Today's NY Times (TS subscription required) includes an Op-Ed piece by John Teirney on the topic of women outnumbering men on US campuses. Apparently the expected female-male ratio among college graduates is expected to reach 60-40 over the next few years. He relates this growing phenomenon to the potential problems it may cause in the long run for marriage prospects among these men and women.
Tierney argues that if women, on average, are more educated than men, that also means they will on average, earn more money. And since studies have proven that women prefer not to "marry down" financially, they may find their pool of eligible bachelors dwindling.
"Of course, some women marry for love and find a man's resources irrelevant," Buss says. "It's just that the men women tend to fall in love with, on average, happen to have more resources."
Which means that, on average, college-educated women and high-school-educated men will have a harder time finding partners as long as educators keep ignoring the gender gap that starts long before college. Advocates for women have been so effective politically that high schools and colleges are still focusing on supposed discrimination against women: the shortage of women in science classes and on sports teams rather than the shortage of men, period. You could think of this as a victory for women's rights, but many of the victors will end up celebrating alone.
A couple of thoughts on this article:
1. This presentation of where women are headed in the workplace is very different from studies which have shown that many highly educated women are giving up on their careers in exchange for a more traditional family paradigm.
2. Tierney's concluding point is that feminism in education seems to have reached its goal. Women are now equally (or overly!) represented in colleges and now we need to take a step back and focus on men. What is really interesting to note however, is that even if women are outnumbering men they are still gravitating to more "female" majors, such as education and psychology. Melana Zyla Vickers writes in The Weekly Standard:
The gender gap is even more palpable within the colleges themselves, because women and men gravitate to different majors. While a split in preferences has always been the case, the gender imbalance in the overall college makes departments so segregated that campus life just ain't what it used to be. In North Carolina's public and private universities, a typical psychology class has four women for every man. In education, the ratio is five to one. The English and foreign language departments are heavily female as well.
You might have thought the solution to this problem is to encourage boys to take an interest in these "female fields". But this article suggests encouraging more boys to go into the already male-dominated fields.
The answer that education experts keep recycling is that American girls need to be encouraged to go into quantitative fields. After all, if there's one thing Harvard president Larry Summers taught the nation, it's that questioning women's aptitude for science is an absolute no--no. But surely some reflection is needed on whether science, mathematics, and engineering wouldn't be more attractive to American boys if more of them were encouraged to discover, at an early age, whether they have strengths in those fields and were warmly encouraged to pursue them in their schooling.
3. Overall, I think Tierney raises a very important issue here. Personally, I would not have presented the issue as "stop spending so much time on the women and start thinking about the men." What is most important is that both girls and boys are instilled with an excitement about learning.
Moreover, it sounds as though these studies are showing that girls and boys on average just do have different needs in terms of learning, and possibly different interests (whether due to nature or nurture). And, one way to help children enjoy and explore learning is through creating some sort of curriculum geared specifically toward the individual (and differing) needs of boys and girls.
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