groups. This bears out time and time again.

I think it's much the same way for fraternities vs sororities. Men prefer more choices. At pretty much every school, as everyone has said, there are more fraternities than sororities (at some places it's almost 3 to 1). Just look at the amount of NIC members vs NPC members on a national basis!

If Greek membership at your school is skewed to the point that there are far more female MEMBERS in the system than male MEMBERS, or vice versa, then yes, there is something wrong that needs to be remedied.

:mad: @ the bolded

But co-sign on the rest of your post.

Oops - fixed!

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the northern chapters of NPC sororities were typically smaller than their southern counterparts (Total = 300 at Ole Miss vs total = 100 at Michigan -- arbitrary numbers, but still...)?

Is my NPC knowledge fading?

All is well in the world again :D

No, I'm just typing too damn fast and will go and fix my post. Bwah.

It's easier to get involved, but I don't think it's easier to get a bid by any means. Probably most of the guys who start rushing will go the whole way thru the process (such as it is) and end up somewhere, if they don't limit themselves and if they're true to themselves. If a group doesn't like them, they just say "screw them" and look at someone else, rather than letting the rejection defeat them entirely (as women often do, and dropping out of rush). Again, I think that's just a "men and women are different" function.

That's pretty much why I think you can't really compare the two.

He's not messing around today...

Sorority women don't have it easier. We're just better at it. :D

I can't speak for the entire Greek system, but I know that at my alma mater (University of Colorado-Boulder), by the end of the next school year, there will be twice as many fraternities as there are sororities (18 and 9, respectively). Despite this, during last year's recruitment (there were only 14 fraternities at the time), the men only had about 500 potential recruits go through, whereas the sororities had about 900. Both of these were the campus' largest recruitment for either group of organizations. The sororities completed the process with around 1800 members total (including the new members, though not all 900) and the fraternities had about 1100 total (including new members, but not all 500).

I think a great deal of the disparity might first come from a lack of publicity, but that isn't necessarily the fault of our fraternities, per se as the fraternities' situation is a unique one (http://www.dailycamera.com/ci_12960503). Secondly, though, I think a lot of it is because a gentleman is not required to attend all houses or go through some sort of party system; likewise, the fraternities do not guarantee a bid (following full completion of a preference card) or have any sort of quota system (the largest houses have around one hundred twenty members, while the smaller houses have somewhere between twenty and fifty members).

I am not necessarily sure which recruitment is easier--I think they both have their own specific hardships/peculiarities. It is definitely true that the sororities tend to have larger numbers of PNMs going through and larger numbers of them joining houses, but I do not know how a structured fraternity recruitment would compare. Are the numbers more comparable at universities that have a more structured fraternity recruitment?