Affirmative Action for Males

Great Debates
1

You may have seen this story this Sunday on 60 Minutes:

From http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2002/10/31/60minutes/main527678.shtml

As someone who has expressed her ambivalence about AA on this board, I have to say that I somewhat agree with this strategy. I am a woman but I don’t want to live in a society where women dominate all professional fields to the exclusion of men. But I am also bothered by the idea that boys can skate along in school and still “make it big”.

We can make the argument that minorities like blacks and Latinos need a “helping hand” because they are overrepresented in poor areas and they have been historically stigmatized and oppressed. We may also feel that their underrepresentation in the top eschelions in society needs to be addressed somehow, even if wwe don’t agree 100% with AA. We may also have problems with middle class minorities receiving preferential treatment, but they only make up a small percentage of the total population so their aggregate effect is almost negligible.

But men make up 50 percent of the population. They have never–as far as I know–been systematically discriminated against. They go to the same schools as over-achieving girls. They are raised by the same parents as valedictorian sisters. They have never been stigmitized as a group (boys are wimps, boys aren’t good in math, etc.). The power positions in the country are still dominated by their fathers and uncles and male cousins. And–most importantly–men are still making more money than women.

Is AA needed for boys in higher education? If so, is this an easier thing to swallow than AA for minorities? If it is, why? If this trend continues, do you think males will be stigmitized as AA incompetents who are taking jobs from the “deserving”? Should they be?

2

NO!!! Affirmative Action isn’t the answer and it doesn’t solve the problem. If there’s some reason why boys are performing worse than women, then we need to figure out why and fix the problem. Same with minorities or any other underachieving group. Affirmative action is just a silly mask for the problem and is a superficial fix.

3

This is a very heated debate in the UK. Quite apart from overall exam inflation, girls have been doing better and better in GCSE and A Levels. It seems to me that the examination system used to be tailored to males, being largely based on exams etc, whereas now there is far more project work, which seems to favour females. Maybe the pendulum has swung too far and needs to swing back - or swing in a different axis. I do believe that we will find a happy medium.

There is also, alas, blatant sexism. Whereas a good male candidate can be rejected without a murmur, rejecting a good female candidate (q.v. Laura Spence) is more problematic. Or, St Hilda’s is allowed to remain female-only, but male colleges are excoriated for not allowing women. But it is not PC to speak of this.

4

I don’t support AA for anyone.

College isn’t everything. I’m not sure about te 60% statistic, but you have to look at how many colleges there are out there, including what are essentially glorified “13th grade”. I’d like to see the stats for, say, the top 100 schools. Also, I think men are more likely to go into fairly high paying trades than women, and women still dominate many of the low paying white collar occupations, some of which even typically require post secondary education (eg, admin assistant or what used to be called secretaries). Not that this has any bearing on whether or not AA is needed for men, I just want to point out that the stats may not tell the whole story by a long shot. (Big surprise.)

Nice to see you back, Monstro. Seems like you’ve been largely absent of late.

5

I’ve been 'round. I’ve just been busy. Thanks though.

Re college type: I agree with you up to a point. I went to a college that had a 3:1 male-female ratio. Males certaintly weren’t the poor oppressed victim there. It was an engineering/research-heavy institution, which possibly explains a whole lot. However, I’m doing my grad studies at a place that’s probably more typical. I’m teaching a class this semester that’s 70% female. Out of the seven Ph.D grad students in my laboratory, there’s only one male.

There are only a handful of women professors in my department, though. No one can convince me that men aren’t getting a fair shake when a disparity like this still exists.

One reason I posted this thread is because I’d like to let the most vehement opposers of AA–who are often of the male persuasion–know that as they rally against AA incompetents and job-stealers, they and their sons may be benefitting from “quotas” without realizing it. But somehow, I don’t think they will be feeling very guilty.

Neurotik, I agree that we should address the disparities in performance. But the guy interviewed in the article thinks hiring more males for educational gigs is the best way to go. If women are outperforming their male counterparts in college, doesn’t this make them more qualified for teaching jobs? Should we lower our standards just so that we can have more men teachers? Hiring one teacher over another just because the former has a penis is wrong, according to people who believe our decisions should be based strictly on merit.

It seems like if the situation is as skewed as Thompson says it is, some amount of differential treatment is necessary.

6

I’m probably one of those “vehement opposers” and I’m definitely of the male persuassion, but I wouldn’t support male affirmative action. I don’t buy into the group politics idea, but even if I took that as a basis, it’d be hard to argue that males somehow are “disadvantaged” and still keep a straight face. As you said, they’re raised in the same social setting as their valdictorian sisters. And somehow I don’t think we’ll see a majority of female CEOs in the Fortune 500 companies any time soon.:slight_smile:

I would like to clarify, though, since I kind of just flat out dismissed AA in my first post:

AA started as “outreach” but is now generally seen as “giving a certain group some preference”. I’m talking about the latter definition. And when it comes to private institutions, I say AA away all you want. It’s your perogative. When it comes to gov’t institutions, that’s where I don’t like to see preferences. For the sake of simplicity, I’d just put state and private schools in two seperate categories. I know it’s a rare private school that doesn’t get some gov’t money, but it that’s a problem, then turn off the gov’t spigot. (I’m no fan of state sponsored education, but if we have to have it, how about just keeping it to the state schools and leave the private ones alone. But that’s a topic for a seperate thread.)

7

How do we fix the problem of underachieving boys then? And if they are able to get good jobs anyway, should we see it as a problem?

8

In order:
[ul]
[li]No, of course not.[/li][li]No, of course not.[/li]li[/li][li]Probably not. For whatever reason, people don’t seem to stigmatize women who benefit from AA to nearly the extent that they stigmatize racial minorities. I don’t begin to understand why this is, but I suspect it will probably apply to men who benefit from AA as well.[/li][li]No, of course not. Nor should women, blacks, hispanics, and whatnot. Individuals who are incompetent but who, because of AA, take jobs from those more qualified, are IMO quite rightly stigmatized, whether men or women, black or white.[/li][/ul]

Can I ask how old the professors tend to be? You’re in some sort of technical field, right? Might part of the reason that you have a majority of male professors be because the people who have longer standing in your field are, for the most part, men? I’m just speculating, but I know that one of the reasons that the faculty in my department are something like 90% male is that the faculty is also relatively old, and you didn’t see many women in this field 30 years ago. Of course, you still don’t see many women in my field, but that’s a separate debate.

My point is not that men aren’t getting a fair shake; I’d say that they bloody well ARE getting a fair shake. But I don’t think that an observation about faculty really applies to the world of students, unless those faculty tend to be younger and recently students themselves.

Not necessarily, in that a teacher needs not only an understanding of what he or she is teaching, but also the ability to effectively communicate and the ability to maintain discipline. Academic merit is only one aspect in judging merit as a teacher.

That said, it would tend to suggest that women are indeed rather more qualified for teaching jobs, in the aggregate.

Absolutely not! The last thing we need to do is lower educational standards; regardless of whether you think we’re doing an adequate job now or not, I can think of no reasons, ever, to accept lowering standards for teachers when more qualified teachers exist.

Yes, quite so. Having a penis is not a job qualification, unless your job involves using it. In which case, I’ll probably want to know all about that job, by the way.
The only thing this really tells me is that if women comprise such a significant majority in higher education, AA for women in higher education hasn’t a leg to stand on.

9

What about afirmative action to get more women into fields like engineering where they are under represented?

Or afirmative action to get more men into fields like nursing where they are under represented?

10

Shoot, you added an extra thought during preview.

Personally, I don’t think college grades are worth a damn. If you’re able to get a good job, then college has served the purpose most people attribute to it. So if young men get good jobs despite lousy grades, I can’t say that I see that they have any problems. Those who want good grades and are willing to put the work in to actually learn something are those who will have actually understood the purpose of college, but most people seem to see college as something you do to get a job, and if it’s serving that end adequately, then it’s doing what most people want it to do.

As to adressing the issue of underachieving boys, I’m not sure what to say. This is largely because I have no idea what causes the phenomenon to begin with.

I don’t really have a typical perspective on this, because I went to a small, mostly male, science college, so the atmosphere was rather different than in your typical state university. But I wonder how much of that underachievement has to do with general college lifestyle. Do men put in less work because they spend more time partying or something? Do they just care less? If it’s something along those lines, then I don’t know what to do. Let them underperform; when it gets to the point when their underperformace hurts their careers, maybe things will change. And if things don’t, well, it’s their own damn faults for pissing away their opportunities, and I can’t say I really feel sorry for them.

11

Hiring one teacher over another just because the former has a penis IS wrong.

However, even if women are outperforming their male counterparts in college that doesn’t necessarily make them more qualified for teaching jobs. I was a stellar college student and I could never be a teacher. I don’t have the patience or the communications skills to deal with teens on a regular basis.

If a male with slightly lower grades in college is better able to reach out to his male students and get them to learn than a female with higher grades, doesn’t that make the male teacher better qualified to teach than the woman?

12

Autz- what you’re talking about has a lot to do with gender roles as well. Those are, in my opinion, fading, but slowly (of course). Some jobs - usually ones dealing with care and children - are still dominated by women, and others (usually physical ones) are dominated by men.

That, by the way, might account for a certain amount of the male-female gap here: you don’t need to go to college to do some jobs, and I think they’re jobs that are more likely to be held by men. Construction work is an example, if an annoyingly obvious one.

g8rguy, there’s a difference between academic performance and its translation into the working world. There’s still plenty of making up to do there. How many Fortune 500 companies are lead by women? I think the number is 4. Women make up a tiny fraction of federal officials (13%), for example. There’s work to be done, even if higher education may not need it.

13

Regarding women in engineering and men in nursing and the like…

I have no problem at all with encouraging women to go into engineering and men to go into nursing. Fine, lovely, knock yourself out doing so.

But why, really, do we care that men are underrepresnted in nursing but overrepresented in engineering? So what? If there are no barriers to men going into nursing and women going into engineering, the mere fact that the gender ratios in those two fields are rather out of whack doesn’t trouble me a bit.

If there ARE barriers for one or the other, the barriers need to be eliminated, of course.

And Marley, I understand that men occupy most of the positions of power. That suggests to me that if you want this ratio to equalize, you use affirmative action in the job market. Because, as you say, getting good grades doesn’t translate to getting a good job.

My point is not that all is ducky with the world, my point is that if all is ducky with the world of higher education, then there’s no need for AA in the world of higher education. This says nothing at all about AA elsewhere.

14

A significant point is being overlooked here: to a very large extent, the “shortage” of males in colleges is really a shortage of black and Hispanic males. That is, black and Hispanic girls tend to do a lot better inschool than boys do, and are FAR more likely to make it to college and into a high-paying profession than boys are.

I’m willing to bet that, if you take race into account, the disparities between the genders shrink substantially.

As for why this should be the case, and how we can fix it… I confess, I have no good answers. But there’s no way around it.

15

Um, but doesn’t this mean that all that talk about merit and qualifications and hard work is a bunch of bs? I know that if a black person with a GPA of 2.5 got chosen over a white guy with a 4.0, people would be crying foul up and down the street. We can’t have one group–males–being rated by a bunch of arbritrary and subjective criteria while females scramble to be judged based solely on merit, right?

I definitely see a problem here. Despite the fact that women work twice as hard as men, they still aren’t getting the props (the $$) that men do. No, it’s not a problem for men. It’s a problem for hard-working women.

The article says that the underachieving in boys starts all the way in grammar school. The pundit in the article blames the emphasis on atheletics, rather than academics, for boys.

See, I have a hard time believing this is going to happen. If suddenly 70% of the doctors, lawyers, politicians, school teachers, Ph.Ds, engineers, and managers that are churned out each year became female, I don’t see people blaming boys for their underperformance and simply letting the chips fall there they may. I see outreach programs. I see male teachers being hired in droves (moreso than they already are…and don’t tell me that AA-for-men is not at work in the educational system because I know that it does). I see there being scholarships set up for boys. I see boys being admitted into female-dominated programs despite below-average grades. I see people being more fired up than they ever were about female inequality.

And here’s the kicker: boys have been underperforming for years in school, and yet this hasn’t stopped them from getting good jobs. It seems to me that AA-for-men has been at work for some time now; we’ve just been so distracted by the underperforming minorities to notice it.

16

I was also wondering if this was part of what was behind the stats. Got any data? I don’t.

IIRC, Blacks and Hispanics together make up about 25% of the populaton. Enough to sway the statistics if there is a significant gender split in college attendance.

17

Did you read the article, astorian? According to it, this isn’t an inner-city, “minority” issue. It’s affecting white people just like everyone else.

I know we like to make every thread in this board about the Failure of Minorities, but this article makes the case that this isn’t a race thing.

18

Isn’t this the same as hiring a teacher because he has a penis?

I mean, why can’t women teachers reach male students? How does having a penis make reaching male students any easier?

What you are advocating IS AA, Neurotik. It’s no different than hiring a black doctor because he’s able to handle black patients better, or hiring a woman professor because she’s able to mentor female graduate students better. Grades are criteria based on merit. When we move away from grades and start looking at subjective qualities like “who can they reach?”, we aren’t looking at merit anymore.

19

Did YOU read the article, monstro? It SAYS the problem is not simply in the inner city, but it offers no doumentation or stats.

To be sure, I’m operating on instinct here, and my instincts are based, in large measure, by what I see here in a major college town. I don’t see a shortage of “males.” What I see is a near -absence of black and Hispanic males (except on the major varsity athletic squads).

20

No, I’m not. Please read what I write instead of having a self-righteous hissy fit.

I specifically said that IF a male teacher is better able to reach out to male students better than a female teacher, then the male teacher is more qualified. Remember that teachers go through a student teaching period of usually about a year before they get their credentials (at least in CA). Since the object of teaching is to reach out to students and get them to be better students and to learn stuff, it makes sense to use the one that can do better.

Grades are indeed merit. But there’s no reason why you can’t try to convince some of the men with high grades to go into education rather than some other profession. Thus keeping teaching standards high.

However, I’m not really convinced that more male teachers are the order of the day. Women have dominated the teaching profession in the past, but it’s only recently that women have started dominating as students, too.

But if it is shown that male teachers indeed are better at helping male students, then school districts should do more to recruit qualified males for the job.