I get asked that question all the time, since I’m at a liberal arts college, and face it, the women are taking over. So here’s an article wondering about those poor suffering men.
“I actually feel like women are taking over the world,” says Ishwar Chhikara, a 36-year-old investment officer at an international development bank, citing statistics showing more women now have college degrees in the US than men. He says this laughing, but with no audible irony.
“I feel bad for men, especially those who don’t go to school, or study. The whole system is changing drastically with the coming of the information age. It’s not about strength anymore, it’s about the brains.”
While muscles at the center of an economy made the physically stronger sex have more power, Chhikara isn’t so convinced with the switch-up.
“It is a positive thing from a woman’s perspective, from a man’s perspective I don’t know.”
The statistics are true, and I consider them kind of inevitable. Here’s my explanation: as we generally improve opportunities, the people who have historically had less than satisfactory outcomes are more eager to improve their situation, and are more likely to take advantage of those opportunities. The groups that have historically had an advantage are slower to recognize that they need to work to keep up, and in fact may resent that they have to jump through a hoop to earn what they used to be simply given. So the current situation is actually a consequence of past inequities and men’s sense of entitlement.
There’s another factor, too: the social stigma of feminization. Look at what happens to occupations associated with “women’s work”, like nursing and teaching. They get paid less, and men actively avoid taking up the occupation. I worry that some of that is happening to universities, as well — we see, for instance, that liberal arts colleges are particularly attractive to women, so why would a man go there? Too many of them are looking at the performance of those manly athletic teams in order to determine where to go.
You find it hard to believe that a winning football season could influence people’s decisions to make an academic commitment? Look up the Flutie Effect, and be horrified.
Well, as a champion body builder whose job it is to literally spray testosterone all over an audience while bellowing and beating my chest, I can confirm that my job was taken by an uppity feminist know-it-all bitch. I have to admit, though, that the pink, frilly dresses suit me, and I love the dainty tea parties I have with my precious dolls.
I, for one, welcome out new women overlords.
(Oh come on, someone had to say it.)
Unfortunately, being from Alabama, I know too well how some people think the only colleges worthwhile are the ones with a decent football team. I know one person who admits to think a good sports team is the only reason anyone would choose to go to any particular school; in most cases, the only reason they would know said school even exists. He just can’t believe someone might be motivated for other reasons.
Football is so massive in this state, I’m surprised more politicians don’t cynically use it to screw more people over. Honestly, if Roy Moore were smarter, he could have gotten more people in his side by claiming marriage equality would ruin Alabama’s starting line-up.
This tracks with my own college experience.
While a lot of guys were OK, a noticeable subset of them were incredibly INDIGNANT about having to do work to get good grades. Like, they should have just gotten decent grades just for showing up or something.
This was doubly so, often with added disruptiveness, in classes like Sociology or Multicultural Diversity.
This lie is more worrisome. Plenty of PhDs on food stamps because they
chose the wrong “brains” to have. Even a science degree is no guarantee if
one ends up stuck in an entry position for 10 years making $30,000 a year.
Apart from the fact that if productivity gains were shared by the entire
workforce the minimum wage would be around $18 an hour.
That is true. Even MRAs would agree with you here. They often talk about
how boys are discriminated against in schools because boys are less capable
of sitting still and quietly completing tasks — ultimately medicated into
obedience with stimulants, and misdiagnosed as hyperactive, etc.
I am still annoyed about all the dudes with football scholarships who got to go to college, but little old me with my academic high achievement was overlooked because girl from poor family. The fact that several of them choose their college based on the fact that they could legally drink beer there did not help. This was before the legal drinking age was raised to 21. No idea if any graduated, but they did drink a lot of beer and play football.
If feminization of work lowers pay and women are getting degrees for management positions, could this lead to CEO pay going down?
Or ‘aww I don’t want to be President, that’s women’s work.’
In support of your ‘some people want it more’ hypothesis, I’ll point to various studies that have shown that the generation immediately after initial immigration usually outperforms later-generation peers; the parents, who usually came from conditions ranging from economically distressed to utterly horrific situations, usually push their children very hard to do well.
Bad scientist. Your “just so” story is bad, and you should feel bad.
Maybe I’m being unduly cynical, but whenever people start pointing to the higher number of women gaining degrees as proof that education is failing boys, I always wonder if they’d come to the same conclusion if the genders were reversed…
My suspicion is that it would be something like more women gaining degrees = the education system is broken, more men gaining degrees = you women sure are bad at learning.
No need to suspect. The MRA interpretation of the data is: women are
getting more degrees in things that don’t require any actual learning
(which is why men have no interest in those degrees); anything difficult is
still dominated by men (“difficult” being math and science). If any
questions are asked, they point to I.Q. tests. If still pressed for more,
evolutionary psychology (boys like blue so math).
penalfire
That is such bullshit.
This is a classroom in the 1950s. Does anybody believe that back then boys were not required to sit still and quietly complete tasks? Yet those boys had a much better chance of going to college, getting a degree and then getting a good job than the girls did.
Have boys fundamentally changed that much in the last 60 years?
One day I will write a long essay on this. Yes, I think that boys are being failed, but to look at the education system (not that there wasn’t a lot to improve there) an point the finger there is like blaming the doctor because your blood values are bad since you eat a Mc Meal three times a day and complain that they can’t make you better.
Interestingly, that Wikipedia article PZ links to suggests the Flutie Effect is questionable at best. In the case of the original claim for Doug Flutie’s impact on Boston College enrollment, the college did experience a bump in enrollment but they had already been investing in marketing and enrollment was picking up. The article cites other examples, but many of these seem to be schools that were unknown until they appeared in some major sports venue. So, the bump in enrollment might not be so much about sports success attracting people interested in sports, but rather more candidate students learning about the school.
You might get a similar effect if a biologist at a little-known university in Minnesota were to win a major science prize.
@Jeremy Shaffer #2:
I expect the schools he chose not to go to didn’t miss him too much.
One could argue that corporal punishment is what kept the boys in line in
the past, and that corporal punishment is a more masculine response than
prescription drugs (unclear which is less unethical).
That image makes me cringe, though.
@gilliel, given that only 5-10% of the male population received college degrees then, it’s not clear that education methods were particularly effective for anyone. Pointing out that 10% of men had college degrees in 1959 while only 6% of women did isn’t really relevant to whether current education methods favor one gender or another. Of course, making essentialist claims without evidence, as the MRA’s do, isn’t really relevant either.
penalfire
Yeah, but feminists hate boys. They either have to be beaten or drugged into basic decent behaviour? I mean, if they actually were incapable of doing the things you have to do in order to learn something unless you beat or drugged them then school wouldn’t be failing them but wasting resources on them.
qwints
Why do you equate “college degrees! with “successful education”?
Apart from that it’s irrelevant. The claim is that school is failing boys now but it didn’t back then and then a bunch of claims is made that is obviously contradictory to how schools were back then.
@Gilliel, I thought you were using college degrees as a metric for successful education. I understood you to say:
A) Schools required boys to sit still and quietly complete tasks in the 1950’s; and
B) those boys had a much better chance of going to college, getting a degree and then getting a good job than the girls did.
therefore
C) the MRA claim that ‘boys are discriminated against by education methods that require them to sit still and be quiet’ is bullshit.
My disagreement is with the significance of B. Too small a portion of the population went to college for it to say anything meaningful about how boys did/do when required to sit still and be quiet. I think I just didn’t read the MRA claim penalfire reported as saying anything about whether schools being better back in the 1950s, which would explain my confusion.
quints
Personally I wouldn’t call a 10% chance vs a 6% chance too small for making dome meaningful claims, but that is besides the point. The boys did stand a much better chance of going to college than the girls, even though chances were smaller than nowadays for all people.
Also, even those 90% of boys who didn’t go to college did much better than the 94% of girls who didn’t. Schools were much stricter back then, much less “accommodating*” for what MRAs and gender essentialists are claiming to be “typical male behaviour” in boys. Some of them even went on to become accountants, a profession known for its adventurous and exercise intensive flair.
*They usually never have an answer to the question how we can help boys to flourish academically. Attempts will usually be between “just don’t allow the girls to be better” and “allow them to beat up the kid with a lisp”.
The good answer is usually student-directed learning. But one must be
careful with that. It could result in “teach boys math, girls English” if
done poorly.
The bad answer is let’s cut the arts and humanities.
The MRA answer would be that only sissy men went to college in the 1950s.
There is some agreement on the left. Chomsky has pointed out that the
school system filters for obedience, and the most obedient students can be
found at elite universities.
The school system is thus designed to favor a kind of drone-like
intelligence — those capable of running systems, but not capable of
questioning them. That explains technocrats like Timothy Geithner running
the country.
So there is a lot going on here. One could argue that patriarchal society
prizes obedience in women so they are more obedient so they go to college
in greater numbers. It’s cool for a guy to be a class clown, weird for a
girl (which Amy Schumer has criticized).
Mr. Chhikara seems to have a surprisingly poor opinion of men, considering that he is one. An economy that values intelligence over strength reduces one of the major advantages men have historically had over women, but it doesn’t put men at a dis-advantage unless you think men are generally less intelligent than women. Heck, I’l admit it – sometimes I do feel bad for men. And one of the things that makes me feel bad for them is when the people who are supposed to be defending them from the Feminist Agenda (TM) portray them as shambling, sex-addicted brutes who can’t possibly be expected to deal with complex concepts like “women are human beings with their own individual thoughts and feelings” or “don’t have sex with someone unless they tell you that they want you to.”
What man needs enemies when he has friends like the MRA’s?
“I feel bad for men, especially those who don’t go to school, or study’
Wait… what? “Especially” for men who don’t study? Why? What are we supposed to do for these non-studying men, cut them some slack and give them good jobs, despite their lack of interest in bettering their own education… just because they’re men?
Quite a few were in college in the 1950s because of the G.I. Bill. They were all “sissy men,” whatever that means?
Doesn’t matter. Like Giliell said, things haven’t gotten more strict (or the system hasn’t somehow increased the pressure for drone-line, non-questioning intelligence … or whatever you’re going to dream up next). If there’s a decline among people who are supposedly discouraged by “strictness,” the implication is that things have gotten more strict. What evidence is there for that?
To be clear, what you don’t do right now (on pain of circularity) is point at evidence that some such decline is happening and start waving your hands. That’s what you were trying to explain, and it isn’t self-explanatory.
There’s hope: once a task or profession becomes “cool” or lucrative, suddenly all the boys come to the yard. For example, women used to make up most of the “calculators” at Bletchley Park and elsewhere: they were cheap, and they could do arithmetic just as well as anyone else. When the first electronic computers moved from theory to vacuum tubes, women transitioned to tending the esoteric machines. A woman invented the first compiled language. A woman wrote the code that sent men to the moon.
Then computers come to college math departments, and IBM cobbles together the PC. They’re the hot new thing, and all boys want one. Soon boys learn to code (using compiling techniques pioneered by Grace Hopper) and deregulation leads to financial firms hiring all the coders they can get for ridiculous money. Shortly after, everyone decide that coding, math, and science is for boys, and that girls just don’t have the smarts. Oh, those women that ran machines back in the old days? They must have been just “code librarians”; the real coding was done by unnamed men, because women can’t code, QED (that’s math, ladies).
So, if we want more boys at college, we just have to man it up. Get the car advertisers on the case, that’ll work.
@Giliell, you’ve lost me. I agree with your scorn of gender essentialism, but I just don’t understand this particular argument. Of course men had better educational and employment outcomes than women in the 1950s, men were explicitly barring women from educational and employment opportunities. That doesn’t mean the period’s pedagogical methods worked well for anyone.
Giliell
conciousness razor
There is very good evidence that things have gotten stricter in the US education system. Consider the widespread adoption of zero tolerance policies, and the introduction of school resource officers. This increased reliance on criminalization of disruptive behavior is often referred to as the school to prison pipeline and, unsurprisingly, has a disparate impact on racial minorities, especially Black students.
NEA:
“The School-to-Prison Pipeline: Time to Shut it Down”
SPLC:
“The School-to-Prison Pipeline”
What does that have to do with “women taking over the world,” or with white male non-“sissy”/non-“drone” assholes being treated unfairly somehow?
@12 robro — yeah, the Flutie effect was debunked long ago. Sure, if you had never heard of Butler or Gonzaga until a deep run in March Madness, you might add them to your safeties, particularly if you were interested in that region. But the notion that a boy who gets into MIT or Yale or Copper-Union or Brown will decide to go to Alabama instead, because they won last year’s BCS, is risible on the face of it.
And by the way, qwints, you were just claiming this:
I’m not sure I should agree with that to begin with — the proportions may be small or much smaller than today, but it’s still a very large number of people that we’re talking about. Why aren’t those statistics useful?
Anyway, you suddenly do have enough useful information to conclude that it’s gotten more strict, in a way that is relevant to the past/present gender distributions of college students (or successful college graduates, or whatever it is, if the claim can be pinned down to anything in particular). So are you saying it’s a real trend that you can reliably identify, but at the same time it isn’t something we can make meaningful conclusions about?
I don’t think the MRA crowd ever get that far. But to get in the head of an
MRA for a second, perhaps those were the sissy GIs — the officers, not the
enlisted soldiers.
Here there is a non-MRA argument. There has been a sharp increase in the
use of standardized testing, especially in the last 20 years (No Child Left
Behind, etc.).
@consciousness razor, just because you’re arguing against someone who’s wrong (MRA’s and gender existentialists) doesn’t make you right. I, obviously, don’t think the increasing harshness of punishments suggests that women are taking over the world. In terms of unfairness, boys are punished more for the same behaviors, especially Black boys as the NEA report mentioned. Harsher punishments raise the stakes of that disparity. Of course, girls are discriminated against in different ways – receiving less support for leadership and receiving less attention from teachers. I don’t know what, if any effect, these disparities have on college degree rates.
As for using higher graduation rates from the 50’s, my point was that it’s not a random sample. The experiences of the highest achieving 10% of students aren’t representative of the population at large. Additionally, the fact that boys who weren’t subject to the same entrenched systemic misogyny did betters than girls who were says very little about whether the system was a good fit for boys.
I’m having a really hard time seeing how you got this. In response to your question “What evidence is there for that?,” I gave you evidence. I didn’t claim the strictness of schools in the US relevant to “the past/present gender distributions of college students.” My original point was that the gender distribution of college students over time isn’t relevant to the question of whether schools do a good job of educating boys.
I understand that. But college students now still aren’t representative of the population at large. Yet they’re both groups of college students. Don’t they have some kind of meaningful relationship with each other?
Who wasn’t subject to it? Are you saying that is correlated with being in “the highest achieving 10%” or with all boys?
What would it mean for “the system” to be “a good fit for boys”? Are they supposed to be more prone to disruptive behavior or what? Have you heard the old saying that “boys will boys,” which some people don’t put as much stock into anymore — what’s your takeaway from that?
In any case, I wasn’t the one claiming the educational system itself is good or bad or better or worse for them. Instead, I think the primary and most obvious reason for the disparity is that boys had (and still have) lots of opportunities that girls didn’t. Decades ago, the moment it seemed like things were starting to balance out, the bigots lost their minds and have never recovered them since, so now they make shit up. I think that’s the story to be told here, not one in which men and boys were really the ones who were at a disadvantage the whole time, yet we’re only now discovering that (I guess because it wasn’t detectable before, if I understand you correctly).
But you apparently are making that claim, and I don’t know what you think does say a little about whether the system was a good fit for boys. I mean, we’re not talking about clothing sizes here — how is an educational system supposed to be fit for a gender? I honestly don’t understand what that means.
Err… the saying goes “boys will be boys,” obviously.
It would be really cool if people remembered that there’s a world outside of the clusterfuck known as the USA and that the phenomenon of girls outperforming boys is quite consistent.
qwints
My argument isn’t that schools back then were better than schools are now. But the MRA argument is that schools are now failing boys because the don’t accommodate “boy behaviour”, but that they didn’t fail boys back in the days when they accommodated those behaviours even less.
fmitchell
There’s a really strong correlation between the first home computers being marketed as boy toys and the decline/lack of increase of women in the IT sector.
penalfire
The boys who ere a PITA in my English class were also a PITA in my Science class. The boys who worked hard and participated productively in my English class also worked hard and participated productively in my Science class.
To be honest, I don’t think that school alone can do much about the phenomenon. It’s a problem of raising and socialising boys. It’s well known that at the start of school boys are behind in fine motor skills. But tell me, how many toys and activities aimed at boys do you know that encourage sitting still completing a task and developing fine motor skills?
They have all kinds of meaningful relationships with each other. I just don’t think you can draw a conclusion about schools’ ability to give boys a “better chance of going to college, getting a degree” by comparing those groups” for the reasons I gave.
My point was that misogyny takes different forms today than it did in 1950. The girls in 1950 faces structural barriers that boys then didn’t. Some of those structural barriers have been dismantled over time, and one factor in the change in gender ratios in college is their removal.
No.
A system that’s a good fit for boys is one that does not include elements with a disparate impact on boys. A system that punishes boys more harshly for the same behavior as girls is not a good fit.
I don’t know what “supposed to be” means in this question. I think one explanation of the difference in discipline is that boys, especially racial minorities, are perceived to be more prone to disruptive behavior by teachers and administrators, as the NEA report I linked above points out.
Yes, I’ve heard it. I don’t think it’s a valid description of child development or behavior.
I agree for past disparities, but that doesn’t do much to explain current gender ratio disparities.
Fair point, that was a poor choice of language by me. I should say the school system has disparate impacts by gender. An ideal school system wouldn’t punish boys more harshly for the same behavior or pay less attention to girls in class.
Giliell
My point is that I don’t agree that “they didn’t fail boys back” in the past nor that “they accommodated those behaviors even less” in the past. Your point about this being a worldwide fact, rather than one limited to the US is a good one, however, and I don’t know enough to comment about its implications about “raising and socialising boys” since boys are presumably raised and socialised differently in different cultures.
qwints
Yet there’s huge overlaps. Look at the global toy market. Or media. Do you think the toy/media consumption of a typical 4/7/10 year old boy in Germany is very different from that of a boy in Spain/the USA/the UK/ Norway? Attitudes towards what “boys” and “girls” are are pretty consistent throughout the western world. As I said above: think of three activities geared towards preschool boys that involve:
-sitting still
-completing a task
-fine motor skills
Also, your own point about boys being punished more harshly isn’t as strong as you make it out*. Here’s from the author of your report:
So in her own words, behaviour may be perceived to be at the same level for boys and girls while it actually isn’t and then the girls get less punishment, which would mean that the double bias cancels itself out.
I can’t see from the article or the report on how the study was set up, meaning it is not clear to me how the original data was obtained. It’s said that “Owen (the author) draws on data” which I take to mean that she took existing data. Since she herself admits that girls are judged more harshly and boys are cut some slack, “disruptive behaviour” may mean something entirely different for boys than it may mean for girls.
And while I agree with the idea of “mak[ing] the content of learning also more relevant”, I have a problem with specifically gearing it towards boys again. At least here, books are often still predominantly “male”. My daughter’s 2nd grade reading book had one text that was supposed to be read as a dialogue with different children taking different roles and guess how many female roles there were? One. Crafts and Arts gets geared towards boys with the result that they are always doing aliens, pirates, monsters… Even the better books I know, books that are actively trying to be diverse are still heavily male biased. For example the English book I usually work with has a core group of two girls and three boys. Then one of the girls has a sister and one has a brother, making it a 3:5 ratio of kid characters that usually show up. And then there are the parents. I really congratulate them for being diverse, but in the result it lead to one single dad and one dad who is disabled and runs the family B&B and is therefore the “stay at home parent”, so you got 2 female adults and 4 male adults semi-regularly showing up. And the entire meta story of the book involves “Mr Smith”.
I’m more than happy to have a broad variety of tasks and exercises. Have NBA Maths hops for heaven’s sake, just don’t only have NBA Maths hops because fuck the girls.
Also, let’s not forget that despite better educational achievements women still get less employment, are paid less and overlooked for promotion.
*Excluding the racialised factor here, especially since girls of colour are punished more harshly as well.
I honestly have no idea about the global toy market or children’s media, but I will take your word for it. As for tasks, learning to tie knots is the only thing I can think of that feels male coded to me. Legos, toy models and puzzles all feel gender neutral (though, of course, there are different versions marketed to different genders).
Sorry for linking a news article. Here’s the study itself. Per page 240, the data is from the Children of the
National Longitudinal Survey of Youth. The specific claim is on page 252 “the same behaviors
are more likely to lead to retention for boys than for girls” where the behavior problems are measured by the mother’s responses to the Externalizing Problems Scale given on page 241. Not very persuasive, and I should have looked at it more closely before relying on it as a source. It does cite this paper which is a better source for the claim, but it only codes by type of infraction (e.g. “fighting/battery” or “defiance/disruption”) so it’s certainly possible that it takes much less for girls to be considered defiant than boys, leading to to the cancelling you mention. Looking at both papers review of the literature, it is very well established that boys are diciplined at higher rates than girls without controlling for behavior and that boy are perceived to be more disruptive, but you’re right that claim that boys are punished more harshly for the same offenses isn’t well supported.
You’re, of course, right about underrepresentation of girls in educational media.
I take it you haven’t been to the toy aisles recently ;)
I give you Legos. It was the one that came to my mind as well. Apart from being heavily gendered nowadays (though I must say I love the Elves), they also come at a hefty price tag.
Puzzles for boys really drop off at a certain age. While small kids of all genders are apparently encouraged to do puzzles, at some point I noticed that it was much easier to get a puzzle for my daughters than for my same age godson or his brothers.
qwints, do you mind stating what your premises are? Maybe it’s because it’s late at night after a very long and exhausting day, but I’m really having trouble parsing your argument.
Gen, I’m not sure I’ve been making a coherent argument either. My premises:
1) Innate differences between boys and girls do not explain differences in academic performance. In other words, absent outside factors, we should expect boys and girls to get similar grades and have similar graduation rates.
2) Some of the currently observed difference in academic performance is explained by differences in how the school system treats boys and girls.
qwints
And I disagree to some extent with your #2. Now, I’m the first person to agree that schools and education systems can and must do better, but their power gets vastly overrated. Kids spend the first 5 to 6 years outside of school. They spend 16 hours a day not in school. For 3 to 4 months a year that increases to 24 hours. Yet schools and teachers are magically supposed to right all the wrongs.
And that’s an easy solution cause you can just bash everybody’s favorite scapegoat, teachers, and avoid discussions about what we’re doing to our kids outside of school.
I have another theory for the “Why men feel like women are invading their spaces and they’re outnumbering them”. There was a study that showed how men are so used to women being a significant minority, they see a group that’s 17% women as if it was a 50/50 split.
So, if women in field X increase from 17% to, say, 30%, what men see is an increase from 50% to 75% and counting. Basically, any step towards a 50/50 split in favor of women would be seen as an “invasion” of women in a field that is (wrongly) believed to be already equal.
To hook up. Duh