"scarce" resources, college and sexism

[rm]

And then there's this:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/23/opinion/23britz.html

It's the sort of thing that makes it hard for me to imagine any world in which women, at least as a group, don't always lose.

via rackmount

Comments

[askeladden.livejournal.com]

I think there is value in artificially gender balancing colleges, to a point. Obviously if the underlying causes that make college so unattractive to men and so attractive to women keep escalating, no amount of admissions fiddling will be able to solve the problem, but I don't see the harm in correcting for a 10% or 15% bias if the underlying causes are mostly things like maturity at adolescence, perceived cultural appropriateness of learning, and things like that. I can expand on this further, but I want to bring up court reporting as an example of what can happen when there are no checks on admission in a situation that becomes gender biased. In the '50s and '60s, court reporting was an extremely lucrative, respected, male-dominated profession. Over the last 40 years it has tipped over into a 90% female dominated profession, and as the percentage of women increased, salaries, prestige, overall applications to court reporting schools -- not just male ones, though they were affected even more dramatically -- and the level of academic preparedness of court reporting school applicants have all dropped dramatically, to the point where the profession is half as lucrative as it was, schools are closing, 85% of students who enroll in programs drop out before graduating, there's a nationwide shortage of qualified reporters, and the entire profession is on the verge of imploding. This is not all due to the self-accelerating gender imbalance of the last 40 years, but I argue that it might well have been slowed or countered somewhat if schools had made a special effort to reach out to male applicants.

[rm.livejournal.com]

I hear you, but I'm having a hard time with believing gender balance is what's associated with prestige.

It's men.

Men are associated with prestige.

And women are associated with the lack there of.

Is this an eternal condition? Are men the only way to grant anything prestige?

How do we change it?

I also prefer operating in relatively gender-balanced environments (one of the reasons I love Doctor Who/Torchwood fandom), but that's because of my own identity issues (I think/hope) not because boys accord worth.

[askeladden.livejournal.com]

Gender imbalance exacerbates cultural bias, in both directions. It's worthwhile encouraging women to break into the boys' clubs of construction and finance (to give two examples), just as it's worthwhile to make sure that the percentage of female doctors doesn't continue its current trend unchecked, from over 50% to over 60% and beyond, relegating medicine to "women's work", as it always has been in many cultures, and making it all the more difficult for men to work in caregiving professions without cultural stigma. The more women go to college and the fewer men do, the less relevance college education will have in our society. Even if we eliminated male favoritism, that would be the case. But it's all the more important, given the history of male favoritism in our culture, that any group that wields power and prestige in our society -- and if the Learned are not one of those groups, we're doomed -- be a group untinged by gender imbalance in either direction. It's just too dangerous and too tempting to the essentialists to do otherwise.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

The interesting case for me isn't medicine (which from what I've read is still fairly gender balanced, with the imbalances showing up in specialties - most surgeons are men, and almost all oby/gyn specialists are women), but in law, where the percentage of women going to law school passed 50% a decade or so ago and continues to increase. Given that this is one of the high status professions, as well as one of the major stepping stones to political office, it will be fascinating to see what happens. I'm hoping the result will be more women in US politics.

[mecurtin.livejournal.com]

The more women go to college and the fewer men do, the less relevance college education will have in our society. Even if we eliminated male favoritism, that would be the case.

I disagree, unless by "male favoritism" you mean something different than I think (possible).

What I see (speaking as the mother of two girls, one in college and one in middle school) is boys actively avoiding situations where they might compete with girls and lose. Academic fields in general (with a few exceptions, mostly engineering and the "hardest" sciences) have become areas where girls can excel if they work hard, so boys refuse to work.

The problem is masculinity; so why is the "solution" to make things harder for women?

[rackmount.livejournal.com]

"The more women go to college and the fewer men do, the less relevance college education will have in our society."

You're right, but that's not a bad thing. The fact is that going to college has not been the same thing as going to COLLEGE since the G.I. Bill. The number of colleges and universities has multiplied since that time. Do you think that's because everyone's gotten smarter or more collegey? Do you think it's because every college-grad improves his or her chances equally? No. The working and middle classes have been sold "college" as a way to climb the status ladder, only to find out that going to Bowling Green State University is NOT the same thing as going to Smith or Oberlin or Brown. The only thing that's similar is the amount of debt it requires. I really don't think it would be the worst thing if our current college-heavy post-high-school thing switched to being a patchwork of what used to be called "normal" schools, teaching schools, seminaries and business preparation courses.

Anyway, companies need some way to separate resumes out, and at the beginning of the career-path, that ends up being college. Give me an example of what else businesses can use when they are offering entry-level jobs that will cut down on "worthy" applications, and I might believe you're right about this. as it is, college will remain, no matter what the gender imbalances.

And I'm going to ditto the Uppity lady below: "The problem is masculinity; so why is the "solution" to make things harder for women?"