As a student at Penn, Carmina Hachenburg was surrounded by buildings named after men, 90 percent in fact, she writes for The Philadelphia Inquirer.

“As a woman, seeing mostly men be recognized through these naming processes is troubling. It signals who has power and who doesn’t,” she wrote.

Hachenburg checked around.  At colleges in our region, fewer than 30 percent of buildings are named for women.

Bryn Mawr College, a women’s institution, has the highest percentage, at around 20 percent.

Swarthmore College, Villanova University, the main campus of Temple University, Drexel University, La Salle University and St. Joseph’s University had between 10 and 20 percent.

Penn, West Chester University, Haverford College, and Rowan University had fewer than 10 percent named after women.

More than half of the women-named buildings at Swarthmore and Villanova were non-academic.

But at Swarthmore College, a new STEM building is under construction. It will be named after a woman, Maxine Frank Singer, a Swarthmore alum known for her contributions toward solving the genetic code.

The Lang family, who made the financial contribution for the new hall, chose Singer partly because “there is a scarcity of recognition of women.”

Read more about the absence of women’s names on college buildings here.

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