"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

[redwitch.livejournal.com]

I'd love to see what happened with college admission if gender was not an issue and all applications had numbers rather than names and no slots for gender, or gasp, and yes, I'm going to say it, race.

[rm.livejournal.com]

It's impossible. People experience themselves and the world with gender and race. It would be evident in the essays, and assumed via everything from activities to zip codes.

[redwitch.livejournal.com]

true enough. Seems like it would flatten the field a little though.

On a side note, wonder if 'gender fluid' or any of the other new pronouns will ever show up.

[rm.livejournal.com]

You know, it's funny, I'm so conservative about the oddest things. Well, it's probably not surprising considering my education and upbringing, but I cannot get it together with the gender neutral pronouns. I'm like just "really? that sounds awful."

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

Might be interesting, yes, but I suspect admissions-types would still manage to make guesses about same based upon the writing style of the admissions letters.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Not only make guesses. I believe people would seek out the information intentionally and to nefarious purpose. The zip code thing in particular.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

The present set of gender-neutral pronouns in English are rather clunky, but I consider it a defect in the language.

[brewsternorth.livejournal.com]

*nods sadly*

And one thing that got me from the admissions person's op-ed. It concentrates on why more women are having to be turned down. Maybe the question should also be, are fewer men applying in the first place, and if so why?

[offbalance.livejournal.com]

Yes, this. I wondered about that too. Where are the men? What are they doing?

[rm.livejournal.com]

Also:

- do we really think it's acceptable that men are being held to lower standards? Men who will go on as a group to make more money and have better careers than the women?
- why do people not want to be educated in environments that may have more women than men?
- first women had to be twice as good as men to prove they were worthy at all. now they have to be twice as good as men to compete for resources that need not be scarce, but we've decided to make scarce because too many women is inherently a negative?

It's just. I mean.... *rage*

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

If the admission-types are the Privileged, Privilege will be reinforced. A world without Privilege is hard to imagine, because it would be completely different from what we know.
Imagine trying to understand back in the eighteenth century, a world in which 95 percent of the population was not engaged in agriculture.
Imagine trying to understand back in the the thirteenth century, a world in which every man and women was a clark.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Everyone I know who works in admissions is female. The possibility that women are once again enforcing the idea of competition for imaginarily scarce resources on each other really disturbs me.

[mellacita.livejournal.com]

I used to work in admissions at my undergraduate university. We did whole analyses based on zip codes and census tracts. I was just a workstudy so I can't speak to how such analyses were used, but...yeah.

Even if race or gender (or economic status) were not a ticky box, there are countless proxies that folks will use. % receiving reduced price lunch, % of people who speak another language at home, % of families headed by a single person.

Before working in admissions I was a census enumerator for a summer. We wore an official badge, and asked so many rather instrusive questions, and at the time I truly thought it was simply so public funding could be allocated properly (more $ for bilingual ed, etc). I didn't understand those who distrusted me and didn't want to give me their full names, birthdays, place of birth, languages spoken at home, number of non-relatives living with them, marital status, race and ethnicity, etc. And I didn't realize that the many members of my town who were political refugees from totalitarian regimes looked at my official badge and looked terrified as they answered my questions. I was young and naive. :/ Sorry for the tangent!

[mellacita.livejournal.com]

Everyone in my admissions office was female (Except the Director and Assistant Director. Naturally.) This was almost 15 years ago, but the female admissions officers exhibited the same sentiments and behaviors as are beng described here.

[kitaloon.livejournal.com]

As someone currently attending a school that's at least 66% female, I find this fascinating. I'm... going to have a bit of an ego here and say that I really didn't have trouble getting into any school that I applied to, so I can't really relate to that part, but there are some really interesting ramifications to living in a mostly-female school (where most of us are majoring in science, incidentally). The dating pool is definitely a bit slim for the straight ones, but there are enough boys to be friends with if you know where to look, and the sense of community is absolutely fantastic.

[bodlon.livejournal.com]

I was going to post a comment, but you got here before I did.

Not only these three things, but it also reinforces socially and professionally toxic competitiveness and distrust among women. Which is already a problem.

Argh.

*nod*

[the-ogre.livejournal.com]

This makes no sense to me. Why is there any need to "gender balance", especially if the applicants to do so aren't there or if in doing so, the standards become unequal.

I had no idea that colleges and universities did this - and I really can't imagine why they would.

[sethg]

One theory I've read is that men are more likely than women to be able to get a middle-class income without a college degree[*] and therefore they are less motivated to apply.

[*]...or, they are more likely to get an upper-class income without a first-tier college degree.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Not only these three things, but it also reinforces socially and professionally toxic competitiveness and distrust among women. Which is already a problem.

I think on at least a subconscious level, many women recognize benefit in this: the competition will knock each other out, and then I will step forward to claim my prize.

Hence the "reward" you often see women get in online drama for keeping their mouth shut, instead of pointing to actual injustice or bad behavior.

Re: *nod*

[rm.livejournal.com]

As the piece says -- apparently too many women makes a school less desirable to applicants of both genders.

[jendaby.livejournal.com]

I have read about this lately - because of the difference in elementary school curriculum in our public schools. They have focused on higher academic achievement at an early age (my daughter is in Kindergarten and has at least two pages of homework a night). Apparently, this is much easier for most girls to adapt to than boys. More boys are having to be held back because they aren't able to cope with the flux, and are not getting socialized the same way, and not having the hands-on tactile learning that the early grades used to provide.

From what I have read (parenting magazines, online articles, etc. - I have a son and a daughter, so I read it all) boys are more likely to do things if they think it will impress other boys, and girls are more likely to do things to impress their teachers - so girls are doing better in school and the dropout rate among high school boys has apparently been rising.

I was already worried about how things will be for my son when he starts school. Now I am really worried about my daughter's chances at being accepted to a good school when she is older.

[sethg]

Yeah, I was nodding my head through the article thinking "well, first-tier colleges are so competitive that people get rejected for all kinds of damn-fool reasons", and then got to the second half where the author essentially said "but of course we go easier on male applicants and let's blame the women's libbers". Whoa.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I hadn't realised. Ow!
"God bless the Squire, and his relations...":(

[karnythia.livejournal.com]

They could still tell race by zip code and high school. And despite the hype being a POC isn't an automatic admit to college.

[amand-r.livejournal.com]

The first time I read "Leaves of Grass," it was from a humanist copy in which all of the pronouns had been changed to "hus" and "hum," and, having no experience with Whitman at all, an this being the content of Leaves of Grass, I didn't give it more than a second thought. In fact, I'll admit that I didn't even know such pronoun variants existed. It turns out I was the only one in the class with that copy (I can never manage to understand the college bookstore), and everyone else had the copies with standard pronouns. I just remember being very confused at the idea, and rather the sound of it. The idea was interesting, and it actually worked in BoG, but still. My pre-programmed brain.