Every year in my genetics class we play a little game. The first lab is dedicated to learning some basic rules of probability and running through some simple statistical tests, and one of the exercises is to look around the room and count male-presenting vs. female-presenting students, and test whether the distribution is close enough to 50:50. It never is. then we test against a 40:60 male:female ratio, which used to be the ratio for my university as a whole, and it’s always significantly different than that. This year I have closer to a 30:70 ratio.
Another anecdotal observation: all the men in the class spontaneously segregated themselves to one lab bench. I told them it looked like a high school dance with all the boys nervous and shy about asking someone to dance. The women also looked comfortable with the separation. I’ve long wondered what’s going on, why men are avoiding college, and today I found an article that ponders the same question.
In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.
By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.
Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.
The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?
Yeah, why is that? Let’s hear some hypotheses.
Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”
I call bullshit on that one. Do you think women don’t get negative, discouraging messages in k-12? The whole damn culture is rife with a bias that girls are supposed to be homemakers and squirt out babies.
Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.”
True, tuition is ridiculously high, but being a woman does not qualify you for a discount, so that’s a bad explanation.
Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school.“
I can confirm that! I’ve looked at final grade distributions in my classes, and typically the top 10% in the class are all women. However, that doesn’t explain why we have this difference in performance. I don’t think women are intrinsically smarter than men (I confess to being biased by my experience), and I struggled to understand where this performance difference might come from. Once I thought it might be that the men are all distracted by sports, but no…our male students are often engaged with our sports teams, but I’m more often seeing that women are putting in long hours with the swim team, the volleyball team, the soccer team. When there’s an away game it produces bigger holes in the women student audience than the men’s group (partly, of course, because there are fewer men in the first place.)
There are other suggestions bounced around.
• Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.
• Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.
• Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.
• Men join the military more than women.
• A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.
OK, but those disparities were just as great, or greater, in the 1950s as they are now. They don’t explain the 𝚫♂ at all. But the author proposes an interesting, if rather circular, explanation.
What has changed is an increase in girls.
When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.
We’re just not talking about it.
Here’s a phenomenon I have witnessed in almost 40 years of teaching: vocational choices have been shifting.
In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
That’s also true for med school. Every year I’m writing recommendations for vet school, med school, and grad school, mostly for women. It’s not for the usual annoying excuse I hear from some people, that those professional schools and those occupations have gotten easier, with reduced standards, to accommodate “the girls”* because, if anything, admissions have become even more competitive over the years. Probably the toughest school to get into is vet school, and that’s where the disparity between male and female applicants is highest, in my experience.
So one simple explanation is…cooties. Girls’ germs.
“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” – Dr. Anne Lincoln
For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!
Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.
Great. I’ll inform the administration that one way out of our enrollment and budget declines is to admit fewer women.
But seriously, there is something going on here: witness the spontaneous segregation of men and women in my genetics lab. I don’t understand why men are averse to working with women, but it’s a real phenomenon I’ve witnessed. There is no shortage of stupid explanations, at least!
Because the concept of school is feminine.
In Spanish, school is ‘escuela’, ending in -a, which is a feminine.
Think about what you do in school.
You sit down, you accept that you don’t know sh:t and you accept that your teacher is right and you have to shut up and listen.
Obedience is what school requires, which is a feminine trait.
What is masculine is standing up in the classroom and saying “Fvck this sh:t, I’m going to do it my way, you’re wrong, I’m right, I’m not gonna listen to you”, that is a very masculine thing to do, and that’s why men, who are on average, more masculine, essentially do that.
The concept of school is feminine…but never mind that women were often forbidden from attending college, until relatively recent decades.
In Spanish, ‘escuela’ has a feminine gender…damn, this is an argument from a man who has never studied languages, because the article attached to a word has no necessary association with sex.
Since when is good teaching and good learning a matter of rote memorization? My best students ask questions. I encourage them to ask me to clarify or explain why something I say is true. To assume that obedience is a feminine trait is straight up wrong and bigoted, and to think that the manly way to learn is to announce aggressively that you’re not going to listen, is antithetical to learning anything. That guy gets everything wrong.
It’s a useful example of the problem, though. It tells me that the problem is a deep cultural bias, where loud-mouthed, ignorant men are shouting out their sexist biases and indoctrinating other men into a dumb attitude that reinforces their bigotry even further. Somehow, men can acquire authority by being loud and aggressive, no matter how stupid their views are, and that just generates more loud, aggressive, stupid men, enshittifying whole generations of young people.
That’s my perspective from the world of education. I can’t think of any examples from the world of politics, for example, can you?
* One thing that bugged me about the article is that it uses men/women, boys/girls, male/female interchangeably. I’m working with college-aged students, and I can’t think of them as boys/girls — they’re adults, or nearly so — and as a biologist male/female has connotations of sex, which I avoid with students. They’re men and women in my classes, that’s it.
Video games.
Boys play video games at a much higher rate than girls. Excessive use of video games correlate with poor performance, attendance, and interest for the middle tranche of boys (most noticeably). Playing video games on the computer looks a lot like doing schoolwork these days, so for anyone attempting to force their kid to do schoolwork that’s a complication. This time suck creates a disadvantage/weakness in performance in high school, and fuels the trend toward passivity, negativity, and failure.
In high school classrooms now women significanty outperform men. Part of this is that the previous generations’ biases against women are much reduced. For example, teachers have been coached to avoid favoritism and to avoid calling on certain students more than others; the problem is much less common now. Being conscious of subtle gender differences in group behavior has improved a lot. (I know I was slow to accept that these habits needed work but then came to see my own biases and did my best to remedy them.)
An excellent place to study these trends is in certain universities where mens and womens schools have been merged or combined. This created an ideal environment to study the trends. There’s one not far from you: the College of St. Benedict/St. John’s University. The schools are separated by a few miles but close enough to associate, and they’re administered by the same Catholic orders. They began combing certain classes (for economy of scale mainly) as far back as the 80’s. In recent years they noticed many of these gender differences, which in some cases were striking–and always favored the women. It was this example that cued me to one big difference: Boys are more confident answerers even while they’re more likely to be wrong.
In my direct experience with boys going to/applyingto/thinking about college (40 years in the classroom teaching upper level English in suburban high schools) the preponderance of women in college is viewed as a positive, or enough of a positive to come close to balancing out any resistance boys have in any given class that’s mostly women. But most boys have learned that women work harder, focus better, and know more coming in so they tend to stick together and do what boys do best: become hostile when cornered or threatened.
Yeah, my money’s on man-children being scared of womens’ cooties. Male privilege is making a lot of men fragile, and if they don’t go to college, it’s only going to get worse.
Do I remember a period when studious African-Americans were accused of ‘acting white’? Could it be that there is a variety of machismo at work here? I almost wrote ‘stupid machismo’ but I suspect that that would be a tautology.
That last explanation, as dumb as it is, does make me wonder if the same thing is happening Latin America with its supposed “machismo” culture. Are fewer men than women attending higher education in non-English speaking countries?
In short, the dumb jocks won the culture war.
Only anecdotal experience and more than 30 years ago in Germany, but from my time at school I definitely remember being studious, curious and maybe even smart was rather uncool for a guy. Being loud, athletic (or just act like your big and strong) and a bully was considered cool, including bragging about bad grades, but that might have been acting tough.
The class bullies definitely avoided working with girls on stuff, not sure about the average guy. I preferred to be in a group with girls – with few exceptions I found the company of girls much more pleasant and doing school stuff with girls increased the chance I wasn’t the only one doing all the work!
Which made me extra uncool in the eyes of most guys and a depressingly large number of girls. And possibly gay. (Even when I finally found a girlfriend…)
…at university I studied Physics and CompSci, so very few women around, though I hung out a lot with the weirdest and coolest woman in the Physics department!
I didn’t read one example that was present when I went to Nursing school in the early 80s. The average age of the college women was 30 to 35, divorced and looking to support a family without the full support of a male counterpart. This may be biased as nursing was/is a predominantly female occupation. Increasingly there is a need for women to be able to adequately support themselves and/or a family. There is a cultural paradigm shift happening. For women, having to rely on a male for financial support may be a thing of the past.
These factors jump out at me based on what I see in my community.
• Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.
• Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.
• Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right. –> This on may fit the cultural bias explanation.
• Men join the military more than women.
• A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.
I think this graph of undergrad enrolment by gender, from 1970 to 2022 (plus projections) is useful;
https://www.statista.com/statistics/236360/undergraduate-enrollment-in-us-by-gender/
From around 2011 to 2022, enrolments for men and women have dropped by a bit more than a million each, with the gap remaining about the same.
I would say that girls are conditioned to listen and to do what they are told and don’t make a fuss. It is more expected and I would argue, more respected for men to buck and make their own way. Not saying I agree with that attitude.
Boys aren’t raised to think they will meet a woman who will take of them and their debts, so $100,000 on a degree makes less sense then a trade school or to join the military.
For a woman, who are, generally speaking for most cultures looked after by their fathers and encouraged to find a man with a well paying job, it makes sense to gamble on a high priced education.
For men who are generally not looked after and expected to make their own way, it makes less sense to get a $100,000 education and enter an over saturated market for employment.
It doesn’t matter if we want to admit it or not, boys and girls are raised differently.
Based on my experience, a man who chooses to “sit with the girls” is just a loser trying to get a girlfriend, and would be looked down on/resented by both sexes. In other words, once sexual segregation starts, it becomes self-reinforcing.
Geez. Perhaps the “loser” is just trying to find a, I don’t know, friend, in a “man’s world”?
Men outnumber women 9 to 1 in our nation’s prisons. It is hard to get a college degree in prison.i had 2 sisters who dropped ouit of high school, got their GEDs, went to community colleges and went into nursing. They did very well for themselves there.
A lot of people are trying to create retroactive justifications for why the percentage of men in college is decreasing, but the more interesting thing to consider is why the de-valuing of education (too expensive, degrees don’t mean anything anymore, too many useless subjects in the humanities, etc) is coinciding with the increase of women attendants (this isn’t the only field where this happens btw)
A slightly sideways view: Potential mothers are conditioned, from a very early age, to appreciate delayed gratification more than potential fathers are. (Society at least at present tries to ignore any conditioning it does for/to the non-reproductive-role-oriented, certainly among early- and mid-teens.) And higher levels in academé are nothing but delayed gratification.
Of course, there’s delayed responsibility in there, too (thirty seconds versus nine months… although in reality a couple decades for both, but that’s too far in the future for teen social conditioning to contemplate!), but — as the last couple generations of political and business leaders have all too visibly demonstrated — contemplating “future responsibility” isn’t something that the West does particularly well. Consider the proportion of tech bros that started but didn’t finish what one might otherwise think are “essential” levels of education for the field at the time they were “innovating,” ranging from Bill Gates, an undergrad dropout, to Elizabeth Holmes, another undergrad dropout, to more early-in-grad-school dropouts than I can count.
In Trumpian times education is rubbished, science is opposed, expertise is rejected, knowledge is sneered at. People can tell millions of lies and it is the road to success along with bowing down to Trump and being racist and misogynist. Why on earth would bros bother going to university and wasting time?
Army.
Where are the men going?
I’m going to go with the simplest answer : money. When young guys hear about staggering, sometimes lifelong college debt, coupled with low wages (I know lawyers who are renting), they tend to look to alternative choices like the trades. I was talking to a young (30?) plumber recently. As he installed my new water heater, he told me he once considered going to college, but two things stopped him, the high costs and the fact that he simply never enjoyed going to school. He was a B student at best. So, he decided on plumbing as a career. He said in a good year he could make over 100k. After what I paid for my new water heater, I could easily believe it wasn’t an idle boast. When was the last time anyone here saw a female plumber? Or roofer, electrician, auto or aircraft mechanic, HVAC tech, and so forth.
I won’t even try to guess why the trend continues now, but it may well have started when the draft ended.
I think I encountered this observation in a BBC podcast of a BBC radio program about the importance of turning children onto a lifelong love of science, and of continuing learning. One of the persons speaking said that as a long-time elementary school educator, he observed that if boys hadn’t fallen in love with science-learning before the age of 11, they were permanently lost as focused, engaged, self-motivated scholastic learners. And if lost, from age 11 on, they were just keeping a seat warm in school. Intellectual development was not observed in them after that.
In discussing his annual ‘Flame Challenge,’ Alan Alda has said that he believes that all children are born with a natural passion for satisfying their innate curiosity about how the universe works. They can retain that passion, if it is not extinguished by bad teaching or harmful educational experiences.
Video games.
I don’t think so, but it’s perhaps the message that they get from the games. The games, themselves, are just exercises in tactical thinking, situational awareness, map maneuvering, and basic strategy. What they portray, however, is a sort of Andrew Tate-esque toxic masculinity – the goal being to have a big gun, fast car, etc. There are plenty of games that aren’t like that, and a lot of people play them, too, so I don’t think it’s the games themselves. The elitist toxic manliness goes back to before James Bond, and probably Charles Martel or Julius Caesar.
I think the problem is role models that are being promoted. I think it’s great, for example, that Taylor Swift is more popular than The Beatles and Shakespeare combined, the fact that there is now a genre of “girl’s music” is troubling. It doesn’t actually say anything about the music, but about social expectations. And on the flip side, you have Joe Rogan promoting a toxic masculinity of ignorance.
I’m biased. My entire life and career were influenced by gaming, and that was largely positive. Of course it was a different time, we didn’t just buy the latest AAA title so we could complain about it, we had to write them, first, then play them. Since I wrote my first game in 1976, by banging two rocks together in the direction of a PDP-11, I was embedded in tech culture, and later saw tech-bros emerge. They were not a result of gaming – they were a result of not being very good at gaming and not understanding fuck all about computers. Professional programmers at the top of their game are usually too busy. If you look at “incel” culture you’ll see the kind of thing I am talking about: young men who opt out of trying to be interesting or exciting, and prefer to sit back and whine about not being born rich like Elon, etc. The woman-hating in tech culture is simply the loud fringe who hate the fact that you have to actually make accomodations with other people (something John Wick does not appear to do, etc.)
Thank you for citing my work! I enjoyed your piece!
Anne E. Lincoln
Also, college used to be portrayed as the path to upward mobility. Get a degree, get a better job. But the rich found out that the poors were able to achieve some upward mobility that way, and began scamming the system to get into the best schools, while MBAs did their best to destroy actual public education. Then, it was about getting the right degree from the right place (and cheating took place, again) and finally the system lost its value and the rich have just bounced over to straight-out nepotism since the pretense of meritocracy doesn’t seem to matter, anymore. It’s not just a matter of “why bother to go to college?” it’s “why bother to do anything at all?” Plus, the emergent system that lards less wealthy students up with crushing debt, serves as a warning flag for all. Any professional education worth having comes with debt that effectively captures the economic output of the best years of a student’s life. It’s a hideous system.
When I was taking astronomy courses in 1995 after leaving my hometown university to go to a bigger city one, we actually had a conversation in class about the disparity of women to men in the class. I don’t really recall the substance of the conversation, though I do remember the women getting rather pointed…
That said, I noticed in that year, and the following years in grad school in meteorology that even though there were fewer women than men…I was much more frequently hanging out with the women in social situations or in the lounges.
Mind you…it turned out I was wrong about being a guy, so being more comfortable about hanging around with women turned out to have a good reason…
And that assumes you can get a job in your profession that pays enough to cover your loan payments. Due to the glut of PhD’s in most or all academic fields, most of new PhD’s have to either do adjunct teaching, which pays less than minimum wage, or go into some field unrelated to their PhD (that was my experience with my math PhD.) Lawyers are another field where the majority of graduates are unemployed or underemployed.
There are exceptions — in our area, nursing is one — but in general, I don’t think that higher education is worth it, economically.
I also can’t help wondering: what are the sex ratios for high school graduates?
I think some of the reasons given above could well be causing some of the shift. However as another commenter indicated; follow the money. Many years ago as an academic advising students (in a different system) who were considering which courses to take, the first question probably half the students, mostly men, asked was ‘how much money would I make in any particular field’.
Andrew
Women are getting smarter. Men are getting dumber.
Why, indeed? It seems that most people are using this as an opportunity to soapbox about the menz instead of trying to figure out what’s going on.
Ding ding ding! Whether or not PZ thinks it’s a “bad explanation”, people simply can’t afford college. Why this is is strongly determined very early on in life, mostly along class lines. We’re seeing the aftershocks of the 2008 financial crash coupled with brutal austerity that never really ended — tiny babs at the time are now college age.
Agreed. Complaining about not being able to find possible partners and then avoiding the place were the sex ratio is skewed in your favor is a maladaptive behavioral strategy and will be eliminated from the population very quickly by selection.
It’s not even an explanation, because it says zero about gender ratios, and that’s the explanandum.
Were women to be notably wealthier than men, it might make sense.
But that’s not the case, is it?.
Re: fishy @17: So if women are more likely than men to meet the educational and some of the other requirements of the military, the military personnel will skew more feminine? And at some point that will really start repelling cootiphobic men? And the military will become devalued socially? How does such a trend affect the chances of future US military adventurism?
[ref]
USA is not the whole world. Here is the whole world, sorta:
https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gender-gap-education-levels
I think there’s some validity to the cooties idea. I did a woman dominated course at uni and I found the women in my degree cliquey and you definitely felt like an outsider as a solo male. I made friends through uni but never from my course. However I’m not in the US so the culture might be different. And regardless I’m not sure that fully explains the effect as most of the time you don’t always know the gender ratio beforehand. But it might be interesting to see if men are more likely to drop out of women dominated courses.
Re: anat @ #29…
One would expect the effect to kick in when women come to dominate the upper ranks where the real decision making takes place.
The most common Spanish words for school are la escuela and el colegio. So we can add cherry-picking to the list of rhetorical dishonesties.
[chrislawson, this is anecdotal but veridical]
Back in 1973 I was in a Catholic school in South Australia, and was assigned as companion to an Uruguayan lad (whose father was a MD) who had very little English, even compared to me after 6 months there.
His Spanish was quaint and archaic to me; his word for school was ‘liceo’ (with seseo), and he used ‘vos’ instead of ‘tu’ as a familiarity (instead of ‘usted’).
So, not actual Spanish as she is spoke in Spain.
Oh, right.
No Spanish speaker confuses grammatical gender with human gender.
(It’s purely a linguistic feature)
—
E.g.
The spoon: la cuchara; the fork: el tenedor.
Nothing is ever this simple but I think one part of it is that there are whole movements with multiple styles and parts devotes to telling men, especially young men, that they’re privileged and deserve to be. There are also whole movements to remove rights from women that have been playing out in a very public way for many years now.
I don’t really like the framing of it as right wing men not being welcomed on campus. It’s not that the colleges select against them. It’s that they’re being targeted by male grievance ads done by people who like them being uneducated. So any if them that believe that mess of lies self-select out of having the college experience.
The groups who advocate for male grievances also advocate for treating women poorly and making personal choices for them. Going to college is a choice so I think there’s at least a mild bias towards women who want to keep making their own choices going to college.
I’m not going to defend the school systems of most industrialised countries in general, but right here and now, we have the most liberal systems that ever were. We don’t beat children anymore. For misbehaviour, we don’t just punish, we try to reason, explain, cooperate. We recognise that it’s hard for kids to sit still for so long and plan activities and breaks so they can move and get rid of some energy. We even buy special stools that allow for movement. In short, we’re much more “boy friendly” than any school system ever before, yet boys do a lot worse than they did in the 1960s. The problem isn’t how we treat boys in school, the problem is how we treat them outside of school. When a boy is good at something, he’s talented, when a girl is good, she’s hard working. Boys get bombarded with messages that learning is feminine, that diligently completing tasks is feminine, that boys are geniuses, they don’t study, and if they don’t get the desired results, the blame lies somewhere else. Boys who do their assignments, who pay attention and work hard get teased and bullied.
Outside of school, boys get rewarded or at least admired for breaking the rules. Then they do the same in school and suddenly it’s not cool, surprise surprise.
I recently saw a video where some people did an experiment with primary school kids. Boys and girls competed against each other. In a group, they had to walk length with a small bag filled with sand on their heads, turn back, pass the bag to the next person. The team that completed this first won. They were not allowed to touch the bag. The girls stuck to the rules of the game, many stretched their arms out. The boys kept their arms close to the bag, often touched it, held it, kept walking. Other than a verbal reminder, nothing happened. The voice over explained that while the girls were obedient, the boys were finding creative ways to circumvent the rules, when everybody could see that they were just blatantly breaking them. The they declared the cheating boys the winners and claimed their experiment showed some fundamental truth about boys and girls. It did, but not the one they claimed.
mordrede
Still the same and even worse. And the more value a boy places on gender roles, the worse it gets.
John Morales
Well, the voseo is perfectly fine in Uruguay. In my experience, Spanish speakers tend to be even less aware of the linguistic differences between the various parts of the Spanish speaking world than English speakers. “Vamos a coger una guagua” has a very different meaning in Cuba than in Mexico.
But of course you’re right: People who speak languages with grammatical gender are absolutely used to it being completely separate from biological sex or social gender. In German “cat” is female and “dog” is male and people will say “Ich habe eine Katze” despite the kitty in question being a giant tomcat because it’s understood that we’re talking about the species.
A high school teacher here. Reporting on somewhat related experiences.
As a teacher I get to sponsor various school clubs (students join clubs to pad their university applications). Some clubs are organized by or have majority male memberships, some are organized by or have majority female memberships. The latter clubs work – they do whatever they were set up to do. By contrast, the clubs organized by males or having largely male membership, fail. Despite clubs being set up to pursue a particular activity or achieve a particular goal, the guys spend endless amounts of time arguing about over details. For example, by the end of term a ‘girls’ club would have shipped a 1000 kg of used clothing to a needy 3rd world country while the similar ‘boys’ club would still be arguing over whether shoes should be included in such a shipment or whether a shipment should go to country A or country B – they would never actually collect the clothing (with or without shoes) let alone ship anything.
Someone beat me to it but, I’d be interested in enrollment trends in Trade schools and apprentice programs in PZ’s area. The trades will skew heavily male and any increase in enrollment there would divert potential male University students. I won’t assume this is an actual cause though.. it wasn’t long ago that This Old House partnered on a program to encourage people to enter the trades because of declining interest. That shortage of qualified workers would have likely caused wages to rise by now though.
Trade pay can be very good. A journeyman plumber, electrician, etc. can certainly make much mouse than my niece.. a HS teacher with a masters. It wouldn’t be surprising for teenage boys to think.. option one.. more school that will put me into debt for a decade or more.. or lower-cost trade school where I’ll soon get paid as an apprenticeship and I might have an easier time getting hired afterward.. earning more.. that seems like a fairly straightforward choice.
The cooties suggestion baffles me though. Many many years ago. A HS friend told us he was going to Ball State.. a school I’d only heard of because Letterman was a graduate. We (us guys) were super jealous when we heard it had a significant female to male bias. What heterosexual teenage boys wouldnt want yo be surrounded by pretty college girls.
BTW.. if being told what to think or being told you know nothing and your instructors are always right is feminine.. the Military has to be the most feminine org(s) ever conceived.
Many men are scared to compete against women. When one side is used to privilege, equality and fairness is scary.
Weird.
As a cis-het male, I’ve always found it personally rewarding to go towards where the women are. (Well, except churches.)
A lot of those incels really don’t have a claim to that “in” part (nor to any sympathy for their plaints).
… the article attached to a word has no necessary association with sex.
Somewhere in his legendary journal Maledicta, editor Reinhold Aman makes that point quite strongly by noting that the French describe their respective genitalia as “le con” and “la bitte”.
I think this is a situation where more research is badly needed. Too many anecdotes, not enough data.
Here’s the deal: if you think going to a school with a high proportion of women will get you laid, it won’t. These are smart, ambitious women who are here to get the job done, and they aren’t interested in you just because you’re less common there. Men are cheap and common elsewhere. Your rarity won’t make you stand out and conceal your deficiencies.
mrdlc @45: Agreed. The data says that between 2010 and 2022, the number of college enrolments dropped by about 2.4 million, with the decreases about equally shared between men and women. Of course, since there were more women than men enrolled in 2010, that means the ratio of women to men has increased.
So there are two important questions; why the decrease in both men and women, and why the proportionally greater decrease for men?
Most comments in this thread are speculatively addressing the second question, while ignoring the first.
This quote struck me as weird. Like – what does he mean by ‘difficult to recruit men’, are universities going around making an explicit effort to get male students to apply and they aren’t?
As I understand US universities, don’t most of them have more applicants than student spaces? There are no men applying and so they’re forced to admit women? Or is it just that the quality of the male candidates lags far enough behind the female ones that they’re having an ‘exponentially more difficult’ time justifying admitting them over the male applications. This isn’t a rhetorical question: I legitimately don’t know what he’s saying here.
I’m enjoying watching people try to find explanations for this that aren’t sexism. The ones showing their own sexism are particularly good
Maybe it’s aliens? Anyone tried that argument?
dangerousbeans, um, asymmetric gender participation.
Sexism, eh?
Care to essay an argument as to why sexism entails fewer men in higher ed? :)
@John Morales
Did you read the post by PZ, or are you just leaving 20% of the comments here without reading the topic?
John Morales and Giliell: Regarding the effect of grammatical gender: Yes, people who speak languages with developed gender systems do not knowingly confuse grammatical gender with actual social gender 9nor with sex), but there is some evidence (no idea how strong) that subconsciously ideas about gender are somehow entangled with grammatical gender of words. For example, see Keys and Bridges: Can Language Shape Thought? – the adjectives attributed to objects differ to some degree between speakers of language where that object is grammatically masculine vs those who speak languages where said object is grammatically feminine. Since I haven’t read the original report I don’t know how big the effect size is, nor have I seen validation from other languages.
In any case, in Hebrew there are jokes about how there must be some significance to the fact that inHebrew country, economy, inflation, and unemployment are feminine, whereas peace, vision, and dream are masculine.
“It tells me that the problem is a deep cultural bias, where loud-mouthed, ignorant men are shouting out their sexist biases and indoctrinating other men into a dumb attitude that reinforces their bigotry even further. Somehow, men can acquire authority by being loud and aggressive, no matter how stupid their views are, and that just generates more loud, aggressive, stupid men, enshittifying whole generations of young people.”
Isn’t’ it the same point that is being made earlier “Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”. Maybe I am misinterpreting here, but ti seems to be the same core concept.
Regardless, I did notice a similar issue even at a young age. I have a daughter, and noticed that whenever small girls start fighting over a conflict of interests, one adult would immediately intervene and stop the fight, saying that they should play nice with each other. Boys on the other had, were always left to ‘sort it out’. By age 6/7, I stopped taking my daughter to boys birthday parties, because they’d be 2 hours of constant conflict between the boys, leaving my daughter to mostly sit on her own with the odd girl/quiet boy in the party. I remember one notable one where the boys were given foam batons, that they used to wack each other with for 2 hours straight.
[@John Morales
Did you read the post by PZ, or are you just leaving 20% of the comments here without reading the topic?]
I read every post by everyone before commenting, in general.
My responses are sui generis and idiosyncratic.
(I’m just a guy who comments)
[for example, that comment @54 does not relate to the topic. It’s a direct answer to a direct question, but not topical. Because I am polite]
anat
Yeah, people rationalise anything. There’s a whole linguistic phenomenon where people try to make a word have an inherent meaning that isn’t there because they want to. On the other hand I find it interesting that while cat is female in German and dog is male, the association with one gender is much stronger in English that doesn’t have grammatical gender. No crazy old cat ladies in Germany.
I’m a little late to the discussion but I think men are dropping out of college for the same reasons they’re voting for Trump: They see the system stacked against them, they see playing by the rules as a sucker’s game, they see that nobody who has been running the country for the past 50 years actually cares about them, and they see that failure is more likely than success whether they try hard or not.
In other words, they have a lot in common with a lot of the people here. Same diagnosis, different solutions.
I find it curious that men are avoiding courses because there are too many women in the course. In my generation (I’m 70 next year), that would be a big plus! There were far too few women in college when I was there. And ALL the honours students were male.
Why is your estimate of the percentage so low?
Both estimates are stupid, BB. I already said, I read 100%.
Here:
I read every post by everyone before commenting, in general.
My responses are sui generis and idiosyncratic.
(I’m just a guy who comments)
(Also, sniping at me in the third person to someone else is such a ridiculous and pathetic attempted premature defence that it reflects on your character. FWTW)
@46 Absolutely agreed PZ, but if you’re looking for reasons why high-school age boys would or wouldn’t decide to go to university, I still wouldn’t have thought “too many girls” would be a deterrent for a large-ish proportion of them. Just because “the odds” aren’t liable to actually help anyone who thinks of it as a statistical interaction, doesn’t stop them from thinking that way.
[BTW, BB, I have not failed to notice you fucked up and addressed me on this specific topic elsethread :)]
freeline
In short, they feel discriminated against because they lost some of their privileges and they’ll rather shoot themselves in the foot and burn the world down than adapt.
From Gilliel
Gilliel you nailed it.
College is a four year exercise in sustained effort and in the US, boys are taught that they never have to work at anything.
White middle class boys are given a certain higher baseline social status early on, with social reinforcements ranging from video game cheats to PUA. Nothing in US society tells boys to make a sustained effort. Girls on the other hand are given constant social reinforcement that their efforts must be perfect, and no matter how well they actually did, that they must always try harder. Girls are socialized (so fucking early) that no matter how much or how well they do, it is never enough, whereas boys are taught even minimal effort/success is acceptable. Which of those two social messages will serve a potential college student better?
@57 All the factors that you mentioned are equally true for women, who will be paying off that same college loan on a paycheck that is 88% of a male peer’s paycheck.
PZ mentions specifically
https://vetidealist.com/women-veterinary-leaders-linda-lehmkuhl-ceo/
So even if you are female, gain entry and finish one of the most competitive fields of study (to say nothing of the startup costs post grad–veterinary medicine is expensive) being male is still an overwhelming advantage in securing the top spot and top pay.
While I’m guessing that those male CEOs had at least an MBA, an MBA is cheaper, easier and more accessible than that DVM.
From the link:
One suspects the buy-in option is the sweetener that gets tossed to male job candidates and not female ones.
Random point on that idiotic post you quoted. I live in Spain, my kids go to school here, and NO-ONE uses the word ‘escuela’, it’s always, always ‘colegio’, which is masculine.
In the parents’ group chats, in school communications, in the big September supermarket campaigns for the ‘Vuelta al cole’ (which phrase I was delighted to see, one year, being used to advertise…. an entire leg of jamón) – always ‘colegio’. I can’t think of a single exception.
It would have made more sense to use Latin schola or Italan scuola instead of escuela.