There have been a couple of threads lately that have touched on the change over the last couple of decades in higher education (more men than women are pursuing college, graduate, and professional degrees), employment (I think more women are now in management than men), and the like. Women seem to be advancing while men seem to be falling behind. I keep hearing that this is happening, but I can’t remember hearing why.
So what is causing it? Is it reversible? Will it go in waves or continue to shift?
Is it a bad thing, a good thing, or mixed?
Or is it an illusion?
Is it a result of civil rights? Birth control? Something else entirely?
Not too sure if The Atlantic made its case in the recent article, as it was largely anecdotal with cherry-picked statistics, but even assuming that the basic facts are true, that women are gaining a larger share of educational, financial, and social success vis-a-vis their historical averages, isn’t this:
What the point of the ERA and women’s liberation movements were about, and
To be expected given their slight statistical prominence (~51% of Americans are female)
I think it’s too early to say that men are falling behind. Dynamics are changing, for sure, but I don’t think we have worked out entirely how the chips are falling.
That said, in my experience, the women are just working a lot harder. I will preface this by saying I am in a female-dominated industry, and that does make a difference. But it is a classically “high-powered” profession (international development).
The top people in my peer group are incredibly dynamic people. Despite being still grad students, they are running businesses, globe hopping, organizing, spending their free time at lectures and conferences, going to informational interviews, wearing suits to class, making calls to Somalia during breaks, and generally just kicking ass. And these are pretty much all women. My program has one success-oriented guy, and his focus is on academia, which is notably less high-powered than the career tracks. The rest of the guys are doing the work, but not too much more. They are basically just phoning it in. For the most part, they are 9-5ers, not putting anywhere near the passion and focus that the women are investing.
Why could this be? No doubt the dynamics of the industry are a big part of it, but there seems to be a bit more. I think we were raised to believe that if we wanted to make it, we had to work three times as hard. We were raised to believe that we had to fight our way out of a disadvantaged spot, and so we came out fighting. It’s the same concept as the high achievers in some immigrant groups. The biological clock may also be a factor- if we want to have children, we have a pretty darn tight deadline for getting our career in line. We don’t have years to fuck around with. We need to get our career on a damn good path in our late 20s or early 30s or we are screwed. If we want a family, we need to have a life plan, in a way that guys don’t necessarily need to.
I tried to read the article mentioned by JohnT before replying but it was filled to the brim with journalist soft thinking and I couldn’t get all the details. The pop-psych discussion of evo psych pretty much killed it for me. Anyway, from what I saw there was only one clear place where women seemed to be over-represented in a field: accountants. Everywhere else, with every other ambiguous stat, men were either over-represented or likely statistically even.
The article only paid lip-service to the sheer dominance of men in science and engineering. I teach in a psych department and take classes in engineering and the gender gap is gigantic. If women are getting more BAs via psych degrees then they are screwed because those degrees are pretty much worthless fluff. Most kinds of technical and engineering degrees are still valuable at the bachelor’s level. Psych/bio sorts of degrees basically require a MA or MS or better to provide hope of job stability and decent salary. Yet biology is probably the only science that is well-represented with women.
I sincerely question whether their is a trend at all other than a trend toward equality. So to answer your questions:
What is causing it? Answer = journalists’ half-baked imaginations and poor analysis of data.
Is it reversible? Answer = obtaining equality is reversible but hopefully it will not happen.
Waves or shift? Answer = you know that all these BA stats ignore several kinds of valuable tech degrees such as mechanic, IT, driver, and the like right? Or what about the military? If true equality is ever obtained then the percentages will follow some dynamic equilibrium. This means shifts to the left and right of purely equal representation. Journalists and pundits will take advantage of these seeming disparities to make articles and spout bs.
The pattern we are seeing of greater equality is a good thing. The fact that it is being obtained through worthless degrees is troublesome.
It is not an illusion, but the interpretation that men are on some kind of decline while women advance is an illusory interpretation of the data.
It is a result of the changing view of sex roles in general in society but it is more important for women.
I think it’s worth noting that a man without a college education has a lot more opportunities than a woman without a college education. The trades, in particular, present a wide array of decent solid jobs–mechanics, construction, plumbing, electrical work, HVAC, etc. These are jobs where someone can reasonably support themselves, and where frankly an undergraduate degree is a waste of both money and time. Women without college degrees are much more limited: it’s pretty much food service, retail, and low end administrative jobs.
I mean, if you have a married couple where she went to the local state school and got a degree in business management and now works as the office manager for a small business, and he is a mechanic, and they make about the same amount of money, you wouldn’t say that he has “fallen behind” her.
I think that’s at least in part yet another derivation of the “zero sum” fallacy, of the idea that in order for someone to get better/more/win, someone else has to get worse/less/lose. It doesn’t work that way for the flu and it doesn’t work that way for economics.
I’m not sure I agree with you. There’s generally a finite number of jobs in any given field, and for more of one gender than another to occupy those jobs, it means someone has to miss out.
First of all, I don’t think it’s so much that men are falling behind; you won’t find many industries / occupations where male standards are slipping. It’s more that women are improving faster in some sectors than men are.
And I think it’s inevitable that there will be roles that are currently dominated by men purely for historical reasons, but which actually better suit women on average.
For the academic side, I think many courses have moved from being quite exam-focused to being coursework-based. IME men prefer the former and women prefer the latter.
Finally, there is some reporting bias. You won’t hear messages of “Stats show men are better <some profession>” anytime soon, because it smacks of the kind of sexism that used to be prevalent.
But you’ll often hear messages implying the opposite.
That’s generally how people tend to see things, especially in the current climate, but it is misguided.
While the number of jobs is finite, it is not fixed. When women entered the workforce it just meant that we as a society did more, and had more wealth, than previously.
It wasn’t the case that the number of jobs remained the same and therefore 50+ percent of men and women were necessary unemployed.
Isn’t the ‘feminization’ of early years education - where men are very thin on the ground - a major factor? It does begin at this point, right?
I just keep seeing young boys being told off for having the energy of young boys - like it’s a bad thing - and it worries me. And then, in mid-teen groups, I observe the ratio of boys/girls studying in libraries and its maybe 20/80%
As an average across The Workforce As A Whole, that’s probably true. But in invidual industries/professions, I don’t think it is.
Look at it this way: For example, If a widget factory is looking to hire a new widgetologist, and they’ve got a male candidate and a female candidate who are otherwise identically qualified and experienced, guess which one is going to look better on the diversity statement?
But the amount of jobs in any given field isn’t fixed, and many of the people who want jobs, say, “linked to what they studied”, don’t want something like “a job for a Chemical Engineer specialized in Organic Chemistry and with a Master’s in Theoretical Chemistry”: they want “jobs in Chemistry or Engineering”.
ETA: And if the widget factory already has a lot of female employees, the male is going to improve diversity more. (Yes, there are factories which are female-dominated)
I don’t know, but I wish women would hurry up and make headway into my industry (utilities) and field (commodities trading / hedging) - it’s a total sausage party.
don’t bother with percentages in the global terms. in your neighborhood, how many talented men do you know who are not realizing their full potential because of perennial worries like a wife and kids to support, mortgages, and dull un-rewarding careers accepted not by choice?
You’d think so, but the past 18 months of job hunting have told me that it doesn’t always seem to apply if you’re a man applying for jobs in industries with a lot of women working in them.
Whereas I work in a female-dominated Department in the government and I wish to god there were more young attractive men there (being a gay man here sucks).