Maija Burnett scanned her California Institute of the Arts classroom as nearly 60 new students filtered in, empty notebooks in hand. It was the start of the 2014–15 school year, and Burnett, director of CalArts’ character animation program, was meeting this crop of freshmen for the first time in her largest classroom, nicknamed “the palace.”
Surrounded by walls painted entirely black—more conducive to drawing—the students stood up, one by one, to introduce themselves. That’s when it hit Burnett that almost all of them were women.
“Where are all the guys?” she recalls thinking.
CalArts’ blind admissions process meant administrators had reviewed portfolios without considering names or gender. “We were shocked to see so many women,” Burnett says.
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