Middle aged college educated white woman makes unfounded assumptions that it's young men's own fault that they're being left behind by nearly every social system in place in modern society....
Middle aged college educated white woman makes unfounded assumptions that it's young men's own fault that they're being left behind by nearly every social system in place in modern society. Fantastic perspective. Let's continue to ostracize and villainize 49% of the population based on vibes.
What I find wild is how authors like this one - with their strident aim to break down barriers and explore intersectionality - treat men like the last acceptable monolith. It reeks of "I've...
What I find wild is how authors like this one - with their strident aim to break down barriers and explore intersectionality - treat men like the last acceptable monolith.
It reeks of "I've written the research paper, now it's time to find the research."
That's not how I read it. The thesis seems to be that some men are choosing not to go to college because of the large fraction of college students who are women, and that this is in turn a major...
That's not how I read it. The thesis seems to be that some men are choosing not to go to college because of the large fraction of college students who are women, and that this is in turn a major driver of that gender imbalance among incoming students.
That's not "vibes", that's a scientific, testable hypothesis. The stuff about "school" being "feminine" is looking for and apparently finding cultural outputs we would expect to see if this mechanism was indeed operating. It's anecdotes and not data, but this is a blog post and not meant to be a controlled study to test or try to rule out the hypothesis.
Nobody is being villainized that I can see. I guess you can make some parallels between the language here and various poor-people-don't-want-to-work style wrong opinions, but those are A) about oppressed groups, which "men" isn't one of in any society I know about, and B) not supported by evidence, which this argument at least appears to be.
And certainly nobody is being ostracized. The core problem seems to be how do we get the men back in to the colleges, not how do we get rid of them.
For a scientifically tested hypothesis, I'm not seeing any of her scientific data for the leading assumptions she's making. There's an awful lot of unrelated data being referenced that she's using...
For a scientifically tested hypothesis, I'm not seeing any of her scientific data for the leading assumptions she's making. There's an awful lot of unrelated data being referenced that she's using to justify claims, but not much more than that. Those are the "vibes" I'm referring to.
I'd like to point out too that the author is not a researcher or a scientist, this is not a research paper or grounded in any study. In fact the many studies she references throughout the article she explicitly disagrees with the conclusions that are drawn by the experts who actually did do the research.
For example, she uses an actual study that says that 34% of men say they didn't finish college "because they just don't want to" (compared to 25%~ of women) and then uses that to launch a thesis that men are avoiding college because it's become a feminine place. Want to know her source for that claim? Some random answer from a Quora post, obviously the bastion of truth. So because one random guy on Quora said that men are avoiding college because it's "feminine" now she states as fact that: "School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine." She even helpfully included a very scientific chart to back up her factual statement here
Even the freakonmics podcast that she cites as the main inspiration for this article never even insinuated anything like her thesis; which she views as a willful omission of an obvious fact, instead of the much more likely and simple answer that this thesis is completely ungrounded in any realm of actual scientific fact.
Nobody is being villainized that I can see.
My mistake, I guess her drawing a direct parallel between men falling behind in schools and college enrollment to WHITE FLIGHT was a totally fair and neutral comparison to make and definitely not intended to be a negative thing.
White flight was the movement of a majority group out of the areas where there were growing numbers of minority group members. Few did so out of explicit racism, though of course many of them had...
White flight was the movement of a majority group out of the areas where there were growing numbers of minority group members. Few did so out of explicit racism, though of course many of them had implicit biases and systemic bias but they also had any number of other specific reasons - larger homes, cheaper cost of living, better schools. Still it was a pattern.
This does not seem an inappropriate comparison to make unless one makes the mistake of treating analysis of population level behaviors as individual condemnation.
Why are we so sure that "male flight" is the explanation for why men are attending college less in the first place (especially when every major source and most of the research papers referenced...
Why are we so sure that "male flight" is the explanation for why men are attending college less in the first place (especially when every major source and most of the research papers referenced state several other compelling reasons that adequately explain the phenomenon.) I disagree with the entire premise of the comparison, and therefore that's the issue I have with it. I also think that just because it seems to be a similar phenomenon on the grounds that both of them are referring to a population number decreasing in a certain environment, it's a very obviously loaded comparison to make. Even if you did buy the idea that the main reason that men are falling behind in college enrollment numbers is because they don't want to be seen as gay or feminine.
I'm not. I'm just discussing your objections to the use of white flight as a comparison. I'd understand that but you bolded and emphasized it, implying you found the specific comparison offensive,...
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Why are we so sure that "male flight" is the explanation for why men are attending college less in the first place (especially when every major source and most of the research papers referenced state several other compelling reasons that adequately explain the phenomenon.)
I'm not. I'm just discussing your objections to the use of white flight as a comparison.
I disagree with the entire premise of the comparison, and therefore that's the issue I have with it.
I'd understand that but you bolded and emphasized it, implying you found the specific comparison offensive, not that you disagreed that the phenomenon is happening here. So I'm addressing that. If the comparison turns out to be false, then sure, it's the wrong one to make.
I also think that just because it seems to be a similar phenomenon on the grounds that both of them are referring to a population number decreasing in a certain environment, it's a very obviously loaded comparison to make.
Well no, both of them refer to a majority population exiting that specific environment over time making the environment now where you find minority presence - both are environments where minorities simply weren't allowed initially and as legal barriers decreased, then societal ones, the population balance didn't shift to equilibrium, they shifted to a majority of minority population members.
Those seem very comparable. It's entirely possible that there are other reasons (even in white flight the individual's reasons vary widely) or that there turns out to be no similarity at all. But the very comparison isn't offensive.
Even if you did buy the idea that the main reason that men are falling behind in college enrollment numbers is because they don't want to be seen as gay or feminine.
If I did in fact believe that was the driving reason, I'd say that's actually more demonstrative of the comparison. It feels like you're taking the comparison itself, not whether it's ultimately right or wrong, as insulting and I'm trying to understand why.
I do, in fact, find it offensive. Offensive and wrong (or at least not proven right, which isn't nearly as bad, but it is a problem when the article is stating it as fact.) I understand if that's...
I do, in fact, find it offensive. Offensive and wrong (or at least not proven right, which isn't nearly as bad, but it is a problem when the article is stating it as fact.)
I understand if that's not something you can emphasize with, that's totally fair. There's definitely a lot of things that I can't understand why it would upset people. Perhaps I just have a overly negative viewpoint of White Flight and it immediately gave me an extremely negative psychological response when I saw the two being compared so readily. I personally would be extremely hesitant to make such comparisons to similar things.
It's more that you've just stated that it is offensive, emphatically so. And that feels in the realm of "we can't talk about issues of oppression/privilege/minority/majority because it makes...
It's more that you've just stated that it is offensive, emphatically so. And that feels in the realm of "we can't talk about issues of oppression/privilege/minority/majority because it makes people feel bad" rather than "this is inaccurate" or that it's because they're entirely different incomparable situations.
I do empathize with you being upset, but that doesn't mean I understand why, unless it is as you sort of implied, more of a knee jerk response to a pre-existing perceived negative being used to describe a group you identify with? I don't know. I think the comparison is a useful one and doesn't condemn the men involved inherently. More information would certainly either disassemble that comparison or strengthen the similarities.
I think that's something we have to just chalk up to differences of perspective. I would imagine given the amount of other people in this thread with similar reactions that I'm not the only one...
I think that's something we have to just chalk up to differences of perspective. I would imagine given the amount of other people in this thread with similar reactions that I'm not the only one who found the comparisons made in this article to be incongruous. If that is silencing the argument because it's "making people feel bad" I apologize.
You were the only person I saw responding to the "white flight" comparison specifically but you were also the most emphatic. Finding it incongruous is understating it quite a bit. You are sort of...
You were the only person I saw responding to the "white flight" comparison specifically but you were also the most emphatic.
Finding it incongruous is understating it quite a bit. You are sort of going back and forth on being very EMPHATIC and then saying you just find it a poor comparison. I don't feel like we're communicating well if you think you're being consistent about that.
I recommend checking out stu2b50's excellent comment here (And their later response here which is also a good read ) They certainly have a much more level-headed response than I did, I'll give you...
They certainly have a much more level-headed response than I did, I'll give you that.
Not counting the several dozen people who voted for the comments I made (which I know doesn't necessarily amount to the same as agreement on all points) there are at least several other comments that point out similar issues they had with the way the article was written.
I hope you have a good evening as well, this was a pleasure as always.
I can't help but be reminded of conversations around "toxic masculinity." It's yet another sore subject concerning privilege with a concrete definition. The comparison it makes is a useful one,...
I don't know. I think the comparison is a useful one and doesn't condemn the men involved inherently.
I can't help but be reminded of conversations around "toxic masculinity." It's yet another sore subject concerning privilege with a concrete definition. The comparison it makes is a useful one, but even mentioning it in passing will attract incalculable amounts of anger by those who equate the saying with "all men are toxic."
It's endlessly frustrating. At what point do we stop arguing over parlance and start arguing over the substance of what is being said?
But doesn't the fact that it produces incalculable anger mean its not a useful term? If you know it is a landmine, why not avoid the term and talk about the concepts more directly? If the...
But doesn't the fact that it produces incalculable anger mean its not a useful term? If you know it is a landmine, why not avoid the term and talk about the concepts more directly? If the difference between someone hearing you out or not is whether or not you use a loaded term, why use it? I am not trying ro be antagonistic, but I just don't understand the thought process.
It doesn't matter what language you use, because the language will be redefined and villified regardless. See what happened to "woke" for a perfect example.
If you know it is a landmine, why not avoid the term and talk about the concepts more directly?
It doesn't matter what language you use, because the language will be redefined and villified regardless. See what happened to "woke" for a perfect example.
I've attempted to do that in the past, talk about "privilege" and "toxic masculinity" without using the terms and it's actually incredibly difficult. It's very hard to be concise if you're trying...
I've attempted to do that in the past, talk about "privilege" and "toxic masculinity" without using the terms and it's actually incredibly difficult. It's very hard to be concise if you're trying to describe a phenomenon and avoid the one or two word phrase that most easily comes to mind to encapsulate it, and people who are easily upset by these phrases aren't likely to be patient and wait for you to gather your words before interrupting you.
Even on online forums where being interrupted isn't a concern, it's not easy to explain these concepts to someone who isn't interested in understanding them. If you've got any suggestions for non-inflammatory ways to talk about them I'd actually be interested in hearing them!
Well, I have a lot of opinions about changing people's minds, but most are about how incredibly difficult and slow it is. First, you're not going to change the mind of someone who isn't at least a...
Well, I have a lot of opinions about changing people's minds, but most are about how incredibly difficult and slow it is. First, you're not going to change the mind of someone who isn't at least a little open to it. What would it take for you to change your opinion on a deeply held belief? I assume it would be a lot or impossible, almost certainly not a single or even a hundred conversations. The same is true for them; they believe as truly and sincerely as you, regardless of the content of that belief.
For more positive suggestions, you need to find a point on which you both agree and work your way from there. Listening to them first, and I mean actually listening, will get you good will from most people, and if it doesn't, it can quickly show that trying is a waste of your time. People hate to be preached at, so make sure you ask them questions without being accusatory or trying to setup intellectual traps. Just being kind to them will do more for whatever your trying to convince them of then any intellectual argument; people internalize random kindness far more then random arguments.
I find whether or not they're open to hearing the definition and usage of phrases like "toxic masculinity" before getting upset or leaving the conversation is a pretty good litmus test for how...
First, you're not going to change the mind of someone who isn't at least a little open to it.
I find whether or not they're open to hearing the definition and usage of phrases like "toxic masculinity" before getting upset or leaving the conversation is a pretty good litmus test for how open they are to the ideas that the phrases convey, which actually makes using the terms a good way to find out if the conversation is worth the time it will take to have it. This is contingent on the context in which the phrase is used, of course.
I'm actually really comfortable with my strategies and boundaries regarding learning from and potentially changing minds of people in general, thank you! My last sentence was in reference to specifically discussing these inflammatory topics without using the triggering phrases. How would you discuss toxic masculinity without 1) being so long winded as to tune people out, 2) being confusing, 3) upsetting people who would be upset by the phrase "toxic masculinity" or 4) just using the phrase?
Ah, I misinterpreted that then! I don't really have a general answer, because I think it heavily depends on all the particulars of the situation, but I'll try. I think the most likely person to...
I'm actually really comfortable with my strategies and boundaries regarding learning from and potentially changing minds of people in general, thank you!
Ah, I misinterpreted that then!
How would you discuss toxic masculinity without 1) being so long winded as to tune people out, 2) being confusing, 3) upsetting people who would be upset by the phrase "toxic masculinity" or 4) just using the phrase?
I don't really have a general answer, because I think it heavily depends on all the particulars of the situation, but I'll try. I think the most likely person to fit the venn diagram of significantly bothered by the term 'Toxic Masculinity' and similar progressive jargon but are open to an actual conversation about the root issues would be centrists who consume some right-wing media. If they are more of the academic type, I would talk about the etymology of the term, i.e. it comes from the mythopoetic men's movement from the 1980s that was explicitly centered on the harm this socialization caused men themselves not other people. If they are just parroting talking points, I would try and bring up something that is rooted in Toxic Masculinity but isn't in the popular right-wing zeitgeist; personally I'd talk about conscription in the Ukraine. I guess my point is that you try and have a conversation about the effects of Toxic Masculinity, not simply the term itself.
Interesting! I typically try to defuse the term and then use it as I normally would. I point out that phrases like "toxic gas" and "toxic chemicals" don't imply that all gasses and chemicals are...
Interesting!
I typically try to defuse the term and then use it as I normally would. I point out that phrases like "toxic gas" and "toxic chemicals" don't imply that all gasses and chemicals are toxic. We need gasses and chemicals to live! Contrarily, no one would ever say "toxic poison" because poison is, by definition, toxic. Therefore the phrase "toxic masculinity" only exists because not all masculinity is toxic.
Typically if they can't go along with that, then we can't have a conversation anyway.
My bet is that the people who are offended at terms like "toxic masculinity" are generally not actually offended at the interperation they claim it is so much as they are looking for excuses to...
My bet is that the people who are offended at terms like "toxic masculinity" are generally not actually offended at the interperation they claim it is so much as they are looking for excuses to not examine the effects of their behaviour and habits.
That was sort of what I was trying to figure out, was this a "white flight is racist and racist is evil and therefore this is villainizing men" situation? Vs my perspective of that things like...
That was sort of what I was trying to figure out, was this a "white flight is racist and racist is evil and therefore this is villainizing men" situation? Vs my perspective of that things like racism and sexism are pervasive and systemic and while doing a racist thing is bad there's a difference between "I have done a bad thing" and "I'm a bad person." Even if every man was avoiding college due to the presence of women, the majority would be acting out of socialization
In "white flight" there were people who actively tried to drive Black families out of white neighborhoods with violence. There were people who intentionally put racist covenants into their deeds. There's a difference of scale between those and "we could get a larger house in the suburbs and feel safer" even if the latter still has systemic racism baked in. But it's all "white flight."
I said testable, not tested. It might be false, but it is capable of being shown to be false. It's not merely an un-disprove-able assertion that the author perceives a vibe. I think the "white...
I said testable, not tested. It might be false, but it is capable of being shown to be false. It's not merely an un-disprove-able assertion that the author perceives a vibe.
I think the "white flight" phrasing was addressed in the thread already.
My sister was a grade school teacher for many years. She mentioned several times that school in general is not geared for boys. In her experience, many boys have trouble sitting still in a desk...
My sister was a grade school teacher for many years. She mentioned several times that school in general is not geared for boys. In her experience, many boys have trouble sitting still in a desk (she observed this issue more frequently in boys than in girls). They want to fidget or get up and move around. This is normally strongly discouraged or punished in school, a place where we need everyone to be still and conform. She found that giving them a little freedom to get up and move a bit during lessons was more effective than butting heads with them and going down the path of punishment.
This is not about college specifically, but if her observations are generally true it could be related to why some men don't want to spend more years in school than necessary, even after they get older and don't feel the need for that freedom of movement.
Anecdotally, as a guy while I didn’t have much trouble in elementary and middle school, from the tail end of high school through uni my head was really just not in the right place. Everything but...
Anecdotally, as a guy while I didn’t have much trouble in elementary and middle school, from the tail end of high school through uni my head was really just not in the right place. Everything but the coursework got my focus and while I was cognizant of that on some level, trying to change it was difficult. Naturally this led to mediocre-to-bad performance.
It wasn’t really until my mid-20s that I felt the kind of shift in mentality and brain function that would lend to doing well in school, but by then I’d been out for several years and joined the workforce.
Your sister’s observations really resonate with a lot of what Richard Reeves discusses in an interview he did on The Ezra Klein Show back in March 2023. (I've linked to it before.) Reeves talks...
Your sister’s observations really resonate with a lot of what Richard Reeves discusses in an interview he did on The Ezra Klein Show back in March 2023. (I've linked to it before.) Reeves talks about how the traditional school environment often isn’t designed with the needs of many boys’ in mind, and how this can lead to long-term disengagement from education.
One thing Reeves highlights is how boys’ brains develop more slowly than girls’ in key areas like impulse control and focus. This can make it harder for them to adapt to structured classrooms that demand sitting still, staying organized, and completing tasks on time. While these traits are rewarded in school, they’re areas where boys are more likely to struggle.
Your sister’s strategy of letting boys move around instead of punishing them aligns perfectly with what Reeves suggests. He argues that meeting boys where they are—by incorporating movement or hands-on activities—can be much more effective than forcing them to conform to rigid expectations.
Reeves also connects these early struggles to why so many men don’t go to college now. If boys associate school with frustration or punishment for things like fidgeting, they might feel done with the whole system as soon as they’re able to leave. It’s a pattern he ties to the widening gender gap in higher education.
It sounds like your sister understood this intuitively, and her approach probably made a huge difference for those boys. If you’re interested in exploring this more, the interview with Reeves is worth a listen (of you have access to it—the NYT put their podcasts behind a paywall on most platforms, though not on YouTube). It dives deep into why boys are falling behind and what we might do about it. And why it matters.
Hasn't school been that way for a very long time, though? It's clearly a problem but I don't see how it could be responsible for this change of it is not a change itself.
Hasn't school been that way for a very long time, though? It's clearly a problem but I don't see how it could be responsible for this change of it is not a change itself.
It has, but I think what has changed in the last 20 to 30 years is that the major authoritarian vibes that dominated school has been eliminated. Teachers had a much more extreme measures to...
It has, but I think what has changed in the last 20 to 30 years is that the major authoritarian vibes that dominated school has been eliminated. Teachers had a much more extreme measures to enforce absolute obedience in schools, including corporal punishment. I think there has been a shift in schooling away from the establishment of authority, and that might be a reason why boys in schools feel more at-ease to fidget, because the stakes have been lowered and there is no longer a chance that a mad teacher is going to assault their fingers with a cane.
Interesting! I had actually assumed that it would work the other way - that now more (even if not enough) teachers are likely to be engaging with boys in hands-on, active ways, and the situation...
Interesting! I had actually assumed that it would work the other way - that now more (even if not enough) teachers are likely to be engaging with boys in hands-on, active ways, and the situation should be better if anything. What you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that a half-measure could be worse than nothing in that it neither gives boy students a path to learn their way consistently throughout their education, nor the rigidity needed to force them to learn in a way that is uncomfortable throughout their education. It gives them just enough flexibility for just long enough to hamstring them. Am I getting that right?
30+ years ago, I had access to machine metals class, pottery throwing, auto shop, and a half dozen other classes that involved things other than sitting in a chair and being quiet. I loved them!...
30+ years ago, I had access to machine metals class, pottery throwing, auto shop, and a half dozen other classes that involved things other than sitting in a chair and being quiet. I loved them! Kids today, with rare exception, no longer have anywhere near the number and variety of things to do than I did, and I think that is a large part of it.
Notably, this is a known issue when it comes to women getting into male dominated fields, something "The West" has been trying to achieve for decades now. It's not just systematic exclusion trying...
That's not how I read it. The thesis seems to be that some men are choosing not to go to college because of the large fraction of college students who are women[...].
Notably, this is a known issue when it comes to women getting into male dominated fields, something "The West" has been trying to achieve for decades now. It's not just systematic exclusion trying to keep them out, but it's also been a notable complaint among the few women that do push into those fields: That there are no other women around to talk to at work.
Humans have a deeply ingrained need to be part of The Group, to have something in common with The Group they identify themselves as part of, especially when moving through populations that they do not consider part of The Group. The most invigorating conversations I've had with fellow nationals is when I happen to meet them on vacation in far off lands. Suddenly the thing we have in common is that we're from the same country, we speak the same language and we're on foreign terrain. It pulls you together like magnets. These are reflexes that formed a long time before civilization was invented. Remember, Mesopotamia only happened like 12,000 years ago. Humans have been around for much longer.
I don't find it questionable to assume that that same reflex that keeps women out of male dominated fields where your gender alone isolates you, is also the same working within men who choose to avoid higher education.
I don't share the opinion of the currently highest ranking comment that views this article so negatively, but aside of the pure numbers now no longer working in men's favour when it comes to college enrollment, there is also the political aspect; colleges are leftist dominated, and certainly not among all leftists, but among those who like to engage in the righteous manhunts, they are just what it says on the tin: manhunts. Especially as you go more extreme in leftist opinion, they seem to be one of the last few monoliths you are generally assumed to be in the right to attack, along with other groups generally understood as "upholding the system".
There is, even now that women are in the majority on colleges, still a push to get more women into college. I vividly remember sitting down in the university canteen for lunch and picking up the weekly issue of the socialist club magazine, of which there was a copy of on every table, every week, proudly stating that despite 60% of the students being women, "the fight to push that number higher, to make university more equal was still not done!" (emphasis mine). This was years ago, and I'm out now with a finished degree, and a university socialist club is going to be skew very left on top of the already leftist natural leaning of a university, but it did strike me as odd use, very specifically, the term equality when you were already above 50%, and very specifically, to say you want even more women in uni.
I read the article, I even read some of the authors other articles. There's a distinct negativity and enmity towards men as a common theme throughout her work. Is that a founded viewpoint?...
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I read the article, I even read some of the authors other articles. There's a distinct negativity and enmity towards men as a common theme throughout her work. Is that a founded viewpoint? Perhaps, (some) men are responsible for most of the terrible things that have happened throughout history including the systematic suppression and oppression of women, minorities, and lower class individuals.
For this specific instance though, it's like she's doing everything she can to find reasons why it's men's fault that they're struggling and doing poorly in the education system (and in a lot of other aspects in modern life), there's no way that the system itself is broken. It must be that men are avoiding women and that college is viewed as a feminized liberal hellscape that no man wants to be a part of.
If you don't think likening the young men of today who aren't attending colleges to White Flight is misleading at best and honestly closer to malicious negativity then I don't know what to say because that's just an insanely loaded parallel to draw. Yeah sure, men losing ground on college education and therefore losing ground in nearly every aspect of professional life is the same as checks notes the racist phenomenon where rich white people fled from cities because they couldn't stand to live near poor black people and set up gated communities and sundown towns where they would lynch black people for daring to dirty up their communities. Those are the same!!
Posting an article like this in the ~men group is the only reason I even bothered getting upset. Coming into a space where men are working to improve and better themselves and insinuating that even in the areas that you're failing as a gender, it's still your own fault, do better; is not helpful.
I voted for the OP comment and read the article. I did not give out an exemplary. Is it wrong for me to ask what assumptions about me are made based on this behavior?
I voted for the OP comment and read the article. I did not give out an exemplary. Is it wrong for me to ask what assumptions about me are made based on this behavior?
Fae already made a comment that sums up my confusion here: https://tildes.net/~life.men/1l59/why_arent_we_talking_about_the_real_reason_male_college_enrollment_is_dropping#comment-ej2q
After reading this article and browsing the comments, I am still left with many questions. There seem to be several possible explanations, but most of them also have some flaws or...
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After reading this article and browsing the comments, I am still left with many questions. There seem to be several possible explanations, but most of them also have some flaws or counter-evidence, which makes me suspect that this is actually a pretty complex phenomenon. These are some of the more interesting hypotheses I saw (with some comments and thoughts of my own tacked on):
Hypothesis: Men are under pressure to be masculine — or to at least not be feminine — so they shy away from career paths that are associated with women.
This is supported by the evidence that the effect does not apply to homosexual men, who are presumably under less such pressure.
On the other hand, as mentioned in one of the comment threads under the article, there are some career paths that were historically dominated by women, but that have now come to be dominated by men (e.g., programming and physical therapy), which suggests that men are actually willing to enter "feminine" fields.
Hypothesis: Spaces dominated by women are more hostile to men and make it harder for them to get ahead — or at least they are perceived that way.
But if this were the case, I would expect gay men's interests in these fields to be at least somewhat dampened. Instead, we still see gay men embracing these fields with greater fervor than women do.
The gender shift in fields like physical therapy remain a mystery.
Hypothesis: Men are more sensitive to ROI (return on investment) than women, and most university degrees no longer meet most men's threshold for what constitues good value. As a consequence, less lucrative fields end up with a lower men-to-women ratio.
It does seem to be true that heterosexual men are under more pressure to earn a breadwinning income, while women and heterosexual men are less likely to expect to support a spouse and children by themselves.
However, this does not explain why women and gay men would become more attracted to these fields in particular. I would expect their interest to also drop off, albeit at a lower rate.
Hypothesis: A large number of men are foregoing further education due to other factors, namely video game addiction.
This would mean that highly ambitious men get degrees in fields with a high ROI, while unambitious men stay home. Meanwhile, both ambitious and unambitious women continue to get degrees in both ambitious and unambitious fields, so we see the gender ratio skew toward women in unambitious fields.
But then why aren't women and gay men falling prey to the same addictions?
There are just a couple of other things I wanted to mention:
One of the fields most dominated by men today is software development, yet (anecdotally speaking) I do not perceive this to be a meaningfully masculine field. Virtually every software developer I've met has been eager to see more women enter the field. It also seems to have an unusually high concentration of trans women and nonbinary people, and they seem to be much more welcome in this space than in most other fields. And it seems to me that men working in the software world are less concerned with appearing traditionally masculine, compared to men in most other fields: they seem to be more comfortable with feminine self-expression, sharing interests that are associated with immaturity (i.e., not "manly"), etc. To me, this just does not fit very well with the hypothesis that men are scared out of perceived "feminine" spaces and prefer perceived "masculine" spaces.
I have a background in agriculture (Australia specifically), which I would describe as quite a bit more traditionally masculine (bordering on macho) than either the Australian or American software development world. I have never seen any kind of effort to attract more women into this field. And yet, at least in Australia, agriculture has a higher ratio of women than software development does (~33% and growing, versus ~25% and shrinking). I have some hypotheses for why this is:
Agriculture is not not as lucrative as software development, so men (for aforementioned ROI reasons) are less likely to enter this field. Many of the women I know who work in agriculture did not grow up working on a farm (many even grew up in cities!). They were simply interested in plants, so they got a related degree and then a work placement out in the boonies, and the rest is history. I don't know a single man working in agriculture who went into it blind; they all grew up working on farms and it was a natural evolution.
To a much greater extent than most other careers, farming is an inherited lifestyle. It's extremely difficult to become an independent farmer without inheriting the business from your parents — and historically, when families were much larger, fathers had a selection of sons to groom into the role. But most of the family farms in my area are due to pass to daughters over the next few decades; because family sizes are smaller, many farming families don't have sons — and even when they do have sons, sons are far more likely to move to the city to pursue lucrative degrees, while daughters are more likely to stay home and help the family business.
Technology is making it more feasible than ever for women to operate farms on their own (especially if their brothers have gone off to study CS/engineering and are happy to help their sisters modernize!). Don't get me wrong; there is still a lot of very hard physical labor, but it's more endurance-limited than strength-limited these days.
I don't think most modern women (or at least the sorts of women who are interested in agriculture) especially mind traditional masculinity or appearing unfeminine. The women I know in this field are more interested in the work itself than in the social atmosphere around it (I think this is a field that introverts find very attractive) — and many of them actively enjoy and partake in the culture.
This strikes me as a compelling explanation (at least in part - like any real-world phenomenon, it's likely multifactorial). There's probably a lot of people who will brush aside hostility towards...
Exemplary
Hypothesis: Spaces dominated by women are more hostile to men and make it harder for them to get ahead — or at least they are perceived that way.
This strikes me as a compelling explanation (at least in part - like any real-world phenomenon, it's likely multifactorial). There's probably a lot of people who will brush aside hostility towards men as de minimis, something inflated by patriarchal resentment towards women. And while I agree that this sometimes occurs as well, I think certain essentially political attitudes in higher education can direct toxicity at men, especially straight white men.
It's been a little while since I attended college (about 15 years) but in my experience there was at least some anti-male bias occurring, and given how political polarization has developed since then it wouldn't surprise me if it was worse today. It always seemed like there was a surplus of clubs, programs, and such to help women and minorities, and of course this is, per se, a good thing. Any group of people should be able to form a club to help themselves with the issues or challenges that are specific to them. And to that end, a guy I knew tried to form a men's issues club. This wasn't a reactionary thing; he was a feminist, a decent and well-balanced person, and the club was meant to be along the lines of the men's liberation movement, helping men to undo ingrained patriarchal attitudes. Of course there are a number of men's issues that aren't the result of the attitudes of the men themselves - for instance, how men automatically become an object of suspicion if they are seen interacting with a child, how custody hearings generally favor women, how men showing vulnerability become the object of scorn (by men and women both), and how sexual harassment of men by women is often not taken seriously. Perhaps lesser issues than what women or minorities face, but whatever, it's not a contest.
Anyway, it seemed like there was some student interest in this men's lib club, but in order to be formally recognized by the school, it had to have a faculty adviser. The guy whose idea it was (I think he was a Psychology major, if that's relevant) looked high and low for a teacher who would be willing to fill this role and none were interested. It was like the subject was radioactive, untouchable. I can imagine some faculty probably were worried this club would develop into a literal boy's club, but I would have hoped somebody from the gender studies program (or something similar) would have seen the very real necessity for this type of club, and the opportunity to shape it towards something healthy and productive. Apparently not.
I looked this guy up on social media recently and he seems to have drifted towards the alt-right - quelle surprise. I haven't been touch with him for years so I have no idea the exact nature of this shift but I have to wonder how things would played out if the men's lib club idea had not fizzled out. I feel like this little melodrama plays out over and over again in myriad forms - men are open to feminism, egalitarianism, etc. but want to be given their own space inside this cultural sphere, which conflicts with the 'establishment' progressive view of men's roles, that it's only women that have a valid need for their own spaces. Perhaps on a sheerly political level there's some truth to this, but we need to recognize that need is not just political but also psychological or personal. Everyone needs to feel like they belong, to have a space where they are respected and centered, especially when similar spaces are available to other, different people.
Later on, I was in a relationship with a girl who was getting her master's in Education Administration (apparently this was a thing in her family, with her sister and a bunch of her cousins/aunts working in colleges in some form). I ended up spending a fair amount of time with other students in her cohort, enough time to make a few observations. For one, they were about 90% female which, okay, maybe the field is just attractive to women, that's fine. But (semi-unrelatedly), these were some of the most toxic people I've encountered - not just personal drama, but also culture war-type stuff. I love to play the devil's advocate, so I had plenty of discussion and a few outright arguments about political things with these people, and there was definitely an attitude of self-righteous absolutism, that if you didn't toe the line on progressive issues that you should be ostracized - not to mention, of course, a healthy dose of hostility towards men (partial exception granted to LGBT and other minorities). And this sort of atmosphere is especially significant in the field of Education - in contrast to STEM, where you can get a degree without really needing to form many personal relationships or collaborations with anyone, in Education pretty much everything was expected to be highly collaborative.
Of course, this is anecdotal; I don't know if every university's administration is composed of this kind of catty, overtly-virtuous but privately-scornful type of people. But if there's any sort of generalizability to my experience it would explain a lot about declining male college attendance. It's much harder to succeed at college if the administration secretly considers you irredeemable. And it's much harder to justify going to college if other men tell you it will be a struggle to succeed there.
I also have some anecdotal experience from my time in a US university, which is tangentially related. I graduated closer to 10 years ago, which is starting to make me feel older. I joined a...
I also have some anecdotal experience from my time in a US university, which is tangentially related. I graduated closer to 10 years ago, which is starting to make me feel older.
I joined a college fraternity during my freshman year, there were several guys I knew from high school who had joined, and my childhood best friend was also rushing, so I thought I would give it a go. It was great having a space to hang out with my friends and have guys be guys, we had bylaws that were enforced and systems in place to remove guys who didn't meet our chapter's academic standards or were problematic (for lack of a better word to describe a variety of behaviors that were unacceptable).
That being said, it felt like there was a double-edged acceptance of Greek life existing, but a hostility to it at the same time. During my freshman year they removed the ability for freshmen to move from the dorms into a Greek life house, even though the university didn't have enough dorms available, which meant they had to rent apartments for some students to live in. We were eventually given the ability to house freshmen again if we met certain standards, including requiring hosting university sanctioned educational talks on a variety of subjects each term. During my three years living in our chapter house, every speaker we had present spoke down to us regarding the topic and acted as though we were responsible for everything wrong that they would be presenting on (alcohol safety, rape culture, racism, etc.).
It felt as a whole that having a space for only men was treated as a negative and a something to be viewed with suspicion by the university and members of the staff. We had an entire term of social events removed because a freshman woman decided to drink too much and come to our house for a party because she knew one of our pledges. When we saw the state she was in, we invited her to sit on our couch inside and got her water to drink. She became unresponsive, so I called an ambulance for her. Even though she admitted at the meeting I had to go that she drank nearly an entire fifth of vodka before she came to our house and was only there for ~30 minutes before being picked up by the ambulance, it was our fault because she was at our house and by virtue of us hosting a party we caused her to drink too much.
When I became president of my chapter, the amount of meetings, and hoops I had to jump through with the university put me off from ever wanting to support them financially. So many meetings to get small things approved or be questioned on events, things that were happened, things reported about our chapter (the vast majority of which were not true, but I still had to go into a meeting for it). Plus having to deal with them changing polices mid-year based on a whim; when a new community director was hired or a member of their staff changed and their idea of what was acceptable for us to do was different from their predecessor; or some negative event related by a Greek Life chapter happened on the other side of the country. My year as president was one of the most stressful years in my life, but also taught me so many valuable lessons in an environment where I had my fraternity brothers to support me, call me out on things, and help put me back on track when I needed it.
Historically, Greek Life alumni have been some of the largest donors to universities, but I wonder if that trend will continue in the coming decades based on the trend I've seen of increasing university hostility towards Greek Life. I'd much rather give my money to support my chapter, a fraternity scholarship, or the international fraternity as a whole then give the university that caused me so much headache a dime.
This is all my own experience, I'm an avid proponent of the value Greek Life provides to its members. I wouldn't be the man I am today without having that environment to learn and grow. I had guys help me through some of my darkest moments, give me tough advice that I needed to hear, or just be the shoulder I needed. I also was part of that same support network, helping guys through tough breakups, the death of parents or close family members, drug and alcohol addictions, among many other things. That all being said, I'll freely admit that we have our own share of problems in the community and there are members and chapters who deserve being shut down and legally prosecuted for the things they do.
While I have heard many very believable anecdotes that at least some universities and some departments have become hostile toward men, and I imagine this would deter many men from attending those...
While I have heard many very believable anecdotes that at least some universities and some departments have become hostile toward men, and I imagine this would deter many men from attending those universities or studying in those departments (it would certainly deter me!), I'm not too convinced that this has all that much explanatory power when we see the same effect amongst racial minorities and we seemingly don't see the same effect with gay men.
Can't speak to PT, but programming became more important due to the rise of computing and women were explicitly pushed out of it. Programming went from grunt admin work (women's work) to...
On the other hand, as mentioned in one of the comment threads under the article, there are some career paths that were historically dominated by women, but that have now come to be dominated by men (e.g., programming and physical therapy), which suggests that men are actually willing to enter "feminine" fields.
Can't speak to PT, but programming became more important due to the rise of computing and women were explicitly pushed out of it.
Programming went from grunt admin work (women's work) to prestigious. And home computers weren't marketed towards girls, only boys, perpetuating the eviction of future women from the space. Women still report feeling uncomfortable and harassed in many tech spaces including in university.
Possibly something similar happened with PT, possibly something different.
I have no doubt that's true, but there was nonetheless a transitional period when programming changed from a "female-coded" job to a "male-coded" job (no pun intended), during which time men were...
I have no doubt that's true, but there was nonetheless a transitional period when programming changed from a "female-coded" job to a "male-coded" job (no pun intended), during which time men were applying for roles primarily held by women. Regardless of why or how women were pushed out of the field, the presence of women didn't deter men from entering the field.
Either programmers and physical therapists were unusually comfortable with women in the workplace, or this is not actually the major factor at play.
Or. Women were fired. There are whole books about how coding switched from administrative to prestigious, those would probably give the information you're seeking. It seems silly to assume men...
Or. Women were fired. There are whole books about how coding switched from administrative to prestigious, those would probably give the information you're seeking. It seems silly to assume men just started applying for the job, rather than, for example, psychologists literally determining the idea programmer was a man and becoming the guide for hiring in the industry.
The data I've seen (such as this, this, and this) doesn't suggest to me that women were fired in large numbers. It looks like the number of women pursuing the career peaked around 1990, at the...
The data I've seen (such as this, this, and this) doesn't suggest to me that women were fired in large numbers. It looks like the number of women pursuing the career peaked around 1990, at the same time that men's interest in the field was peaking, and then gradually leveled off from there.
To me, this data is more consistent with a different hypothesis, which is that both men and women became more interested in the field as it became more prestigious and high-paying, but then women's interest fell more than men's interest did after that — my guess being when it stopped being a normal 9-to-5 office job and employers started expecting long hours. Society still expects women to be caretakers and men to be breadwinners, so I would anticipate that high-paying jobs with long hours will be filled mostly by men, while low-paying jobs with flexible hours will be filled mostly by women.
In the UK women were specifically "selected for redundancy". In the US, many used the work of a few psychologists in the hiring of future programmers which pretty much excluded women as well. The...
In the UK women were specifically "selected for redundancy". In the US, many used the work of a few psychologists in the hiring of future programmers which pretty much excluded women as well.
The field didn't become as high paying for women, they weren't promoted and were paid poorly. (And even in the 60s universities had men's only rules about their computer labs)
By the end of the decade, the general demographics of programmers had shifted away from being predominantly women, as they had before the 1940s.[113] Though women accounted for around 30 to 50 percent of computer programmers during the 1960s, few were promoted to leadership roles and women were paid significantly less than their male counterparts.
But by the 90s we were fully into the "women just think different" bio-essentialist theories.
Women went from the majority to less than half in about 20 years.
Sure the women weren't all fired on Tuesday morning one week, but they were explicitly and strategically fired and excluded from new hiring as a whole. You don't need to guess based on the data, there are whole histories out there.
If women were not fired en masse, then surely there must have been a period of time when men were knowingly getting jobs in a field dominated by women. The young men who entered the field early on...
If women were not fired en masse, then surely there must have been a period of time when men were knowingly getting jobs in a field dominated by women. The young men who entered the field early on were perhaps fooled by recruiters into not realizing that they would be working with computers, but eventually recruits must have realized which industry they would be working in.
I'm not saying that the perceived masculinity/femininity of a job has no effect on the careers that men choose, but it's hard to imagine that it's the major factor and that computer science only shifted toward men because they were in essence tricked or manipulated into it. After all, nursing has a much more entrenched association with women than computer programming ever did, and it would be extremely difficult to hire someone to be a nurse without them making an active effort to become a nurse, and yet the ratio of men to women is steadily increasing — even though the original article's author seems to be arguing that this shouldn't happen in fields above the "tipping point" of 60% women. (For the same reason, I remain unconvinced that fear of misandry is the key factor in men's career choices, either.)
I've never said the original author was correct about everything. I'm saying women were explicitly pushed out of this field and men were explicitly favored for hiring despite women being the...
I've never said the original author was correct about everything. I'm saying women were explicitly pushed out of this field and men were explicitly favored for hiring despite women being the majority of the workforce.
There were really specific dynamics involved. You're the only person that suggested men were tricked into computer science and decided to make guesses at why the data looks how it does. You don't need to set up a straw man to knock it down. I was sharing a piece of historical information about one of the two specific fields you highlighted.
Feel free to read more about it or not as you like, but I'm not this interested.
I am sorry that I misunderstood what you were communicating. Would you clarify what you meant by this line in particular? I took it to mean that you were saying that men weren't knowingly choosing...
I am sorry that I misunderstood what you were communicating. Would you clarify what you meant by this line in particular?
It seems silly to assume men just started applying for the job...
I took it to mean that you were saying that men weren't knowingly choosing to work as programmers, in opposition my own comment:
...during which time men were applying for roles primarily held by women.
Did I misread your argument? I would like to understand, if you have the patience to explain.
I was saying it's silly to assume that the cause of the population shift was solely because men just happened to start applying for the same job women had been doing for years. There were...
I was saying it's silly to assume that the cause of the population shift was solely because men just happened to start applying for the same job women had been doing for years.
There were deliberate forces targeting hiring men and explicitly firing or devaluing women in the field. Men didn't just start applying to the administrative jobs en masse. The perception of the field changed to a skilled one (despite it always being such) and that perception led to a paradigm shift in who was a good candidate for those jobs. This progressed even to the marketing of personal computers as good toys for young boys explicitly which is another of the key historical moments. (Also throughout this, women were rarely elevated to leadership roles anyway, another pattern that continues in many fields.) Men were being recruited to work in a newly masculine field, not the existing feminine one.
We know why men entered and women left the field and it wasn't happenstance. It was intentional. I don't understand the need to try to "guess" at why this happened instead of reading the work that's already been done on it.
I took a history of Western society course back in the day, and one thing they covered in a couple of classes was that at various times there were a number of jobs that were (almost) exclusively...
I took a history of Western society course back in the day, and one thing they covered in a couple of classes was that at various times there were a number of jobs that were (almost) exclusively the province of men, including nurses, teachers, clerks, secretaries, etc. But that women started entering those fields and, at some point, men mostly stopped entering those careers. When I read things like 'too many women / not enough men' in college, I can't help but wonder if something similar is occurring here.
[Coincidentally, after each field became perceived as a mostly "female" profession, wages dropped (either explicitly or by failing to keep up with inflation.]
My guess is that it's not coincidental that the wages fell when women entered the field; women make up 50% of the population, so even if only a small percentage of women started applying for a...
My guess is that it's not coincidental that the wages fell when women entered the field; women make up 50% of the population, so even if only a small percentage of women started applying for a given role, that could drastically increase the labor pool and drive down wages — which in turn may have driven men (at least the breadwinners amongst them) away to higher-paying fields.
I would love to see some WWII data on this; when women filled men's roles because men left, and therefore presumably didn't increase the labor pool, did wages still fall? Of course, this one is tricky to work out because there was a massive worldwide effort to reduce consumption of goods/services and, at least in many parts of Europe, there was a lot of government intervention in assigning jobs and setting wages artificially to maximize the war effort.
This is my primary issue with the article. When reading it I felt like I could replace "women" with "many people" and it made as much, or even more, sense. Maybe summed up best by taking and...
This is my primary issue with the article. When reading it I felt like I could replace "women" with "many people" and it made as much, or even more, sense. Maybe summed up best by taking
When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.
Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice.
and replacing it with
When few people went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.
Now that many people go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice.
Now just reads like the obvious supply and demand outcome of increased accessibility. Degrees are quite accessible so of course they don't feel prestigious.
Random additional thought, though one I'm not attempting to argue in any way: what if the framing is completely backward? What if these men are accurately seeing the writing on the wall for saturated degrees, are correct in avoiding them, and the real issue is that women are being left holding the bag (of student debt for a depreciating degree)?
I think this would fit with the "men are more sensitive to ROI" hypothesis. I would not be the least bit surprised if boys on average receive better career advice than girls. To give a personal...
What if these men are accurately seeing the writing on the wall for saturated degrees, are correct in avoiding them, and the real issue is that women are being left holding the bag (of student debt for a depreciating degree)?
I think this would fit with the "men are more sensitive to ROI" hypothesis. I would not be the least bit surprised if boys on average receive better career advice than girls.
To give a personal anecdote, I (female) did very well in school across all subjects: I did just as well in math as I did in English, history, foreign language, etc. And yet, despite this, the teachers in my life largely tried to corral me toward either visual arts or creative writing. I did not have a single teacher suggest a STEM field to me.
I ultimately pursued a science degree because I thought it would offer better job prospects (lol), and while I was a university student, I caught up with some of my old high school teachers — who, upon learning of my major, tried to persuade me to become a science teacher. (I cannot tell you how laughable that idea is. I am the most introverted person I have ever met in my life. My quiet, keep-to-myself-ness was the singular most noted feature that my teachers and classmates always commented on.)
This did not happen to my guy friends who had a broad general aptitude like me. They were all strongly encouraged to study STEM degrees and to enter high-paying fields.
I made sure it did not happen to my little sister. When she told me that her favorite subject in school was math, I encouraged her to give programming a whirl, and now she makes way more money than anyone else in our family (and it's a good thing, too, because she ended up marrying a DREAMer who was legally barred from working for long periods of time and had hefty immigration-related legal expenses).
I think the fact that women were more or less forced out of the workforce after this temporary arrangement makes this hard to extrapolate from no matter what the wage data shows.
I would love to see some WWII data on this; when women filled men's roles because men left, and therefore presumably didn't increase the labor pool, did wages still fall?
I think the fact that women were more or less forced out of the workforce after this temporary arrangement makes this hard to extrapolate from no matter what the wage data shows.
Regarding your third hypothesis, I have some anecdotal stories from my professors to refute it. However, this does come with the caveat that this is about graduate school sorting, not whether or...
Regarding your third hypothesis, I have some anecdotal stories from my professors to refute it. However, this does come with the caveat that this is about graduate school sorting, not whether or not to earn a Bachelor's. They said that one of the reasons for the dearth of women in academia is the fact that they call their list of top-performing female students their list of future MDs and DVMs; their equal-performing male peers were evenly split between academia grad school and medical fields. Put flippantly, only a young man would be stupid enough to attempt the academic grind.
I feel like for this to make sense there needs to be something to fly to. With White Flight, white americans went somewhere, they went to gated off suburban neighborhoods. But as the article...
I feel like for this to make sense there needs to be something to fly to. With White Flight, white americans went somewhere, they went to gated off suburban neighborhoods.
But as the article describes, trades are not growing in the US. Coding bootcamps are way past their heyday - these days to get a SWE job you need a bachelors again. Are the boys just male flighting to being NEETs or something?
Also, in terms of "elites", as by income, male enrollment is still high. It's only on the broader scale that male enrollment fell off. This, I feel, makes it a very different situation than, say, vet school. Young men of wealthy backgrounds are not avoiding college.
The "devaluing" of college degrees is more that they are a necessary but not sufficient condition, now. Not that there's some alternative. You just need more than a bachelors. That doesn't really mesh with the idea that men are just moving somewhere else to get away from the cooties.
I don't really buy the opinion of the author for the reason that I've heard young women express the same vague hesitancy about going to college as young men: they "don't know what they want to...
I don't really buy the opinion of the author for the reason that I've heard young women express the same vague hesitancy about going to college as young men: they "don't know what they want to do," it's "too expensive," it "isn't what it used to be," or some sentiment that it's unfair that higher education should be necessary to do X or Y (often when it very definitely requires math and science knowledge that high school is nowhere near being able to provide).
And yes, being a NEET seems to be a common choice. And those NEETs are online all the time, being downers and telling other people they should avoid college.
It also used to be that blue collar families wanted their children to go to college, to do better than them. Now we have a massive populist resentment that people who study and apply themselves are better off. Incoming students now have to deal with parents or extended family dragging them down, discouraging them along the way, telling them they should just get a job doing X or Y thing they do instead of taking out loans and being "elitist."
I had someone in my class, a few years ago, in my major (Computer Science) who dropped out after freshman year. He was studious and doing well, but his parents pressured him to quit and learn to take over the family business...a restaurant. It was sad and ridiculous.
We have a deep anti-intellectual problem in the US, as famously noted by Asimov and Sagan. Ultimately, a large swathe of people doesn't like that success is measured by intellectual pursuits that the culture they've been immersed in since birth has told them is cool and okay to blow off and resist. It's expected that they not like like school, and it's not "cool" to do so. Then they graduate (after coasting along instead of being held back...thanks, NCLB) and suddenly they have the realization that more school is the only path to success, and they already blew it off their whole life, and then shockedpikachu.jpg.
I also wouldn't be surprised if some of those families had different expectations of their children based on their gender. e.g. the boys have to get a job and move out and be self sufficient ASAP, but the girls can go to college where they might meet someone to marry. I saw a little of that growing up, even in not exactly conservative families: paying for the daughter to go to college (after scholarships), but the younger brother had to get a job.
This hits way too close to home. Parents pushed an expensive engineering school right out of high school. In order to pay off the debt I moved to a larger city that had well-paying jobs. Now there...
It also used to be that blue collar families wanted their children to go to college, to do better than them. Now we have a massive populist resentment that people who study and apply themselves are better off. Incoming students now have to deal with parents or extended family dragging them down, discouraging them along the way, telling them they should just get a job doing X or Y thing they do instead of taking out loans and being "elitist."
This hits way too close to home. Parents pushed an expensive engineering school right out of high school. In order to pay off the debt I moved to a larger city that had well-paying jobs. Now there is clearly resentment that I am not going to move back to a dying town to work in the factory making a quarter of my current salary.
100%. I grew up in poverty and was told in no uncertain terms that I was expected to go to college but I would have to pay for it myself and I couldn't live at home anymore (not that I wanted to)....
100%. I grew up in poverty and was told in no uncertain terms that I was expected to go to college but I would have to pay for it myself and I couldn't live at home anymore (not that I wanted to). I took out what amounted to about $100k in loans after interest accrual--and I've paid it off, and could only do so because I was able to get a good job and career with my degree in a large city on the other side of the country from my small dying hometown.
I make a very comfortable living, I am never moving back, and now I'm told I'm "living above my raising". What are you gonna do, right?
I’d argue it’s relatively easy to be a NEET today. Internet, video games, online porn, living in your childhood bedroom well into middle age, microwave meals, etc. cover most of the basics. Pair...
I’d argue it’s relatively easy to be a NEET today. Internet, video games, online porn, living in your childhood bedroom well into middle age, microwave meals, etc. cover most of the basics. Pair those with a shitty part-time retail job you hate (but that gives you $200 a week) and you are more or less “set”. Wait until your parents die, then you (hopefully) inherit the house.
While I think this essay brings up lots of interesting and good points, I think this one is a bit silly. While college degrees have been economically devalued due to an overproduction of college...
As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.
While I think this essay brings up lots of interesting and good points, I think this one is a bit silly.
While college degrees have been economically devalued due to an overproduction of college graduates with too few brahmin positions to fully and meaningfully employ them all, degrees are still socially valued and necessary to be a brahmin.
A lack of college education is the first thing the college-educated remark about a college-uneducated person in their midst. Announce to your college-educated friends that you've started dating a tradesperson and watch those eyebrows rise. A person's education is one of the first things you see on their Tinder profile. A college education is one of the most important prestige signals in American society.
It goes both ways in my experience. I'm not opposed to a lot of what's stated in this article, but the author seems to separate gender and politics here, whereas I think they are both part of a...
It goes both ways in my experience.
I'm not opposed to a lot of what's stated in this article, but the author seems to separate gender and politics here, whereas I think they are both part of a larger shift that has happened in the culture wars.
Anecdotally, I will say that my college educated friends tend to be liberals who look down on uneducated right wingers with some disgust, while the right wingers I know tend to do the same with college educated folks.
Both groups are distrustful of, and disgusted by, the other. With a larger portion of men leaning right politically, it doesn't surprise me that men are avoiding a place that they see as a money-sink built to indoctrinate liberals.
It's awful. I hate that, as a liberal arts graduate degree holding university employee, that I'll often agree with what are otherwise backward conservative provincial governments on the need to...
It's awful. I hate that, as a liberal arts graduate degree holding university employee, that I'll often agree with what are otherwise backward conservative provincial governments on the need to pull the academy back from the left.
The emergence of self righteousness and a lack of humility in my area over the previous 10 years has been hard to watch. If I held traditional views, I wouldn't study liberal arts today.
The entire framing of this is the same logic you see in most conspiracy theories. "Why is no one talking about the secret cabal that runs the world! This book only got 5 reviews and talks about it...
The entire framing of this is the same logic you see in most conspiracy theories.
"Why is no one talking about the secret cabal that runs the world! This book only got 5 reviews and talks about it so whats up with that!".
It might not be as fundamentally flawed, but holy hell the reason no one is talking about it is because most people would never consider it. I have literally never even heard or seen this argument.
I haven't even heard this from the extreme right wingers, hell most of them probably don't even know the gender ratio to college or professions(and now that I type this I'd say the most extreme right wingers I've met are college educated and arguably pro college, i guess depending on what you define as the extreme right wing.)?
There's certainly some interesting data presented but I think the conclusion is far from supported and wildly speculative, and i'd say obviously supported by their personal beliefs more than any hard data. It bugs me they frame it as "why is no one talking about it" as if its some sort of conspiracy or us vs them, when a much more reasonable approach would be "here's something else to consider".
I have a hard time with the male flight example because it seems to ignore the transition from 50/50 gender balance. Sure, I can understand someone being intimidated by a classroom that is 90% the...
I have a hard time with the male flight example because it seems to ignore the transition from 50/50 gender balance. Sure, I can understand someone being intimidated by a classroom that is 90% the opposite gender; I'd personally be surprised if that was the primary source of this effect, but I can understand it to a degree. But a 50/50 to 60/40 split is something that I don't think I could notice, like what kind of person is so quick to parse the gender balance of a room with like 30 or more people? And then they change long-term plans because there was 6 more people of the opposite gender then their own? I guess its possible, but that Millions of men are doing this as their primary reason? That's a big statement that I don't see backed up with enough evidence. Personally, I don't think there is a single CAUSE for the gender imbalance, but most likely a loose collection of social and economic factors.
I find this article to be kind of irritating to read. The first thing that bugs me is that it doesn’t cover why it’s important that men aren’t going to college at the same levels as women do. Or...
I find this article to be kind of irritating to read. The first thing that bugs me is that it doesn’t cover why it’s important that men aren’t going to college at the same levels as women do. Or at least it doesn’t until around the end of it. So I spent a bunch of time wondering why they think it’s such an issue before they cover it.
The second thing that bugs me is that Freakanomics didn’t cover the masculinity issue in their coverage, when it’s an economics podcast. Social issues are not exactly in their wheelhouse.
I do think that what they are talking about is important, it’s just the way it was written bugged me.
To be fair, you do see the same kind of articles just about any time men are >50% of a group, so I do think it's only fair to address it if our goal as a society is equality and/or equity. (The...
The first thing that bugs me is that it doesn’t cover why it’s important that men aren’t going to college at the same levels as women do.
To be fair, you do see the same kind of articles just about any time men are >50% of a group, so I do think it's only fair to address it if our goal as a society is equality and/or equity. (The reasons of course are different historically, but I think the point stands)
Social issues are notoriously difficult to unpack, and I think this article tries to attribute a complex issue to a monolithic cause. I agree that being in a culture with people like you makes it...
Social issues are notoriously difficult to unpack, and I think this article tries to attribute a complex issue to a monolithic cause.
I agree that being in a culture with people like you makes it easier to succeed; this is why it’s so important to increase minority representation in general. As a result, I also agree that if men represent a minority of students in an institution, they will be at a disadvantage.
That is definitely not a valid monocausal explanation, though. If you want one cause, I have a better one: video game addicts are overwhelmingly male, online video games are a novel invention, and those addicts are less likely to succeed in school. We already know social media is disproportionately affecting the mental health of young teenage girls. It’s not that hard to conclude video games are disproportionately affecting the educational success of young men, in both high school and university.
I’m not saying video games are the bad guy. I’m illustrating that for social issues, monocausal explanations are fairly easy to develop and justify if you are using survey statistics and not doing rigorous scientific experiments. Something something correlation.
There’s likely some truth in what the article argues. It’s also unwise to dismiss other causes like the article seems to be doing.
I think this is a low quality article because it comes up with a theory with close-to-zero backing and then proclaims it as the "real reason". I don't see anything wrong with adding another theory...
I think this is a low quality article because it comes up with a theory with close-to-zero backing and then proclaims it as the "real reason". I don't see anything wrong with adding another theory to think about though; it could be true to some extent.
However, there's a lot of passionate defense of this weakly proposed theory with zero basis in scientific fact. Do you remember the shitty James Damore Google memo? Yeah, try reading the defense of this article with that as the subject instead. It's just a hypothesis, it's useful to think about it, I've seen it happen, it makes sense intuitively, etc. I can totally understand the frustration from men in this thread watching this article be defended because it is just as flimsy as the Damore one was.
Edit: and to clarify I'm okay with this article being posted here. I don't agree with it but it's fine to discuss these theories. Just remember that it's also fine if someone takes umbrage with it because it's implicitly accusing men of dooming their own careers due to sexism. That's a hurtful thing to say.
Maybe I'm being too charitable, but that isn't how I took it, exactly. Yes, assuming this hypothesis is true it would be helpful for men to be aware of how these biases could impact their decision...
implicitly accusing men of dooming their own careers due to sexism.
Maybe I'm being too charitable, but that isn't how I took it, exactly. Yes, assuming this hypothesis is true it would be helpful for men to be aware of how these biases could impact their decision making so they can consciously avoid sabatoging themselves this way, but wouldn't actually be the most effective way to address this issue.
One thing that's sort of bothered me in the article and thread is that these aren't men (for the most part) deciding whether or not to go to college. They 17, 18, 19. They're boys. They're still kids. They're still operating on the systems of understanding imparted to them by their parents, and if they ever challenge those systems, there's a good chance it will be in college. So demanding that boys just stop thinking that girls have cooties* is not actually going to accomplish anything. To effectively address this issue, the best course of action would be to socialize boys to be comfortable doing "girly" things just as we've socialized girls to do "boyish" things. And that would probably be good for a lot of other reasons, right?
So, while the article is much more certain than it has any right to be, the only reasonable solution to the problem that it poses is at worst fairly harmless.
Absolutely nothing wrong with encouraging boys to explore "girly" subjects in school! I didn't find it to be a problem when I was in school, but it's likely location dependent. The issue would be...
Absolutely nothing wrong with encouraging boys to explore "girly" subjects in school! I didn't find it to be a problem when I was in school, but it's likely location dependent. The issue would be if we accept that the reason boys don't go to college is because of "cooties" and in the process overlook the real reasons they're not going, that would be harmful.
Definitely. It seems to me like an extremely multifaceted issue, and multiple causes should be addressed. This one has such a safe, low-cost solution I see little harm in including it among the...
Definitely. It seems to me like an extremely multifaceted issue, and multiple causes should be addressed. This one has such a safe, low-cost solution I see little harm in including it among the solutions even without rigorous evidence, in the same way that I drink a glass of water any time I'm not feeling well, but I don't do that instead of taking medicine.
For those skeptical of the “women’s work being devalued” arguments, there’s a very interesting comment on the thread about this article in r/neoliberal. Reposted below: That said, I do suspect...
In the microbiology laboratory that I worked in as an undergrad I get to see the male flight phenomenon form repeatedly first hand because of the lack of stabilizing graduate students making the generations of lab culture run faster than normal, and I found it fascinating. The lab was almost two labs under a single professor working with bacteriophage against two different model organisms, E. coli and Pseudomonas, which need to be kept separated from each other in different rooms because more wild Pseudomonas has a nasty way of killing the shit out of more domesticated lab strains of E. coli and contaminating everything. The 'two' labs were connected, shared a professor, shared a break room, shared a common type of research, shared a research community, generally partied together, and did everything but the wet lab research together; but ever since the 90s when work with the second model organism started they were always both dramatically self-segregated by gender and switched every two to four years.
When I started in the lab as a male wee little pipette scratcher, I joined the E. coli lab while it was female rather than the Pseudomonas lab, which was male. It was really hard not to get a general sense that everyone sort of internalized how working with Pseudomonas phages was a hardcore medical thing relevant to phage therapy done by future doctors who were doing serious science while working with E. coli phages was an almost passive thing to do that was somehow just basic research. Then, as the generation who trained me left and I was still there the male students in the generation I trained ended up flocking to me and constructing an entirely new general internalized impression, where the basic research I was leading with E. coli was suddenly the serious science thing done only by people who could handle it while those in the now female Pseudomonas lab were somehow just glorified future nurses. Never mind that female pre-meds were the ones actually going to medical school while male pre-meds pretty exclusively washed out, or that all of the students who fucked up and couldn't handle it (aside from the one female student who turned out to have a serious problem with heroin) were pretty categorically male. The cycles seemed to in general correlate very strongly with female student generations needing to clean up various kinds of messes with poorly maintained stocks and useless data left behind by men,; as well as male generations limping along by building on solid foundations left by women, the generalized impression of the worthiness of effort seems to just only follow dudes.
Having gotten to see the natural experiment play out a third time before one lab shut down, it seems obvious to me that it isn't so much disparaged tasks that women get pushed into, but tasks that women do that get disparaged. It's like the very fact that a woman is doing something that makes the something somehow less important, less successful, and less worthy. The task itself is not the dependent factor, but the fact that women are doing it. It is also not like this was some kind of especially sexist environment students are entering into, the professor, who had been working since the 60s as a woman in molecular biology when it was among the worst of boy clubs, worked thoughtfully to fight this sort of thing. Indeed, even though it was really me and my work that the impression of the maleness of the E. coli lab was built around, none of my own efforts to fight it seemed to do much other than occasionally provoke some thought - like it's just this emergent property inherent to how students are raised.
That said, I do suspect that the causes are multifactorial than “men don’t want to be near women”, but I wouldn’t dismiss this whole theory out of hand.
But that example also shows why I don't think it generalizes to college. With that anecdote, what is happening is that as women enter a field, the pay gradually lowers, and men move on both...
But that example also shows why I don't think it generalizes to college. With that anecdote, what is happening is that as women enter a field, the pay gradually lowers, and men move on both because cooties and in search of brighter, high paying pastures.
That is a phenomena with elite, high income, white collar men. These are not the people who are not going to college anymore. It's overwhelmingly lower class, low income men.
There's also no alternative. There's no brighter pastures for these college-averse men. More white collar jobs than ever require a bachelors, if not more. The trades still suck for the same reasons, and the number of tradesmen has only been going down. I think it's fairly obvious the fates of factory work and mining in America. Part of all the political turmoil is that it's pretty dismal to not have a college degree in America in 2025.
In the white-flight example, it would be like if white people, instead of moving to fancy, expensive suburbs, decided to become homeless instead. Or live in a ghetto or something.
If it were true, you would expect to see many jobs, particularly masculine jobs, start to not require a degree, or require some alternative certification process. But that isn't the case - you only have to look at BLS numbers to see that it's the reverse.
The prestige factor comes into play before pay does, and then it becomes a feedback loop of pay and prestige declining. This anecdote is about a grad lab where pay doesn’t matter in the same way a...
But that example also shows why I don't think it generalizes to college. With that anecdote, what is happening is that as women enter a field, the pay gradually lowers, and men move on both because cooties and in search of brighter, high paying pastures.
The prestige factor comes into play before pay does, and then it becomes a feedback loop of pay and prestige declining. This anecdote is about a grad lab where pay doesn’t matter in the same way a career does.
Additionally, it’s all about the perception of brighter, higher paying jobs… (cont. below)
That is a phenomena with elite, high income, white collar men. These are not the people who are not going to college anymore. It's overwhelmingly lower class, low income men.
There's also no alternative. There's no brighter pastures for these college-averse men. More white collar jobs than ever require a bachelors, if not more. The trades still suck for the same reasons, and the number of tradesmen has only been going down.
For lower class men, it’s all about perception. The main alternatives (in order of viability) to college are trades (“My uncle says you can make $150,000 six months after starting!”), crypto/WSB-type gambling (“Bro my returns are 10,000%!”) and a hustle/grind mindset (“Man maybe I need to take Tate’s classes.”). It’s about perceived advantages over college (which has a real disadvantage of costing a lot of money before you can substantially make money), with a lack of clarity over their disadvantages (backbreaking, luck, and scam, respectively).
If it were true, you would expect to see many jobs, particularly masculine jobs, start to not require a degree, or require some alternative certification process. But that isn't the case - you only have to look at BLS numbers to see that it's the reverse.
I’d argue the most traditionally masculine jobs still don’t require degrees. In any case, most of these men seem averse to working white collar jobs, they either want to work trades and “be a real man” or be magically (likely through cryptocurrency or lucky stock trades) rolling in dough and not actually have to do work.
Maybe, to carry on the metaphor, they think they're going to move to fancy, expensive suburbs and end up in the ghettos because there isn't as much housing in the suburbs as it appeared...
In the white-flight example, it would be like if white people, instead of moving to fancy, expensive suburbs, decided to become homeless instead. Or live in a ghetto or something.
Maybe, to carry on the metaphor, they think they're going to move to fancy, expensive suburbs and end up in the ghettos because there isn't as much housing in the suburbs as it appeared externally. Maybe they think they're going to become tradesmen, but the jobs in the field aren't as available as they expect and they end up driving for Uber/DoorDash/Lyft even though it wasn't their plan. Men do make up a larger share of the gig economy and are more likely to rely on it as primary income. PDF warning.
Exactly this. Many think they will move to a big mansion in Coral Gables or the Hollywood Hills, but they instead end up in crummy apartment in Miami Gardens or Willowbrook.
Exactly this. Many think they will move to a big mansion in Coral Gables or the Hollywood Hills, but they instead end up in crummy apartment in Miami Gardens or Willowbrook.
Is this true? It was certainly not the case when I went to college about 15 years ago. Premed students were consistently under the most pressure at my school.
Biology is now often considered the “easiest” of the STEM majors.
Is this true? It was certainly not the case when I went to college about 15 years ago. Premed students were consistently under the most pressure at my school.
From my experience physics and chem were the hardest of the three. The only reason pre-med had more pressure was because they pretty much needed straight As to even be considered for med school,...
From my experience physics and chem were the hardest of the three.
The only reason pre-med had more pressure was because they pretty much needed straight As to even be considered for med school, whereas everyone else just needed decent grades to get a job straight out of undergrad, then possibly do a masters/PhD after a few years of work and saving (or even get their employer to pay for it).
I remember the pre-med career students bitching about how foolish it was for them to have chosen to study ChemE, when they could have done something easier like bio, because the As would have come easier.
And yeah, OChem was a nightmare for everyone lmao, so glad I never had to take it.
My classmates split between those who preferred grinding memorization (found physics intolerably cerebral) and those who coasted on being the fastest mind in the room to avoid grunt work (avoided...
From my experience physics and chem were the hardest of the three.
My classmates split between those who preferred grinding memorization (found physics intolerably cerebral) and those who coasted on being the fastest mind in the room to avoid grunt work (avoided bio at all costs).
The only reason pre-med had more pressure was because they pretty much needed straight As to even be considered for med school
Did you have any sadistic professors who especially loved to take away med school dreams of students? They have resentment against strivers who must earn As at all costs.
OChem was a nightmare
For me, it was OChem, part 2 that was awful. Part 1 I could coast on a quick conceptual understanding on how to push electrons around; Part 2 had too much content for one semester and required memorization.
I loved Orgo, but hated microbio, and thus my pre-med path ended. I'll never agree that bio is easier. Physics and Organic chem were a delight in comparison. My ultimate psych degree was about...
I loved Orgo, but hated microbio, and thus my pre-med path ended. I'll never agree that bio is easier. Physics and Organic chem were a delight in comparison.
My ultimate psych degree was about wanting to work with people more than it was about not wanting to stay in the other sciences.
Haha, yeah that's about right. I much prefer thinking over rote-memorization. Most of my friends were good at math, so bio seemed like an absurd amount of memorization to all of us. Chemistry was...
My classmates split between those who preferred grinding memorization (found physics intolerably cerebral) and those who coasted on being the fastest mind in the room to avoid grunt work (avoided bio at all costs).
Haha, yeah that's about right. I much prefer thinking over rote-memorization. Most of my friends were good at math, so bio seemed like an absurd amount of memorization to all of us. Chemistry was way more respected, but it was still funny how there was a bit of a barrier between the more physics based degrees vs chemistry.
Did you have any sadistic professors who especially loved to take away med school dreams of students? They have resentment against strivers who must earn As at all costs.
So it was a small engineering focused school, no real weedout classes...but a lot of "Why did you pick ChemE of all things if you want to be a doctor?". I guess ChemE is kinda overkill if your path is med school.
I don't think it's true in any objective sense, and it wasn't my perception when I was in undergrad about 6-10 years ago, but I've definitely encountered spaces where this is the perception. Only...
I don't think it's true in any objective sense, and it wasn't my perception when I was in undergrad about 6-10 years ago, but I've definitely encountered spaces where this is the perception. Only really in spaces where there's a culture of pervasive misogyny though, like internet comments and physics departments.
I don't think that's fair. I think it's a pretty common view, since a lot of people probably feel Biology had a lot more rote memorization and less things you had to "get" compared to physics or...
I don't think that's fair. I think it's a pretty common view, since a lot of people probably feel Biology had a lot more rote memorization and less things you had to "get" compared to physics or math. Depends on your definition of easy, of course. Personally I enjoyed the types of challenges in other subjects more.
I enjoyed the types of challenges in other subjects more as well, but that doesn't entail that those subjects were more difficult or more worth one's time. The idea that it having a lot you need...
I enjoyed the types of challenges in other subjects more as well, but that doesn't entail that those subjects were more difficult or more worth one's time. The idea that it having a lot you need to memorize makes it easier is quite silly to me -- memorization like that is far more difficult for me than learning things that you need to "get". Whether it'll actually be more difficult is highly dependent on the individual learner, and the idea that it's easier as a whole is pretty much only bandied about by people who believe that the fields they pursued are inherently superior.
Math is pretty universally regarded as the most difficult subject, so I don't think the notion is completely groundless. While I agree somewhat with your arguments, ending all your posts with...
Math is pretty universally regarded as the most difficult subject, so I don't think the notion is completely groundless. While I agree somewhat with your arguments, ending all your posts with basically "only assholes think like that" is pretty passive-aggressive.
EDIT: With difficult I mean with what students seem to have the most trouble with.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about the universality of your own opinions. I personally definitely don't think math is the most difficult STEM subject -- that doesn't fit my own...
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about the universality of your own opinions. I personally definitely don't think math is the most difficult STEM subject -- that doesn't fit my own subjective experience at all, and I don't think the belief that it's the most difficult STEM subject was remotely universal among my peers when I was in either undergrad or grad school. The people I've known who study/studied pure math at a university level have never given me this impression either -- if anything, they've seemed more detached from this "my subject is the most difficult and therefore the best" squabbling than those in other STEM fields (though it's admittedly possible I just got luckier with my math friends).
I simply don't think entire disciplines can really be fruitfully compared with regards to difficulty in any sort of objective fashion. There's simply too much subjectivity and variation based on personal experience and any number of other factors that aren't inherent to a discipline. Even if it were possible to set up a rigorous universal definition of difficulty that can apply across disciplines, that's certainly not what's happening here -- your assessments are entirely vibes-based. At best you search for features of a given discipline to justify your preexisting feelings about their difficulty.
I've never encountered someone attempting to seriously argue that a certain field was inherently more difficult who wasn't trying to assert their superiority over others for having studied it. It's, at the very least, an indicator that they're not the sort of person I want to interact with if I don't have to. In fact, I've deliberately not mentioned what I studied in university in this thread, because this type of person more or less without fail dismisses my opinions and treats me as an intellectual inferior.
It wasn't the case where I attended, either. Biology majors had to study organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, and genetics, amongst other things. I was in a somewhat related field (ecology),...
It wasn't the case where I attended, either. Biology majors had to study organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, and genetics, amongst other things.
I was in a somewhat related field (ecology), which had most of the same requirements (except we had to study calculus and statistics rather than genetics). The classes we had in common with biology majors were deliberately made harder than they needed to be because they were used for weeding out pre-med majors. They were actually even harder than that because pre-med majors (as well as pre-law majors) had a reputation for vandalizing library books/resources related to their fields to give themselves a competitive edge.
My only data point on this is someone I know who’s a doctor and the answer to that is “fuck no”. Organic chemistry and other higher level fields of biology are pretty brutal. The only really...
My only data point on this is someone I know who’s a doctor and the answer to that is “fuck no”.
Organic chemistry and other higher level fields of biology are pretty brutal.
The only really argument I’ve seen about this is the mostly tongue and cheek “my science is more fundamental than your science” stuff where biology is near the end because it’s just “really complicated chemistry”
I would say so. But the pre-med part is part of it. Med school doesn't require a particular bachelors degree, just that you have one and take the pre-req subjects. Biology was known as the path to...
I would say so. But the pre-med part is part of it. Med school doesn't require a particular bachelors degree, just that you have one and take the pre-req subjects. Biology was known as the path to med school because it was considered the easiest of the majors which naturally take med school pre-reqs. GPA is important for med school.
Biology classes would acknowledge the importance of GPA to a lot of their students - who are med school bound - and inflate the grades of those classes.
The "hardcore" med students were the ones that took chem, or hard majors that didn't even cover the pre-reqs like math or CS.
Note, this is about perception, I'm not saying that's the truth.
I went looking for more data. What’s behind the growing gap between men and women in college completion? This does not rule out the cooties theory, but here's two highlights I found interesting.
This does not rule out the cooties theory, but here's two highlights I found interesting.
Roughly a third (34%) of men without a bachelor’s degree say a major reason they didn’t complete college is that they just didn’t want to.
In some instances, the gender gaps in the reasons for not completing college are more pronounced among White adults than among Black or Hispanic adults. About four-in-ten White men who didn’t complete four years of college (39%) say a major reason for this is that they just didn’t want to. This compares with 27% of White women without a degree. Views on this don’t differ significantly by gender for Black or Hispanic adults.
So the hypothesis is that an increasing number of American men are turning away from further education because they somehow feel too intimidated to go into a classroom filled with women. That...
So the hypothesis is that an increasing number of American men are turning away from further education because they somehow feel too intimidated to go into a classroom filled with women. That explanation doesn't quite add up...
Middle aged college educated white woman makes unfounded assumptions that it's young men's own fault that they're being left behind by nearly every social system in place in modern society. Fantastic perspective. Let's continue to ostracize and villainize 49% of the population based on vibes.
What I find wild is how authors like this one - with their strident aim to break down barriers and explore intersectionality - treat men like the last acceptable monolith.
It reeks of "I've written the research paper, now it's time to find the research."
That's not how I read it. The thesis seems to be that some men are choosing not to go to college because of the large fraction of college students who are women, and that this is in turn a major driver of that gender imbalance among incoming students.
That's not "vibes", that's a scientific, testable hypothesis. The stuff about "school" being "feminine" is looking for and apparently finding cultural outputs we would expect to see if this mechanism was indeed operating. It's anecdotes and not data, but this is a blog post and not meant to be a controlled study to test or try to rule out the hypothesis.
Nobody is being villainized that I can see. I guess you can make some parallels between the language here and various poor-people-don't-want-to-work style wrong opinions, but those are A) about oppressed groups, which "men" isn't one of in any society I know about, and B) not supported by evidence, which this argument at least appears to be.
And certainly nobody is being ostracized. The core problem seems to be how do we get the men back in to the colleges, not how do we get rid of them.
For a scientifically tested hypothesis, I'm not seeing any of her scientific data for the leading assumptions she's making. There's an awful lot of unrelated data being referenced that she's using to justify claims, but not much more than that. Those are the "vibes" I'm referring to.
I'd like to point out too that the author is not a researcher or a scientist, this is not a research paper or grounded in any study. In fact the many studies she references throughout the article she explicitly disagrees with the conclusions that are drawn by the experts who actually did do the research.
For example, she uses an actual study that says that 34% of men say they didn't finish college "because they just don't want to" (compared to 25%~ of women) and then uses that to launch a thesis that men are avoiding college because it's become a feminine place. Want to know her source for that claim? Some random answer from a Quora post, obviously the bastion of truth. So because one random guy on Quora said that men are avoiding college because it's "feminine" now she states as fact that: "School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine." She even helpfully included a very scientific chart to back up her factual statement here
Even the freakonmics podcast that she cites as the main inspiration for this article never even insinuated anything like her thesis; which she views as a willful omission of an obvious fact, instead of the much more likely and simple answer that this thesis is completely ungrounded in any realm of actual scientific fact.
My mistake, I guess her drawing a direct parallel between men falling behind in schools and college enrollment to WHITE FLIGHT was a totally fair and neutral comparison to make and definitely not intended to be a negative thing.
White flight was the movement of a majority group out of the areas where there were growing numbers of minority group members. Few did so out of explicit racism, though of course many of them had implicit biases and systemic bias but they also had any number of other specific reasons - larger homes, cheaper cost of living, better schools. Still it was a pattern.
This does not seem an inappropriate comparison to make unless one makes the mistake of treating analysis of population level behaviors as individual condemnation.
Why are we so sure that "male flight" is the explanation for why men are attending college less in the first place (especially when every major source and most of the research papers referenced state several other compelling reasons that adequately explain the phenomenon.) I disagree with the entire premise of the comparison, and therefore that's the issue I have with it. I also think that just because it seems to be a similar phenomenon on the grounds that both of them are referring to a population number decreasing in a certain environment, it's a very obviously loaded comparison to make. Even if you did buy the idea that the main reason that men are falling behind in college enrollment numbers is because they don't want to be seen as gay or feminine.
I'm not. I'm just discussing your objections to the use of white flight as a comparison.
I'd understand that but you bolded and emphasized it, implying you found the specific comparison offensive, not that you disagreed that the phenomenon is happening here. So I'm addressing that. If the comparison turns out to be false, then sure, it's the wrong one to make.
Well no, both of them refer to a majority population exiting that specific environment over time making the environment now where you find minority presence - both are environments where minorities simply weren't allowed initially and as legal barriers decreased, then societal ones, the population balance didn't shift to equilibrium, they shifted to a majority of minority population members.
Those seem very comparable. It's entirely possible that there are other reasons (even in white flight the individual's reasons vary widely) or that there turns out to be no similarity at all. But the very comparison isn't offensive.
If I did in fact believe that was the driving reason, I'd say that's actually more demonstrative of the comparison. It feels like you're taking the comparison itself, not whether it's ultimately right or wrong, as insulting and I'm trying to understand why.
I do, in fact, find it offensive. Offensive and wrong (or at least not proven right, which isn't nearly as bad, but it is a problem when the article is stating it as fact.)
I understand if that's not something you can emphasize with, that's totally fair. There's definitely a lot of things that I can't understand why it would upset people. Perhaps I just have a overly negative viewpoint of White Flight and it immediately gave me an extremely negative psychological response when I saw the two being compared so readily. I personally would be extremely hesitant to make such comparisons to similar things.
It's more that you've just stated that it is offensive, emphatically so. And that feels in the realm of "we can't talk about issues of oppression/privilege/minority/majority because it makes people feel bad" rather than "this is inaccurate" or that it's because they're entirely different incomparable situations.
I do empathize with you being upset, but that doesn't mean I understand why, unless it is as you sort of implied, more of a knee jerk response to a pre-existing perceived negative being used to describe a group you identify with? I don't know. I think the comparison is a useful one and doesn't condemn the men involved inherently. More information would certainly either disassemble that comparison or strengthen the similarities.
I think that's something we have to just chalk up to differences of perspective. I would imagine given the amount of other people in this thread with similar reactions that I'm not the only one who found the comparisons made in this article to be incongruous. If that is silencing the argument because it's "making people feel bad" I apologize.
You were the only person I saw responding to the "white flight" comparison specifically but you were also the most emphatic.
Finding it incongruous is understating it quite a bit. You are sort of going back and forth on being very EMPHATIC and then saying you just find it a poor comparison. I don't feel like we're communicating well if you think you're being consistent about that.
Have a good one
I recommend checking out stu2b50's excellent comment here (And their later response here which is also a good read )
They certainly have a much more level-headed response than I did, I'll give you that.
Not counting the several dozen people who voted for the comments I made (which I know doesn't necessarily amount to the same as agreement on all points) there are at least several other comments that point out similar issues they had with the way the article was written.
I hope you have a good evening as well, this was a pleasure as always.
I can't help but be reminded of conversations around "toxic masculinity." It's yet another sore subject concerning privilege with a concrete definition. The comparison it makes is a useful one, but even mentioning it in passing will attract incalculable amounts of anger by those who equate the saying with "all men are toxic."
It's endlessly frustrating. At what point do we stop arguing over parlance and start arguing over the substance of what is being said?
But doesn't the fact that it produces incalculable anger mean its not a useful term? If you know it is a landmine, why not avoid the term and talk about the concepts more directly? If the difference between someone hearing you out or not is whether or not you use a loaded term, why use it? I am not trying ro be antagonistic, but I just don't understand the thought process.
It doesn't matter what language you use, because the language will be redefined and villified regardless. See what happened to "woke" for a perfect example.
I've attempted to do that in the past, talk about "privilege" and "toxic masculinity" without using the terms and it's actually incredibly difficult. It's very hard to be concise if you're trying to describe a phenomenon and avoid the one or two word phrase that most easily comes to mind to encapsulate it, and people who are easily upset by these phrases aren't likely to be patient and wait for you to gather your words before interrupting you.
Even on online forums where being interrupted isn't a concern, it's not easy to explain these concepts to someone who isn't interested in understanding them. If you've got any suggestions for non-inflammatory ways to talk about them I'd actually be interested in hearing them!
Well, I have a lot of opinions about changing people's minds, but most are about how incredibly difficult and slow it is. First, you're not going to change the mind of someone who isn't at least a little open to it. What would it take for you to change your opinion on a deeply held belief? I assume it would be a lot or impossible, almost certainly not a single or even a hundred conversations. The same is true for them; they believe as truly and sincerely as you, regardless of the content of that belief.
For more positive suggestions, you need to find a point on which you both agree and work your way from there. Listening to them first, and I mean actually listening, will get you good will from most people, and if it doesn't, it can quickly show that trying is a waste of your time. People hate to be preached at, so make sure you ask them questions without being accusatory or trying to setup intellectual traps. Just being kind to them will do more for whatever your trying to convince them of then any intellectual argument; people internalize random kindness far more then random arguments.
I find whether or not they're open to hearing the definition and usage of phrases like "toxic masculinity" before getting upset or leaving the conversation is a pretty good litmus test for how open they are to the ideas that the phrases convey, which actually makes using the terms a good way to find out if the conversation is worth the time it will take to have it. This is contingent on the context in which the phrase is used, of course.
I'm actually really comfortable with my strategies and boundaries regarding learning from and potentially changing minds of people in general, thank you! My last sentence was in reference to specifically discussing these inflammatory topics without using the triggering phrases. How would you discuss toxic masculinity without 1) being so long winded as to tune people out, 2) being confusing, 3) upsetting people who would be upset by the phrase "toxic masculinity" or 4) just using the phrase?
Ah, I misinterpreted that then!
I don't really have a general answer, because I think it heavily depends on all the particulars of the situation, but I'll try. I think the most likely person to fit the venn diagram of significantly bothered by the term 'Toxic Masculinity' and similar progressive jargon but are open to an actual conversation about the root issues would be centrists who consume some right-wing media. If they are more of the academic type, I would talk about the etymology of the term, i.e. it comes from the mythopoetic men's movement from the 1980s that was explicitly centered on the harm this socialization caused men themselves not other people. If they are just parroting talking points, I would try and bring up something that is rooted in Toxic Masculinity but isn't in the popular right-wing zeitgeist; personally I'd talk about conscription in the Ukraine. I guess my point is that you try and have a conversation about the effects of Toxic Masculinity, not simply the term itself.
Interesting!
I typically try to defuse the term and then use it as I normally would. I point out that phrases like "toxic gas" and "toxic chemicals" don't imply that all gasses and chemicals are toxic. We need gasses and chemicals to live! Contrarily, no one would ever say "toxic poison" because poison is, by definition, toxic. Therefore the phrase "toxic masculinity" only exists because not all masculinity is toxic.
Typically if they can't go along with that, then we can't have a conversation anyway.
My bet is that the people who are offended at terms like "toxic masculinity" are generally not actually offended at the interperation they claim it is so much as they are looking for excuses to not examine the effects of their behaviour and habits.
That was sort of what I was trying to figure out, was this a "white flight is racist and racist is evil and therefore this is villainizing men" situation? Vs my perspective of that things like racism and sexism are pervasive and systemic and while doing a racist thing is bad there's a difference between "I have done a bad thing" and "I'm a bad person." Even if every man was avoiding college due to the presence of women, the majority would be acting out of socialization
In "white flight" there were people who actively tried to drive Black families out of white neighborhoods with violence. There were people who intentionally put racist covenants into their deeds. There's a difference of scale between those and "we could get a larger house in the suburbs and feel safer" even if the latter still has systemic racism baked in. But it's all "white flight."
I said testable, not tested. It might be false, but it is capable of being shown to be false. It's not merely an un-disprove-able assertion that the author perceives a vibe.
I think the "white flight" phrasing was addressed in the thread already.
My sister was a grade school teacher for many years. She mentioned several times that school in general is not geared for boys. In her experience, many boys have trouble sitting still in a desk (she observed this issue more frequently in boys than in girls). They want to fidget or get up and move around. This is normally strongly discouraged or punished in school, a place where we need everyone to be still and conform. She found that giving them a little freedom to get up and move a bit during lessons was more effective than butting heads with them and going down the path of punishment.
This is not about college specifically, but if her observations are generally true it could be related to why some men don't want to spend more years in school than necessary, even after they get older and don't feel the need for that freedom of movement.
Anecdotally, as a guy while I didn’t have much trouble in elementary and middle school, from the tail end of high school through uni my head was really just not in the right place. Everything but the coursework got my focus and while I was cognizant of that on some level, trying to change it was difficult. Naturally this led to mediocre-to-bad performance.
It wasn’t really until my mid-20s that I felt the kind of shift in mentality and brain function that would lend to doing well in school, but by then I’d been out for several years and joined the workforce.
I wonder how common this kind of experience is.
Your sister’s observations really resonate with a lot of what Richard Reeves discusses in an interview he did on The Ezra Klein Show back in March 2023. (I've linked to it before.) Reeves talks about how the traditional school environment often isn’t designed with the needs of many boys’ in mind, and how this can lead to long-term disengagement from education.
One thing Reeves highlights is how boys’ brains develop more slowly than girls’ in key areas like impulse control and focus. This can make it harder for them to adapt to structured classrooms that demand sitting still, staying organized, and completing tasks on time. While these traits are rewarded in school, they’re areas where boys are more likely to struggle.
Your sister’s strategy of letting boys move around instead of punishing them aligns perfectly with what Reeves suggests. He argues that meeting boys where they are—by incorporating movement or hands-on activities—can be much more effective than forcing them to conform to rigid expectations.
Reeves also connects these early struggles to why so many men don’t go to college now. If boys associate school with frustration or punishment for things like fidgeting, they might feel done with the whole system as soon as they’re able to leave. It’s a pattern he ties to the widening gender gap in higher education.
It sounds like your sister understood this intuitively, and her approach probably made a huge difference for those boys. If you’re interested in exploring this more, the interview with Reeves is worth a listen (of you have access to it—the NYT put their podcasts behind a paywall on most platforms, though not on YouTube). It dives deep into why boys are falling behind and what we might do about it. And why it matters.
FWIW, the transcript is here.
Hasn't school been that way for a very long time, though? It's clearly a problem but I don't see how it could be responsible for this change of it is not a change itself.
It has, but I think what has changed in the last 20 to 30 years is that the major authoritarian vibes that dominated school has been eliminated. Teachers had a much more extreme measures to enforce absolute obedience in schools, including corporal punishment. I think there has been a shift in schooling away from the establishment of authority, and that might be a reason why boys in schools feel more at-ease to fidget, because the stakes have been lowered and there is no longer a chance that a mad teacher is going to assault their fingers with a cane.
Interesting! I had actually assumed that it would work the other way - that now more (even if not enough) teachers are likely to be engaging with boys in hands-on, active ways, and the situation should be better if anything. What you're saying, if I understand correctly, is that a half-measure could be worse than nothing in that it neither gives boy students a path to learn their way consistently throughout their education, nor the rigidity needed to force them to learn in a way that is uncomfortable throughout their education. It gives them just enough flexibility for just long enough to hamstring them. Am I getting that right?
Yep! That's my opinion on it anyhow.
30+ years ago, I had access to machine metals class, pottery throwing, auto shop, and a half dozen other classes that involved things other than sitting in a chair and being quiet. I loved them! Kids today, with rare exception, no longer have anywhere near the number and variety of things to do than I did, and I think that is a large part of it.
Notably, this is a known issue when it comes to women getting into male dominated fields, something "The West" has been trying to achieve for decades now. It's not just systematic exclusion trying to keep them out, but it's also been a notable complaint among the few women that do push into those fields: That there are no other women around to talk to at work.
Humans have a deeply ingrained need to be part of The Group, to have something in common with The Group they identify themselves as part of, especially when moving through populations that they do not consider part of The Group. The most invigorating conversations I've had with fellow nationals is when I happen to meet them on vacation in far off lands. Suddenly the thing we have in common is that we're from the same country, we speak the same language and we're on foreign terrain. It pulls you together like magnets. These are reflexes that formed a long time before civilization was invented. Remember, Mesopotamia only happened like 12,000 years ago. Humans have been around for much longer.
I don't find it questionable to assume that that same reflex that keeps women out of male dominated fields where your gender alone isolates you, is also the same working within men who choose to avoid higher education.
I don't share the opinion of the currently highest ranking comment that views this article so negatively, but aside of the pure numbers now no longer working in men's favour when it comes to college enrollment, there is also the political aspect; colleges are leftist dominated, and certainly not among all leftists, but among those who like to engage in the righteous manhunts, they are just what it says on the tin: manhunts. Especially as you go more extreme in leftist opinion, they seem to be one of the last few monoliths you are generally assumed to be in the right to attack, along with other groups generally understood as "upholding the system".
There is, even now that women are in the majority on colleges, still a push to get more women into college. I vividly remember sitting down in the university canteen for lunch and picking up the weekly issue of the socialist club magazine, of which there was a copy of on every table, every week, proudly stating that despite 60% of the students being women, "the fight to push that number higher, to make university more equal was still not done!" (emphasis mine). This was years ago, and I'm out now with a finished degree, and a university socialist club is going to be skew very left on top of the already leftist natural leaning of a university, but it did strike me as odd use, very specifically, the term equality when you were already above 50%, and very specifically, to say you want even more women in uni.
I'm wondering if anyone voted for the OP comment (and gave it an exemplary??) actually read the article.
I read the article, I even read some of the authors other articles. There's a distinct negativity and enmity towards men as a common theme throughout her work. Is that a founded viewpoint? Perhaps, (some) men are responsible for most of the terrible things that have happened throughout history including the systematic suppression and oppression of women, minorities, and lower class individuals.
For this specific instance though, it's like she's doing everything she can to find reasons why it's men's fault that they're struggling and doing poorly in the education system (and in a lot of other aspects in modern life), there's no way that the system itself is broken. It must be that men are avoiding women and that college is viewed as a feminized liberal hellscape that no man wants to be a part of.
If you don't think likening the young men of today who aren't attending colleges to White Flight is misleading at best and honestly closer to malicious negativity then I don't know what to say because that's just an insanely loaded parallel to draw. Yeah sure, men losing ground on college education and therefore losing ground in nearly every aspect of professional life is the same as checks notes the racist phenomenon where rich white people fled from cities because they couldn't stand to live near poor black people and set up gated communities and sundown towns where they would lynch black people for daring to dirty up their communities. Those are the same!!
Posting an article like this in the ~men group is the only reason I even bothered getting upset. Coming into a space where men are working to improve and better themselves and insinuating that even in the areas that you're failing as a gender, it's still your own fault, do better; is not helpful.
I voted for the OP comment and read the article. I did not give out an exemplary. Is it wrong for me to ask what assumptions about me are made based on this behavior?
Fae already made a comment that sums up my confusion here: https://tildes.net/~life.men/1l59/why_arent_we_talking_about_the_real_reason_male_college_enrollment_is_dropping#comment-ej2q
After reading this article and browsing the comments, I am still left with many questions. There seem to be several possible explanations, but most of them also have some flaws or counter-evidence, which makes me suspect that this is actually a pretty complex phenomenon. These are some of the more interesting hypotheses I saw (with some comments and thoughts of my own tacked on):
Hypothesis: Men are under pressure to be masculine — or to at least not be feminine — so they shy away from career paths that are associated with women.
Hypothesis: Spaces dominated by women are more hostile to men and make it harder for them to get ahead — or at least they are perceived that way.
Hypothesis: Men are more sensitive to ROI (return on investment) than women, and most university degrees no longer meet most men's threshold for what constitues good value. As a consequence, less lucrative fields end up with a lower men-to-women ratio.
Hypothesis: A large number of men are foregoing further education due to other factors, namely video game addiction.
There are just a couple of other things I wanted to mention:
One of the fields most dominated by men today is software development, yet (anecdotally speaking) I do not perceive this to be a meaningfully masculine field. Virtually every software developer I've met has been eager to see more women enter the field. It also seems to have an unusually high concentration of trans women and nonbinary people, and they seem to be much more welcome in this space than in most other fields. And it seems to me that men working in the software world are less concerned with appearing traditionally masculine, compared to men in most other fields: they seem to be more comfortable with feminine self-expression, sharing interests that are associated with immaturity (i.e., not "manly"), etc. To me, this just does not fit very well with the hypothesis that men are scared out of perceived "feminine" spaces and prefer perceived "masculine" spaces.
I have a background in agriculture (Australia specifically), which I would describe as quite a bit more traditionally masculine (bordering on macho) than either the Australian or American software development world. I have never seen any kind of effort to attract more women into this field. And yet, at least in Australia, agriculture has a higher ratio of women than software development does (~33% and growing, versus ~25% and shrinking). I have some hypotheses for why this is:
This strikes me as a compelling explanation (at least in part - like any real-world phenomenon, it's likely multifactorial). There's probably a lot of people who will brush aside hostility towards men as de minimis, something inflated by patriarchal resentment towards women. And while I agree that this sometimes occurs as well, I think certain essentially political attitudes in higher education can direct toxicity at men, especially straight white men.
It's been a little while since I attended college (about 15 years) but in my experience there was at least some anti-male bias occurring, and given how political polarization has developed since then it wouldn't surprise me if it was worse today. It always seemed like there was a surplus of clubs, programs, and such to help women and minorities, and of course this is, per se, a good thing. Any group of people should be able to form a club to help themselves with the issues or challenges that are specific to them. And to that end, a guy I knew tried to form a men's issues club. This wasn't a reactionary thing; he was a feminist, a decent and well-balanced person, and the club was meant to be along the lines of the men's liberation movement, helping men to undo ingrained patriarchal attitudes. Of course there are a number of men's issues that aren't the result of the attitudes of the men themselves - for instance, how men automatically become an object of suspicion if they are seen interacting with a child, how custody hearings generally favor women, how men showing vulnerability become the object of scorn (by men and women both), and how sexual harassment of men by women is often not taken seriously. Perhaps lesser issues than what women or minorities face, but whatever, it's not a contest.
Anyway, it seemed like there was some student interest in this men's lib club, but in order to be formally recognized by the school, it had to have a faculty adviser. The guy whose idea it was (I think he was a Psychology major, if that's relevant) looked high and low for a teacher who would be willing to fill this role and none were interested. It was like the subject was radioactive, untouchable. I can imagine some faculty probably were worried this club would develop into a literal boy's club, but I would have hoped somebody from the gender studies program (or something similar) would have seen the very real necessity for this type of club, and the opportunity to shape it towards something healthy and productive. Apparently not.
I looked this guy up on social media recently and he seems to have drifted towards the alt-right - quelle surprise. I haven't been touch with him for years so I have no idea the exact nature of this shift but I have to wonder how things would played out if the men's lib club idea had not fizzled out. I feel like this little melodrama plays out over and over again in myriad forms - men are open to feminism, egalitarianism, etc. but want to be given their own space inside this cultural sphere, which conflicts with the 'establishment' progressive view of men's roles, that it's only women that have a valid need for their own spaces. Perhaps on a sheerly political level there's some truth to this, but we need to recognize that need is not just political but also psychological or personal. Everyone needs to feel like they belong, to have a space where they are respected and centered, especially when similar spaces are available to other, different people.
Later on, I was in a relationship with a girl who was getting her master's in Education Administration (apparently this was a thing in her family, with her sister and a bunch of her cousins/aunts working in colleges in some form). I ended up spending a fair amount of time with other students in her cohort, enough time to make a few observations. For one, they were about 90% female which, okay, maybe the field is just attractive to women, that's fine. But (semi-unrelatedly), these were some of the most toxic people I've encountered - not just personal drama, but also culture war-type stuff. I love to play the devil's advocate, so I had plenty of discussion and a few outright arguments about political things with these people, and there was definitely an attitude of self-righteous absolutism, that if you didn't toe the line on progressive issues that you should be ostracized - not to mention, of course, a healthy dose of hostility towards men (partial exception granted to LGBT and other minorities). And this sort of atmosphere is especially significant in the field of Education - in contrast to STEM, where you can get a degree without really needing to form many personal relationships or collaborations with anyone, in Education pretty much everything was expected to be highly collaborative.
Of course, this is anecdotal; I don't know if every university's administration is composed of this kind of catty, overtly-virtuous but privately-scornful type of people. But if there's any sort of generalizability to my experience it would explain a lot about declining male college attendance. It's much harder to succeed at college if the administration secretly considers you irredeemable. And it's much harder to justify going to college if other men tell you it will be a struggle to succeed there.
I also have some anecdotal experience from my time in a US university, which is tangentially related. I graduated closer to 10 years ago, which is starting to make me feel older.
I joined a college fraternity during my freshman year, there were several guys I knew from high school who had joined, and my childhood best friend was also rushing, so I thought I would give it a go. It was great having a space to hang out with my friends and have guys be guys, we had bylaws that were enforced and systems in place to remove guys who didn't meet our chapter's academic standards or were problematic (for lack of a better word to describe a variety of behaviors that were unacceptable).
That being said, it felt like there was a double-edged acceptance of Greek life existing, but a hostility to it at the same time. During my freshman year they removed the ability for freshmen to move from the dorms into a Greek life house, even though the university didn't have enough dorms available, which meant they had to rent apartments for some students to live in. We were eventually given the ability to house freshmen again if we met certain standards, including requiring hosting university sanctioned educational talks on a variety of subjects each term. During my three years living in our chapter house, every speaker we had present spoke down to us regarding the topic and acted as though we were responsible for everything wrong that they would be presenting on (alcohol safety, rape culture, racism, etc.).
It felt as a whole that having a space for only men was treated as a negative and a something to be viewed with suspicion by the university and members of the staff. We had an entire term of social events removed because a freshman woman decided to drink too much and come to our house for a party because she knew one of our pledges. When we saw the state she was in, we invited her to sit on our couch inside and got her water to drink. She became unresponsive, so I called an ambulance for her. Even though she admitted at the meeting I had to go that she drank nearly an entire fifth of vodka before she came to our house and was only there for ~30 minutes before being picked up by the ambulance, it was our fault because she was at our house and by virtue of us hosting a party we caused her to drink too much.
When I became president of my chapter, the amount of meetings, and hoops I had to jump through with the university put me off from ever wanting to support them financially. So many meetings to get small things approved or be questioned on events, things that were happened, things reported about our chapter (the vast majority of which were not true, but I still had to go into a meeting for it). Plus having to deal with them changing polices mid-year based on a whim; when a new community director was hired or a member of their staff changed and their idea of what was acceptable for us to do was different from their predecessor; or some negative event related by a Greek Life chapter happened on the other side of the country. My year as president was one of the most stressful years in my life, but also taught me so many valuable lessons in an environment where I had my fraternity brothers to support me, call me out on things, and help put me back on track when I needed it.
Historically, Greek Life alumni have been some of the largest donors to universities, but I wonder if that trend will continue in the coming decades based on the trend I've seen of increasing university hostility towards Greek Life. I'd much rather give my money to support my chapter, a fraternity scholarship, or the international fraternity as a whole then give the university that caused me so much headache a dime.
This is all my own experience, I'm an avid proponent of the value Greek Life provides to its members. I wouldn't be the man I am today without having that environment to learn and grow. I had guys help me through some of my darkest moments, give me tough advice that I needed to hear, or just be the shoulder I needed. I also was part of that same support network, helping guys through tough breakups, the death of parents or close family members, drug and alcohol addictions, among many other things. That all being said, I'll freely admit that we have our own share of problems in the community and there are members and chapters who deserve being shut down and legally prosecuted for the things they do.
While I have heard many very believable anecdotes that at least some universities and some departments have become hostile toward men, and I imagine this would deter many men from attending those universities or studying in those departments (it would certainly deter me!), I'm not too convinced that this has all that much explanatory power when we see the same effect amongst racial minorities and we seemingly don't see the same effect with gay men.
Can't speak to PT, but programming became more important due to the rise of computing and women were explicitly pushed out of it.
Programming went from grunt admin work (women's work) to prestigious. And home computers weren't marketed towards girls, only boys, perpetuating the eviction of future women from the space. Women still report feeling uncomfortable and harassed in many tech spaces including in university.
Possibly something similar happened with PT, possibly something different.
I have no doubt that's true, but there was nonetheless a transitional period when programming changed from a "female-coded" job to a "male-coded" job (no pun intended), during which time men were applying for roles primarily held by women. Regardless of why or how women were pushed out of the field, the presence of women didn't deter men from entering the field.
Either programmers and physical therapists were unusually comfortable with women in the workplace, or this is not actually the major factor at play.
Or. Women were fired. There are whole books about how coding switched from administrative to prestigious, those would probably give the information you're seeking. It seems silly to assume men just started applying for the job, rather than, for example, psychologists literally determining the idea programmer was a man and becoming the guide for hiring in the industry.
The data I've seen (such as this, this, and this) doesn't suggest to me that women were fired in large numbers. It looks like the number of women pursuing the career peaked around 1990, at the same time that men's interest in the field was peaking, and then gradually leveled off from there.
To me, this data is more consistent with a different hypothesis, which is that both men and women became more interested in the field as it became more prestigious and high-paying, but then women's interest fell more than men's interest did after that — my guess being when it stopped being a normal 9-to-5 office job and employers started expecting long hours. Society still expects women to be caretakers and men to be breadwinners, so I would anticipate that high-paying jobs with long hours will be filled mostly by men, while low-paying jobs with flexible hours will be filled mostly by women.
In the UK women were specifically "selected for redundancy". In the US, many used the work of a few psychologists in the hiring of future programmers which pretty much excluded women as well.
The field didn't become as high paying for women, they weren't promoted and were paid poorly. (And even in the 60s universities had men's only rules about their computer labs)
But by the 90s we were fully into the "women just think different" bio-essentialist theories.
Women went from the majority to less than half in about 20 years.
Sure the women weren't all fired on Tuesday morning one week, but they were explicitly and strategically fired and excluded from new hiring as a whole. You don't need to guess based on the data, there are whole histories out there.
If women were not fired en masse, then surely there must have been a period of time when men were knowingly getting jobs in a field dominated by women. The young men who entered the field early on were perhaps fooled by recruiters into not realizing that they would be working with computers, but eventually recruits must have realized which industry they would be working in.
I'm not saying that the perceived masculinity/femininity of a job has no effect on the careers that men choose, but it's hard to imagine that it's the major factor and that computer science only shifted toward men because they were in essence tricked or manipulated into it. After all, nursing has a much more entrenched association with women than computer programming ever did, and it would be extremely difficult to hire someone to be a nurse without them making an active effort to become a nurse, and yet the ratio of men to women is steadily increasing — even though the original article's author seems to be arguing that this shouldn't happen in fields above the "tipping point" of 60% women. (For the same reason, I remain unconvinced that fear of misandry is the key factor in men's career choices, either.)
I've never said the original author was correct about everything. I'm saying women were explicitly pushed out of this field and men were explicitly favored for hiring despite women being the majority of the workforce.
There were really specific dynamics involved. You're the only person that suggested men were tricked into computer science and decided to make guesses at why the data looks how it does. You don't need to set up a straw man to knock it down. I was sharing a piece of historical information about one of the two specific fields you highlighted.
Feel free to read more about it or not as you like, but I'm not this interested.
I am sorry that I misunderstood what you were communicating. Would you clarify what you meant by this line in particular?
I took it to mean that you were saying that men weren't knowingly choosing to work as programmers, in opposition my own comment:
Did I misread your argument? I would like to understand, if you have the patience to explain.
I was saying it's silly to assume that the cause of the population shift was solely because men just happened to start applying for the same job women had been doing for years.
There were deliberate forces targeting hiring men and explicitly firing or devaluing women in the field. Men didn't just start applying to the administrative jobs en masse. The perception of the field changed to a skilled one (despite it always being such) and that perception led to a paradigm shift in who was a good candidate for those jobs. This progressed even to the marketing of personal computers as good toys for young boys explicitly which is another of the key historical moments. (Also throughout this, women were rarely elevated to leadership roles anyway, another pattern that continues in many fields.) Men were being recruited to work in a newly masculine field, not the existing feminine one.
We know why men entered and women left the field and it wasn't happenstance. It was intentional. I don't understand the need to try to "guess" at why this happened instead of reading the work that's already been done on it.
I took a history of Western society course back in the day, and one thing they covered in a couple of classes was that at various times there were a number of jobs that were (almost) exclusively the province of men, including nurses, teachers, clerks, secretaries, etc. But that women started entering those fields and, at some point, men mostly stopped entering those careers. When I read things like 'too many women / not enough men' in college, I can't help but wonder if something similar is occurring here.
[Coincidentally, after each field became perceived as a mostly "female" profession, wages dropped (either explicitly or by failing to keep up with inflation.]
My guess is that it's not coincidental that the wages fell when women entered the field; women make up 50% of the population, so even if only a small percentage of women started applying for a given role, that could drastically increase the labor pool and drive down wages — which in turn may have driven men (at least the breadwinners amongst them) away to higher-paying fields.
I would love to see some WWII data on this; when women filled men's roles because men left, and therefore presumably didn't increase the labor pool, did wages still fall? Of course, this one is tricky to work out because there was a massive worldwide effort to reduce consumption of goods/services and, at least in many parts of Europe, there was a lot of government intervention in assigning jobs and setting wages artificially to maximize the war effort.
This is my primary issue with the article. When reading it I felt like I could replace "women" with "many people" and it made as much, or even more, sense. Maybe summed up best by taking
and replacing it with
Now just reads like the obvious supply and demand outcome of increased accessibility. Degrees are quite accessible so of course they don't feel prestigious.
Random additional thought, though one I'm not attempting to argue in any way: what if the framing is completely backward? What if these men are accurately seeing the writing on the wall for saturated degrees, are correct in avoiding them, and the real issue is that women are being left holding the bag (of student debt for a depreciating degree)?
I think this would fit with the "men are more sensitive to ROI" hypothesis. I would not be the least bit surprised if boys on average receive better career advice than girls.
To give a personal anecdote, I (female) did very well in school across all subjects: I did just as well in math as I did in English, history, foreign language, etc. And yet, despite this, the teachers in my life largely tried to corral me toward either visual arts or creative writing. I did not have a single teacher suggest a STEM field to me.
I ultimately pursued a science degree because I thought it would offer better job prospects (lol), and while I was a university student, I caught up with some of my old high school teachers — who, upon learning of my major, tried to persuade me to become a science teacher. (I cannot tell you how laughable that idea is. I am the most introverted person I have ever met in my life. My quiet, keep-to-myself-ness was the singular most noted feature that my teachers and classmates always commented on.)
This did not happen to my guy friends who had a broad general aptitude like me. They were all strongly encouraged to study STEM degrees and to enter high-paying fields.
I made sure it did not happen to my little sister. When she told me that her favorite subject in school was math, I encouraged her to give programming a whirl, and now she makes way more money than anyone else in our family (and it's a good thing, too, because she ended up marrying a DREAMer who was legally barred from working for long periods of time and had hefty immigration-related legal expenses).
I think the fact that women were more or less forced out of the workforce after this temporary arrangement makes this hard to extrapolate from no matter what the wage data shows.
Regarding your third hypothesis, I have some anecdotal stories from my professors to refute it. However, this does come with the caveat that this is about graduate school sorting, not whether or not to earn a Bachelor's. They said that one of the reasons for the dearth of women in academia is the fact that they call their list of top-performing female students their list of future MDs and DVMs; their equal-performing male peers were evenly split between academia grad school and medical fields. Put flippantly, only a young man would be stupid enough to attempt the academic grind.
I feel like for this to make sense there needs to be something to fly to. With White Flight, white americans went somewhere, they went to gated off suburban neighborhoods.
But as the article describes, trades are not growing in the US. Coding bootcamps are way past their heyday - these days to get a SWE job you need a bachelors again. Are the boys just male flighting to being NEETs or something?
Also, in terms of "elites", as by income, male enrollment is still high. It's only on the broader scale that male enrollment fell off. This, I feel, makes it a very different situation than, say, vet school. Young men of wealthy backgrounds are not avoiding college.
The "devaluing" of college degrees is more that they are a necessary but not sufficient condition, now. Not that there's some alternative. You just need more than a bachelors. That doesn't really mesh with the idea that men are just moving somewhere else to get away from the cooties.
I don't really buy the opinion of the author for the reason that I've heard young women express the same vague hesitancy about going to college as young men: they "don't know what they want to do," it's "too expensive," it "isn't what it used to be," or some sentiment that it's unfair that higher education should be necessary to do X or Y (often when it very definitely requires math and science knowledge that high school is nowhere near being able to provide).
And yes, being a NEET seems to be a common choice. And those NEETs are online all the time, being downers and telling other people they should avoid college.
It also used to be that blue collar families wanted their children to go to college, to do better than them. Now we have a massive populist resentment that people who study and apply themselves are better off. Incoming students now have to deal with parents or extended family dragging them down, discouraging them along the way, telling them they should just get a job doing X or Y thing they do instead of taking out loans and being "elitist."
I had someone in my class, a few years ago, in my major (Computer Science) who dropped out after freshman year. He was studious and doing well, but his parents pressured him to quit and learn to take over the family business...a restaurant. It was sad and ridiculous.
We have a deep anti-intellectual problem in the US, as famously noted by Asimov and Sagan. Ultimately, a large swathe of people doesn't like that success is measured by intellectual pursuits that the culture they've been immersed in since birth has told them is cool and okay to blow off and resist. It's expected that they not like like school, and it's not "cool" to do so. Then they graduate (after coasting along instead of being held back...thanks, NCLB) and suddenly they have the realization that more school is the only path to success, and they already blew it off their whole life, and then shockedpikachu.jpg.
I also wouldn't be surprised if some of those families had different expectations of their children based on their gender. e.g. the boys have to get a job and move out and be self sufficient ASAP, but the girls can go to college where they might meet someone to marry. I saw a little of that growing up, even in not exactly conservative families: paying for the daughter to go to college (after scholarships), but the younger brother had to get a job.
This hits way too close to home. Parents pushed an expensive engineering school right out of high school. In order to pay off the debt I moved to a larger city that had well-paying jobs. Now there is clearly resentment that I am not going to move back to a dying town to work in the factory making a quarter of my current salary.
100%. I grew up in poverty and was told in no uncertain terms that I was expected to go to college but I would have to pay for it myself and I couldn't live at home anymore (not that I wanted to). I took out what amounted to about $100k in loans after interest accrual--and I've paid it off, and could only do so because I was able to get a good job and career with my degree in a large city on the other side of the country from my small dying hometown.
I make a very comfortable living, I am never moving back, and now I'm told I'm "living above my raising". What are you gonna do, right?
I’d argue it’s relatively easy to be a NEET today. Internet, video games, online porn, living in your childhood bedroom well into middle age, microwave meals, etc. cover most of the basics. Pair those with a shitty part-time retail job you hate (but that gives you $200 a week) and you are more or less “set”. Wait until your parents die, then you (hopefully) inherit the house.
While I think this essay brings up lots of interesting and good points, I think this one is a bit silly.
While college degrees have been economically devalued due to an overproduction of college graduates with too few brahmin positions to fully and meaningfully employ them all, degrees are still socially valued and necessary to be a brahmin.
A lack of college education is the first thing the college-educated remark about a college-uneducated person in their midst. Announce to your college-educated friends that you've started dating a tradesperson and watch those eyebrows rise. A person's education is one of the first things you see on their Tinder profile. A college education is one of the most important prestige signals in American society.
It goes both ways in my experience.
I'm not opposed to a lot of what's stated in this article, but the author seems to separate gender and politics here, whereas I think they are both part of a larger shift that has happened in the culture wars.
Anecdotally, I will say that my college educated friends tend to be liberals who look down on uneducated right wingers with some disgust, while the right wingers I know tend to do the same with college educated folks.
Both groups are distrustful of, and disgusted by, the other. With a larger portion of men leaning right politically, it doesn't surprise me that men are avoiding a place that they see as a money-sink built to indoctrinate liberals.
It's awful. I hate that, as a liberal arts graduate degree holding university employee, that I'll often agree with what are otherwise backward conservative provincial governments on the need to pull the academy back from the left.
The emergence of self righteousness and a lack of humility in my area over the previous 10 years has been hard to watch. If I held traditional views, I wouldn't study liberal arts today.
I think if you ask any K-12 teacher that's managed to stick around long enough you'll find that teaching social value has fallen.
The entire framing of this is the same logic you see in most conspiracy theories.
"Why is no one talking about the secret cabal that runs the world! This book only got 5 reviews and talks about it so whats up with that!".
It might not be as fundamentally flawed, but holy hell the reason no one is talking about it is because most people would never consider it. I have literally never even heard or seen this argument.
I haven't even heard this from the extreme right wingers, hell most of them probably don't even know the gender ratio to college or professions(and now that I type this I'd say the most extreme right wingers I've met are college educated and arguably pro college, i guess depending on what you define as the extreme right wing.)?
There's certainly some interesting data presented but I think the conclusion is far from supported and wildly speculative, and i'd say obviously supported by their personal beliefs more than any hard data. It bugs me they frame it as "why is no one talking about it" as if its some sort of conspiracy or us vs them, when a much more reasonable approach would be "here's something else to consider".
I have a hard time with the male flight example because it seems to ignore the transition from 50/50 gender balance. Sure, I can understand someone being intimidated by a classroom that is 90% the opposite gender; I'd personally be surprised if that was the primary source of this effect, but I can understand it to a degree. But a 50/50 to 60/40 split is something that I don't think I could notice, like what kind of person is so quick to parse the gender balance of a room with like 30 or more people? And then they change long-term plans because there was 6 more people of the opposite gender then their own? I guess its possible, but that Millions of men are doing this as their primary reason? That's a big statement that I don't see backed up with enough evidence. Personally, I don't think there is a single CAUSE for the gender imbalance, but most likely a loose collection of social and economic factors.
I find this article to be kind of irritating to read. The first thing that bugs me is that it doesn’t cover why it’s important that men aren’t going to college at the same levels as women do. Or at least it doesn’t until around the end of it. So I spent a bunch of time wondering why they think it’s such an issue before they cover it.
The second thing that bugs me is that Freakanomics didn’t cover the masculinity issue in their coverage, when it’s an economics podcast. Social issues are not exactly in their wheelhouse.
I do think that what they are talking about is important, it’s just the way it was written bugged me.
To be fair, you do see the same kind of articles just about any time men are >50% of a group, so I do think it's only fair to address it if our goal as a society is equality and/or equity. (The reasons of course are different historically, but I think the point stands)
Social issues are notoriously difficult to unpack, and I think this article tries to attribute a complex issue to a monolithic cause.
I agree that being in a culture with people like you makes it easier to succeed; this is why it’s so important to increase minority representation in general. As a result, I also agree that if men represent a minority of students in an institution, they will be at a disadvantage.
That is definitely not a valid monocausal explanation, though. If you want one cause, I have a better one: video game addicts are overwhelmingly male, online video games are a novel invention, and those addicts are less likely to succeed in school. We already know social media is disproportionately affecting the mental health of young teenage girls. It’s not that hard to conclude video games are disproportionately affecting the educational success of young men, in both high school and university.
I’m not saying video games are the bad guy. I’m illustrating that for social issues, monocausal explanations are fairly easy to develop and justify if you are using survey statistics and not doing rigorous scientific experiments. Something something correlation.
There’s likely some truth in what the article argues. It’s also unwise to dismiss other causes like the article seems to be doing.
I think this is a low quality article because it comes up with a theory with close-to-zero backing and then proclaims it as the "real reason". I don't see anything wrong with adding another theory to think about though; it could be true to some extent.
However, there's a lot of passionate defense of this weakly proposed theory with zero basis in scientific fact. Do you remember the shitty James Damore Google memo? Yeah, try reading the defense of this article with that as the subject instead. It's just a hypothesis, it's useful to think about it, I've seen it happen, it makes sense intuitively, etc. I can totally understand the frustration from men in this thread watching this article be defended because it is just as flimsy as the Damore one was.
Edit: and to clarify I'm okay with this article being posted here. I don't agree with it but it's fine to discuss these theories. Just remember that it's also fine if someone takes umbrage with it because it's implicitly accusing men of dooming their own careers due to sexism. That's a hurtful thing to say.
Maybe I'm being too charitable, but that isn't how I took it, exactly. Yes, assuming this hypothesis is true it would be helpful for men to be aware of how these biases could impact their decision making so they can consciously avoid sabatoging themselves this way, but wouldn't actually be the most effective way to address this issue.
One thing that's sort of bothered me in the article and thread is that these aren't men (for the most part) deciding whether or not to go to college. They 17, 18, 19. They're boys. They're still kids. They're still operating on the systems of understanding imparted to them by their parents, and if they ever challenge those systems, there's a good chance it will be in college. So demanding that boys just stop thinking that girls have cooties* is not actually going to accomplish anything. To effectively address this issue, the best course of action would be to socialize boys to be comfortable doing "girly" things just as we've socialized girls to do "boyish" things. And that would probably be good for a lot of other reasons, right?
So, while the article is much more certain than it has any right to be, the only reasonable solution to the problem that it poses is at worst fairly harmless.
Absolutely nothing wrong with encouraging boys to explore "girly" subjects in school! I didn't find it to be a problem when I was in school, but it's likely location dependent. The issue would be if we accept that the reason boys don't go to college is because of "cooties" and in the process overlook the real reasons they're not going, that would be harmful.
Definitely. It seems to me like an extremely multifaceted issue, and multiple causes should be addressed. This one has such a safe, low-cost solution I see little harm in including it among the solutions even without rigorous evidence, in the same way that I drink a glass of water any time I'm not feeling well, but I don't do that instead of taking medicine.
For those skeptical of the “women’s work being devalued” arguments, there’s a very interesting comment on the thread about this article in r/neoliberal. Reposted below:
That said, I do suspect that the causes are multifactorial than “men don’t want to be near women”, but I wouldn’t dismiss this whole theory out of hand.
But that example also shows why I don't think it generalizes to college. With that anecdote, what is happening is that as women enter a field, the pay gradually lowers, and men move on both because cooties and in search of brighter, high paying pastures.
That is a phenomena with elite, high income, white collar men. These are not the people who are not going to college anymore. It's overwhelmingly lower class, low income men.
There's also no alternative. There's no brighter pastures for these college-averse men. More white collar jobs than ever require a bachelors, if not more. The trades still suck for the same reasons, and the number of tradesmen has only been going down. I think it's fairly obvious the fates of factory work and mining in America. Part of all the political turmoil is that it's pretty dismal to not have a college degree in America in 2025.
In the white-flight example, it would be like if white people, instead of moving to fancy, expensive suburbs, decided to become homeless instead. Or live in a ghetto or something.
If it were true, you would expect to see many jobs, particularly masculine jobs, start to not require a degree, or require some alternative certification process. But that isn't the case - you only have to look at BLS numbers to see that it's the reverse.
The prestige factor comes into play before pay does, and then it becomes a feedback loop of pay and prestige declining. This anecdote is about a grad lab where pay doesn’t matter in the same way a career does.
Additionally, it’s all about the perception of brighter, higher paying jobs… (cont. below)
For lower class men, it’s all about perception. The main alternatives (in order of viability) to college are trades (“My uncle says you can make $150,000 six months after starting!”), crypto/WSB-type gambling (“Bro my returns are 10,000%!”) and a hustle/grind mindset (“Man maybe I need to take Tate’s classes.”). It’s about perceived advantages over college (which has a real disadvantage of costing a lot of money before you can substantially make money), with a lack of clarity over their disadvantages (backbreaking, luck, and scam, respectively).
I’d argue the most traditionally masculine jobs still don’t require degrees. In any case, most of these men seem averse to working white collar jobs, they either want to work trades and “be a real man” or be magically (likely through cryptocurrency or lucky stock trades) rolling in dough and not actually have to do work.
Maybe, to carry on the metaphor, they think they're going to move to fancy, expensive suburbs and end up in the ghettos because there isn't as much housing in the suburbs as it appeared externally. Maybe they think they're going to become tradesmen, but the jobs in the field aren't as available as they expect and they end up driving for Uber/DoorDash/Lyft even though it wasn't their plan. Men do make up a larger share of the gig economy and are more likely to rely on it as primary income. PDF warning.
Exactly this. Many think they will move to a big mansion in Coral Gables or the Hollywood Hills, but they instead end up in crummy apartment in Miami Gardens or Willowbrook.
Is this true? It was certainly not the case when I went to college about 15 years ago. Premed students were consistently under the most pressure at my school.
From my experience physics and chem were the hardest of the three.
The only reason pre-med had more pressure was because they pretty much needed straight As to even be considered for med school, whereas everyone else just needed decent grades to get a job straight out of undergrad, then possibly do a masters/PhD after a few years of work and saving (or even get their employer to pay for it).
I remember the pre-med career students bitching about how foolish it was for them to have chosen to study ChemE, when they could have done something easier like bio, because the As would have come easier.
And yeah, OChem was a nightmare for everyone lmao, so glad I never had to take it.
My classmates split between those who preferred grinding memorization (found physics intolerably cerebral) and those who coasted on being the fastest mind in the room to avoid grunt work (avoided bio at all costs).
Did you have any sadistic professors who especially loved to take away med school dreams of students? They have resentment against strivers who must earn As at all costs.
For me, it was OChem, part 2 that was awful. Part 1 I could coast on a quick conceptual understanding on how to push electrons around; Part 2 had too much content for one semester and required memorization.
I loved Orgo, but hated microbio, and thus my pre-med path ended. I'll never agree that bio is easier. Physics and Organic chem were a delight in comparison.
My ultimate psych degree was about wanting to work with people more than it was about not wanting to stay in the other sciences.
Haha, yeah that's about right. I much prefer thinking over rote-memorization. Most of my friends were good at math, so bio seemed like an absurd amount of memorization to all of us. Chemistry was way more respected, but it was still funny how there was a bit of a barrier between the more physics based degrees vs chemistry.
So it was a small engineering focused school, no real weedout classes...but a lot of "Why did you pick ChemE of all things if you want to be a doctor?". I guess ChemE is kinda overkill if your path is med school.
I don't think it's true in any objective sense, and it wasn't my perception when I was in undergrad about 6-10 years ago, but I've definitely encountered spaces where this is the perception. Only really in spaces where there's a culture of pervasive misogyny though, like internet comments and physics departments.
I don't think that's fair. I think it's a pretty common view, since a lot of people probably feel Biology had a lot more rote memorization and less things you had to "get" compared to physics or math. Depends on your definition of easy, of course. Personally I enjoyed the types of challenges in other subjects more.
I enjoyed the types of challenges in other subjects more as well, but that doesn't entail that those subjects were more difficult or more worth one's time. The idea that it having a lot you need to memorize makes it easier is quite silly to me -- memorization like that is far more difficult for me than learning things that you need to "get". Whether it'll actually be more difficult is highly dependent on the individual learner, and the idea that it's easier as a whole is pretty much only bandied about by people who believe that the fields they pursued are inherently superior.
Math is pretty universally regarded as the most difficult subject, so I don't think the notion is completely groundless. While I agree somewhat with your arguments, ending all your posts with basically "only assholes think like that" is pretty passive-aggressive.
EDIT: With difficult I mean with what students seem to have the most trouble with.
I think you're making a lot of assumptions about the universality of your own opinions. I personally definitely don't think math is the most difficult STEM subject -- that doesn't fit my own subjective experience at all, and I don't think the belief that it's the most difficult STEM subject was remotely universal among my peers when I was in either undergrad or grad school. The people I've known who study/studied pure math at a university level have never given me this impression either -- if anything, they've seemed more detached from this "my subject is the most difficult and therefore the best" squabbling than those in other STEM fields (though it's admittedly possible I just got luckier with my math friends).
I simply don't think entire disciplines can really be fruitfully compared with regards to difficulty in any sort of objective fashion. There's simply too much subjectivity and variation based on personal experience and any number of other factors that aren't inherent to a discipline. Even if it were possible to set up a rigorous universal definition of difficulty that can apply across disciplines, that's certainly not what's happening here -- your assessments are entirely vibes-based. At best you search for features of a given discipline to justify your preexisting feelings about their difficulty.
I've never encountered someone attempting to seriously argue that a certain field was inherently more difficult who wasn't trying to assert their superiority over others for having studied it. It's, at the very least, an indicator that they're not the sort of person I want to interact with if I don't have to. In fact, I've deliberately not mentioned what I studied in university in this thread, because this type of person more or less without fail dismisses my opinions and treats me as an intellectual inferior.
It wasn't the case where I attended, either. Biology majors had to study organic chemistry, biochemistry, physics, and genetics, amongst other things.
I was in a somewhat related field (ecology), which had most of the same requirements (except we had to study calculus and statistics rather than genetics). The classes we had in common with biology majors were deliberately made harder than they needed to be because they were used for weeding out pre-med majors. They were actually even harder than that because pre-med majors (as well as pre-law majors) had a reputation for vandalizing library books/resources related to their fields to give themselves a competitive edge.
My only data point on this is someone I know who’s a doctor and the answer to that is “fuck no”.
Organic chemistry and other higher level fields of biology are pretty brutal.
The only really argument I’ve seen about this is the mostly tongue and cheek “my science is more fundamental than your science” stuff where biology is near the end because it’s just “really complicated chemistry”
In fact xkcd did this joke:
https://xkcd.com/435/
I would say so. But the pre-med part is part of it. Med school doesn't require a particular bachelors degree, just that you have one and take the pre-req subjects. Biology was known as the path to med school because it was considered the easiest of the majors which naturally take med school pre-reqs. GPA is important for med school.
Biology classes would acknowledge the importance of GPA to a lot of their students - who are med school bound - and inflate the grades of those classes.
The "hardcore" med students were the ones that took chem, or hard majors that didn't even cover the pre-reqs like math or CS.
Note, this is about perception, I'm not saying that's the truth.
I went looking for more data. What’s behind the growing gap between men and women in college completion?
This does not rule out the cooties theory, but here's two highlights I found interesting.
So the hypothesis is that an increasing number of American men are turning away from further education because they somehow feel too intimidated to go into a classroom filled with women. That explanation doesn't quite add up...
Not intimidated, unless you think most men choose not to wear skirts or make- up because they're too intimidated to do those things as well.
Girls are icky and have cooties.