I have been aware of gender inequality on college campuses for some time, but I was a little surprised at the ratio quoted in the new USA TODAY story cited by Instapundit this morning – 135 women to every 100 men and widening!
The implications of that for society are extraordinary. Many will offer explanations for this trend. Some will have their limited validity. But the brutal truth may be found…. as it often is… in the lyrics to a Grateful Dead song.
(Of course this Calypso song pre-dates the Dead. Here is a photo of the author.)
UPDATE: I was amused by the somewhat predictable commments below from the largely-male blogosphere audience. And, yes, I agree that there is considerably more practicality (and honor) in studying automobile mechanics than the PC maunderings of most college English departments… but medicine?… Console yourselves, brothers, with the thought that there are no female Shakespeares or Einsteins… yet. But first examine history and how it has played out.
Recently I was having some work done on my wife’s Accura and the service manager at the Honda dealer in College Station, Texas (home of Texas A&M) indicated the mechanic working on the car was a rugular Acurra specialist who had moved there to put his wife through college. It is an interesting implication.
Women are smarter then men? The historical record, and current science, indicates that the reverse is true.
What has happened is that the traditional female occupations such as nursing and teaching, along with “office work” in general, now require a college degree. The jobs traditionally held by men, such as electrician, plumber, farmer, soldier, mechanic, or carpenter, have no such requirement.
This seems like an oversight on governments part. It means a significant number of people with good incomes are not being indoctrinated in individulaist/collectivist thought.
The proper corrective is to end the practice of requiring a college degree to teach children the alaphabet.
As someone who spends a lot of time on college campuses and around colleges, I just want to say that I find this fact entirely pleasing.
Men are smarter than women?
Men value beauty and boobs while drooling over Protest Babes.
Women value humor and brains.
Boobs or brains-which last longer?
As for the Brutal Truth-you could always solve the “overpopulation” of women in colleges problem with this-
The China Solution-
Seriously Sickening
…as would countering the anti-intellectual male code.
Or countering the intellectual anti-male code.
It’s a silly little article. The person who typed it up filled it with all those partial, out of context statistical nuggets. There may be real problems, but we’ll have to go find the actual report for that. Announcing there is such a report is about the only thing of value in the little piece.
Hmm. When word of this gets out among the broad population – er, I mean the general population, sorry – it may be the best recruitment tool higher ed ever had for attracting more guys.
Seriously, I’d be more interested to see a breakdown by field of study. If the .35 diff is primarily due to courses such as “How Neocon Post-Conciousness Stifles Progressive Karma” and degrees based on the same, then by wasting pivotal and irreplaceable years of their lives on that stuff, those concentrating on it are actually holding themselves back, male or female.
It really would be better to be a mechanic (a profession, I might add, continually requiring much more ability than in years gone by). The Karma crowd will bring in their cabs for repairs.
Da source:
http://nces.ed.gov/pubsearch/pubsinfo.asp?pubid=2005074
flenser has a point. I know of jobs in the social services field that now require a college degree.
Not so long ago many of those jobs went to competent people who wanted to do them. No more. Gotta have a degree in social services and men do not like those kind of jobs.
I also think school is really expensive, there is a lot of bad press about yahoos like Ward Churchill and so some guys are just as likely to go to a tech school and learn a skill as they are to go to a liberal arts school.
There may be more to this than the numbers indicate.
Roger-
When you mentioned the Grateful Dead, I was thinking more along the lines of “Good Morning, Little Schoogirl”. Just shows what kind of mind I have , doesn’t it?
I look forward to a new Title 9 program to end this gender inequity. Pull their federal funding unless they equalize the numbers of matriculated males and females.
I don’t know if I can explain this coherently, but since Matina Horner of Harvard, and my conservative husband, have both noticed it, there may be something to it.
When a high-status, door-opening job or role gets flooded with those of lower status (including women), it raises the status of the flooding demography a little bit, but ultimately lowers the status of the role or position. Certain professions have simultaneously lowered in status in the public eye, and covertly embedded in employers’ eyes a high value for super-competent presentable males.
Credential inflation is also a big issue, and so is the idea that stereotypical strengths of women are favored in throughout most lockstep humanities education. The college degree is becoming so questionable and so expensive that we know people spending a lot of time with their children looking for creative, custom-tailored training with an adequate credential trail such as apprenticeships, and respectable but non-stratosphere schools with designed extracurricular emphasis.
An excess of women may be sitting pretty for male faculty, but it doesn’t mean anyone’s getting smarter, that they’re outstripping men, nor that education is robust.
Comments above tell the story. That said, normal intelligent men are usually found in the hard sciences, few of them will stand still for the ridiculous PC that’s the rule on college campuses.
Communication, the current favorite field of study for those who have embraced the politics of the left and who are drinking the koolaid with great relish doesn’t appeal to men who have a lot of self respect and neither do the “soft” sciences, often referred to as the “soft-headed” sciences and are frequently taught by men who rival Churchill in appearance and philosophy.
Even such formerly respected fields of study like history and economics are filled with faculty who teach their own leftwing agendas. Most English departments have been reduced to opera buffa. If you doubt it, check any MLA conference for topics and you’ll think you’ve entered a Kafka novel.
These statistics arise from an even more difficult problem.
A closer look at the data will show that among white Americans, about equal numbers of males and females go to college. Among blacks, females attending college hugely outnumber males. One study showed that nearly the entire “lead” that females have over males in college attendance is due to the low percentage of black males enrolling in college.
This is a deeply embedded social problem that we have done little to improve in the last two decades. The liberal social and educational agenda has been a almost total failure, but conservatives have been unable to sell and implement their alternative ideas on any scale. Meanwhile black males (as a group)sink further behind. (The black female graduation rate for those attending college are much higher than the male rate as well.)
The solution begins in the black community itself, but much more effective help from the society in general is also needed.
I’ve read that this has a lot to do with how earlier schooling has changed. I don’t doubt that due to our stupid public school system a lot of brilliant men are falling through the cracks. From what I’ve read, the curriculum has changed to appeal to girls and has the effect of pushing away boys. This is a piece with how massive numbers of boys now have to be drugged to do well in school. From watching what has happened with my nephews, they were a train wreck in the public schools, but my sister bent over backwards to get them into Catholic school and now they’re doing well. The nuns seem to understand that you can’t treat boys as if they are really girls and then punish the boys when they act like boys.
madawaskan, yeah, sure, we women don’t value the physical aspects of men. Women are also seriously impressed with shiny rocks. We’re no better.
Perhaps men are the wiser. Unless they’re aiming to get an advance degree, they may intuit the diminishing returns of a 4-year degree and are simply unwilling to be saddled with the debt.
How the cost of a degree could last for a lifetime
After staying in full-time education until he was 18, Matt decided to buck the trend and head straight to work, rather than follow the path chose by most of his friends, who were heading off to university to do various courses. “It just wasn’t really for me,” he says. “I didn’t think university could offer anything to me that I couldn’t get from the world of work.”
He’s right. One of the most accomplished managers I know is a young woman who ran her father’s construction firm while her friends went off to college.
I also noticed that all the two-year colleges in the area are now pushing 4-year degrees. The Associate Degree was perfectly adequate for the jobs these students were obtaining after graduation.
The article states that in England “those who go straight to work could be more than £60,000 better off by the time than their school friends by the time they finish university.” I suspect that here in the US, it’s much higher.
lindenen-
It was an attempt at humor to deflate a rather chauvinist comment that flenser made without backing it up with any links-which renders it just opinion as far as I am concerned.
Funny how you haven’t bothered to challenge him.
As is this paragraph from the article-
While demographers and economists have a pretty good idea where the boys end up, educators are largely clueless about the causes. Some say female teachers in elementary and middle schools, where male teachers are scarce, naturally enforce a girl-friendly environment that rewards students who can sit quietly
Let me clarify the intejecting aspect of my argument.
In elementary school the girls would raise their hands and wait to be called on-the boys would just jump in while the teacher was lecturing and ask their questions.
The girls were thus left waiting and a disproportionate amount of their questions were left unanswered. I don’t remember boys doing any less well with their grades than girls did and the article makes that conclusion in much the same way that flenser made his “opener”-without any supporting evidence.
In college a lot of girls continue this behavior and during the discussions were left in the dust. I don’t think they got as much out of the class.
Oh for cripes sakes I forgot the operative word in my second to last comment’s anti-Coulter salvo-
Ann Coulter being a PRIMO example when she says-
Females should NOT have the right to vote.
Roger:
Lets use the traditional leftist proof texting method to examine this situation. Because the college male to female ratio does not equal the actual population this shows that the colleges are sexist and they must be made to be more male friendly and must implement a program that will give males a preference until this balance is brought back to normal.
Of course I do not want this but it is funny that the simplistic method that has been used to tar institutions as racist or sexist does not come in to play when males are suddenly the minority. And more then likely any “pro male” government programs would cause more harm then good. Lets drop the forced qouta systems and let the market handle the situation. It will solve any problem faster(let accept the fact that sometimes these problems take time to correct) without the ham handed government meddling. If the government wants to give economic help based on income or as a reward for goverment service like the G.I. Bill, rather then sex or race that is fine with me.
Kevin Peters
Here is flenser’s comment-
Women are smarter then men? The historical record, and current science, indicates that the reverse is true.
Now let’s insert any other groups-
Italians are smarter then Irish? The historical record, and current science, indicates that the reverse is true.
I’m the only one who challenges him and lindenen the other female decides to backhand me-and Terrye tries to validate his other point.
Why?
Women are sometimes the worst chauvinists.
It would be interesting to see whether the gender disparity persists at the graduate/professional school level. Since some professions (dentistry, veterinary medicine, the ministry or rabbinate in those traditions that ordain women, and some medical specialties, for example) are now attracting more women than men, it may be that some of those “surplus” female undergraduates are pursuing bachelor’s degrees in preparation for entrance into professional schools that formerly had quotas for admitting women or excluded them altogether.
I also think that David Lott’s point could be extended to some other racial or ethnic minorities. I knew several Native Americans in grad school who said that girls from their reservations are more likely to go to and finish college than boys.
Maybe males having been reviled on campus by the entrenched rabid women’s studies crowd for decades, suffering freshman orientation with the sensitivity police telling them they are the root of all the world’s problems if white, and the fact that you will be nailed no matter how lame the date rape claim is taking a toll.
Come to think of it, college campuses aren’t the friendlist place for any one’s son.
Think about it, unless you are in the sciences, what’s in it for young men but exposure to self-esteem erosion at the hands of today’s leftist academics.
Maybe males having been reviled on campus by the entrenched rabid women’s studies crowd for decades, suffering freshman orientation with the sensitivity police telling them they are the root of all the world’s problems if white, and the fact that you will be nailed no matter how lame the date rape claim is taking a toll.
Come to think of it, college campuses aren’t the friendlist places for anyone’s son.
Think about it, unless you are in the sciences, what’s in it for young men but exposure to self-esteem erosion at the hands of today’s leftist academics.
Sorry for the double post.
I had a brilliant comment to offer, but it took so long getting through the briar of entry to whatever — couldn’t remember my this or that –that I’ve totally lost my train of thought. Choo. Choo.
That’s OK Sissy, when you remember it, TypeKey will make up for it by double posting.
But I say that the women today
Are smarter than the men in every way
That sums it up nicely. Thanks, Roger.
What a delightful, progressive-credentials-affirming post about the relative intelligence of U.S. demographic groups! I feel better about myself having read it.
Oddly enough, some people seem to imagine that I made a controversial comment when I said this:
Women are smarter then men? The historical record, and current science, indicates that the reverse is true.
Even Roger seems to have problems with this for some reason.
List the top one thousand people in the fields of science, mathamatics, philosophy, art, and literature and the overwhelming majority of them will be male.
As for the state of current scientific research on the matter, see this.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/4183166.stm
The foundation stone of liberalism has always been the belief that everyone in the world is an essentially interchangable member of the class “human”. So any evidence to the contrary will encounter fierce resistance. But the differences between the sexes, and between different ethhnic groups, are simply establshed facts. Liberalism is closer to a religious faith than a pragmatic way of looking at the world.
The foundation stone of liberalism has always been the belief that everyone in the world is an essentially interchangable member of the class “human”.
Interestingly, this belief is in direct conflict with their faith in the impersonal forces of Darwinian evolution.
When a high-status, door-opening job or role gets flooded with those of lower status (including women), it raises the status of the flooding demography a little bit, but ultimately lowers the status of the role or position.
Years ago, I read an article on the ratio of women to male doctors in Russia and that as more Russian women entered the field, fewer men sought out a career in medicine because of the perceived diminishment in status. Approximately 70% of doctors in Russia are women.
It would be interesting to know what the split is between women/men here in the US seeking a career as a general practioner or pediatrician as opposed to neurosurgeon or heart surgeon. Nevermind that women have smaller hands and may have a slight advantage in performing some surgeries or so I have read. And, I be curious to know if medical school graduate more general practioners than specialists.
madaswaskan:
What other point?
I think that perhaps some of us are having a problem understanding.
I do agree with your point that there is nothing wrong with being a mechanic. I farmed for years and trust me, there is no way to teach in a classroom hat I learned.
Men and women within the specialities of the nursing field. CRNA means a nurse anesthetist.
http://allnurses.com/forums/showthread.php?threadid=111112
I was amused by the somewhat predictable commments below from the largely-male blogosphere audience. And, yes, I agree that there is considerably more practicality (and honor) in studying automobile mechanics than the PC maunderings of most college English departments… but medicine?… Console yourselves, brothers, with the thought that there are no female Shakespeares or Einsteins… yet. But first examine history and how it has played out.
You’re defending the original contents of this post against it’s critics by accusing them of chauvinism? Now that is amusingly predictable. Sheesh!
Sorry to have offended you, djs, but leaving the chauvinism or defensiveness out of it, consider this:
The “medicine” link above tell us that two of the top four research medical schools in the USA according to the US News Survey – John Hopkins and Duke – now have female majorities in their entering classes. (Don’t know about the other two – Harvard and GWU – but imagine they’re close to fifty-fifty… you can check and tell us.) Ten years ago these stats were of course wildly different. During that same ten years as well, SAT scores have been generally going up, college admissions tougher all around. So the women getting into John Hopkins and Duke are damed smart and damned well prepared. These aren’t affirmative action cases. Far from it. Something has been going on here and it isn’t answered as simply as finding a link to a discussion of the success of male nurses in a certain category. If you want to put my analysis down to some kind of politically correctness, go ahead and do it. But that dog won’t hunt, my friend. I loathe political correctness. I’m just trying to understand the facts.
At the risk of embarassing myself by wading into this thicket: The link Flenser cites does square, I believe, with the research done my Herrnstein and Murray in their (reviled but not refuted book) The Bell Curve. It also squares with the work of Arthur Jensen, probably the premier researcher of IQ. Of course, the BBC, Herrnstein and Murray, and Jensen’s analyese are predicted on the validity of of the concept of IQ as a factor that accurately represents intelligence. There is, of course, much debate on this point probably best exemplified the the work on “Multiple Intelligences.”
Having said all that, grant me the assumption that IQ is an appropriate measurement for “intelligence.” The difference in the numbers of men and women at the second and third standard deviations is a function of the shape of the curve around the mean IQ. The corollary to this argument is, of course, there are many more stupid men than women, because the dispersions is “two tailed,” that is equally represented on both the high and low sides of the mean.
All of this is to suggest, that college is a great place to pick up chicks. (tongue in cheek)
At the risk of embarassing myself by wading into this thicket: The link Flenser cites does square, I believe, with the research done my Herrnstein and Murray in their (reviled but not refuted book) The Bell Curve. It also squares with the work of Arthur Jensen, probably the premier researcher of IQ. Of course, the BBC, Herrnstein and Murray, and Jensen’s analyese are predicted on the validity of of the concept of IQ as a factor that accurately represents intelligence. There is, of course, much debate on this point probably best exemplified the the work on “Multiple Intelligences.”
Having said all that, grant me the assumption that IQ is an appropriate measurement for “intelligence.” The difference in the numbers of men and women at the second and third standard deviations is a function of the shape of the curve around the mean IQ. The corollary to this argument is, of course, there are many more stupid men than women, because the dispersions is “two tailed,” that is equally represented on both the high and low sides of the mean.
All of this is to suggest, that college is a great place to pick up chicks. (tongue in cheek)
excuse the double post and atrocious typing.
Roger writes that “These aren’t affirmative action cases. Far from it.”
Given that the average male SAT score continues to be higher than the average female score, and yet there are many more women than men in college, I’m not sure how you can write off AA so easily. Perhaps there is another explanation which I just have not thought of.
Other than admission officials giving a lot of weight to things other than SAT’s, I don’t see what can account for this.
http://cnnstudentnews.cnn.com/2002/fyi/teachers.ednews/08/27/sat.scores/
I’ve always thought that what is really needed in American colleges is “blind” exam scoring. The people grading papers should not know anything about who wrote them. This of course would make AA almost impossible, which is one reason it will never be implemented. Any teachers out there have any thoughts on that?
“Years ago, I read an article on the ratio of women to male doctors in Russia and that as more Russian women entered the field, fewer men sought out a career in medicine because of the perceived diminishment in status.”
I read a theory awhile ago (I forget where) that part of the reason for the decline of Broadway is due to the popularity it enjoyed among gay men. Straight men found this off-putting and began to abandon it. This theory was also used to explain the decline in the number of new classic Broadway plays from its height earlier in the century since the majority of the talent pool abandoned the art. Who knows if this is right. It’s an interesting theory though. I bet tv has a lot to do with the decline, but it doesn’t explain the lack of new classics.
If you want to put my analysis down to some kind of politically correctness, go ahead and do it. But that dog won’t hunt, my friend. I loathe political correctness. I’m just trying to understand the facts.
Right. Humble apologies.
All of this is to suggest, that college is a great place to pick up chicks. (tongue in cheek)
Hear, hear! And, it seems, a great place to meet an intelligent, well-educated wife and mother.
What Yale Women Want
RogerA,
Murray just published a piece in Commentary that will undoubtedly wind up in the irrefutable but unmentionable category again. If it’s not talked about, it didn’t happen. Kind of like the evidence that the death penalty actually deters potential murderers.
I’m not sure about AA and med school admissions. I can’t seem to find any admission data sets to even be able to look at raw numbers. How many men vs. women are actually enrolled in pre-med courses?
Here is the actual 2004 applicant/matriculant data. (PDF)I still don’t find graduation/licensing stats.
Two points:
1) males’ capabilities and performance, intellectual and otherwise, are far more dispersed than females’. IOW the average female may indeed be more intellectually adept, but the extreme ends of the curve, both for the rocket scientists and the dullards, are dominated by men. So if society in general is sending more and more of th middling high school grads to college, it’s perfectly plausible that many more women than men will take advantage of the new opportunities, even as men continue to dominate the upper ranks of the professions.
2) to Roger’s point:
the women getting into John Hopkins and Duke are damed smart and damned well prepared. These aren’t affirmative action cases. Far from it. Something has been going on here and it isn’t answered as simply as finding a link to a discussion of the success of male nurses in a certain category.
Isn’t “damed smart” a little, well, fem-chauvinist?
Seriously, I’ll take a crack at it. It’s not so much more women entering the field of medicine as fewer ambitious top-notch male college grads seeking it. This is because medicine’s prestige has fallen drastically since the end, about 25 years ago, of what Paul Starr called American medicine’s “golden era,” when overwhelmingly male American doctors enjoyed extraordinary wealth, independence, and social deference.
All gone. Relative to what extremely bright, quantitative alpha males could be making in the investment banking business, today’s returns on a medical degree suck. Independence in the age of the HMO is a joke. As to social deference, consider how it feels to move from being viewed as one notch below god to being labeled, along with the nurses, a “care provider.”
Doctors do not live in a bubble. Every college friend or acquaintance of mine who got an MD has gone to or is now considering business school. Most have no clear idea what they want to do with the degree; they simply feel like suckers when they look at peers who are no smarter than they are but several times wealthier and, more importantly, are given enormous latitude, independence and power by our society.
Now, at the same time as women are flooding into medical and law schools, they continue to shy away from business school. At the top B-schools, female enrollments remain locked in the 25% range, as they have been for more than a decade. Why so? Obviously, medicine and law offer women the chance to have one’s own practice, which allows a woman to take time off to bear children and raise a family without unduly jeopardizing her ability to use her degree.
By contrast the MBA and its related career paths– for the top students, investment banking and consulting and senior management at F500 corporations– offers no such detour, in large measure because the MBA is not a true professional certification with any restrictive market value. Take a year off to have kids and your chances of making MD at Goldman or Morgan Stanley are close to zip. Ditto for climbing the ranks at Citigroup or GE or Intel.
So for any woman seeking to have a family, medicine or law are vastly more attractive than business; for any ambitious man who can do the numbers, the reverse is increasingly true. This will change only when/if ambitious men in our society being to see as much value in staying home to help raise children as women in our society do. I don’t see that happening anytime soon.
On a separate note, I find it intriguing (and mroe than a little disturbing) that female enrollments are soaring while engineering and science enrollments are plunging. I’m all for more enrollments of women– and/or indian-, chinese- russian- korean-, vietnamese, israeli- irish-, hungarian-, or whatever-americans– who can help reverse the trends graphically displayed at the bootom of this interview http://instapundit.com/archives/025289.php
thibaud
I think your 9:58 at least partly addresses the question posed in your 10:09. A career in science or engineering is increasingly seen as not a good investment of time and effort. It’ seen as the kind of work that we hire outsiders to so for us.
flenser,
Problem solved: make science and engineering careers the most family-oriented professional careers going, even more so than medicine or law, and attract a large % of the bright women who otherwise would be wasting their lives in legal careers. Also attract some of the brighter first-in-family-to-attend-college women who are now likely to go to journalism school, or nursing or the like.
I believe Larry Summers suggested postponing tenure decisions until female science PhDs have had time to return to science after childrearing and write more articles, do more research pojects etc….
Can’t be all that difficult. The stakes are enormous, and all those proffered Minority Engineering Scholarships over the last 30 years have failed to make a dent in the falling engineering/science enrollment stats.
“I believe Larry Summers suggested postponing tenure decisions until female science PhDs have had time to return to science after childrearing and write more articles, do more research pojects etc….”
We’d be better shortening the amount of time spent in college by making the summer a semester and letting people graduate from high school and enter a sort of pre-college program earlier. The sooner they’re able to get their PhDs the more time they’ll have to start a family.
Another benefit of making science and engineering careers mommy-, er family-friendly: it sidesteps both the $$ issue and the nerd barrier. Women on the mommy track are glad to take a paycut relative to their peers who are not on the mommy track, so by recasting (lower-paid) science and engineering jobs into the uber-family professions, you turn the negative into an attraction.
And you overcome the social nerd image by recasting scientists and engineers as far more humane and compassionate than lawyers and business(wo)men, perhaps even doctors. What better way to vercome half a century of pernicious pop-culture imagery of evil and bizarre-o scientists than to replace the image of a Christopher Lloyd with that of a Mrs Cliff Huxtable, bio-engineer?
Plus, think of all the savings to be had from axing idiotic government programs for and research into making math !fun! or science !kewl!
Totally agree with lindenen’s suggestion, which should be applied to all college-bound kids. The last year of high school is a complete waste, and lame high school curricula force many of even the smartest college kids to spend the first 2-3 semesters in college learning what they should have mastered in high school.
Another thought re the mommy engineer/scientist track. Instead of subsidizing female students, provide cash payments, very generous tax rebates, mandated family leave of up to a year for any married female scientist or engineer who wishes to bear and raise a child. Another win-win: OTOH, we put real and very substantial incentives in front of young women to choose a sci/engin. career, OTOH, we encourage childbearing and give a real boost to stable, healthy families.
None of this, btw, entails higher salaries paid to scientists or engineers, or scholarships paid to kids who have a high dropout rate either from college or from the profession shortly after graduation. These benefits are paid to practising engineers and scientists and are tied to positive behavioral changes that generate increased economic activity and tax revenues, improved demographics for society, greater social stability and reduced costs related to divorce. Create yuppies — AND help the puppies.
“The last year of high school is a complete waste, and lame high school curricula force many of even the smartest college kids to spend the first 2-3 semesters in college learning what they should have mastered in high school.”
In the UK non-college bound kids can leave at 16. I think it’s 15 in Germany. Those last two years of high school could be spent taking what is essentially the first two years of an undergraduate curriculum. This would save a lot of money for their families. For kids who go into the workforce, perhaps those two years would sober them up about the importance of an education viz a viz their future earning capacity or they could go into specific apprentice programs where they actually learn a trade.
With all due respect, this whole thing ain’t no closely held secret among the rocket science crowd.
In dis country, you gotta make da money first. Den when you get da money, you get da powah. When you get da powah, den you get the womens.
Knuck–thats precisely why Roger’s post was so good–dont have to do any of that if you go to college and find the right woman first. This is a major opportunity structure.
RogerA,
I once manned a booth at a job fair that was part of a regional convention of the Society of Women Engineers. I looked up at one point to see a young man approaching the booth – male attendees were few and far between. He promptly identified himself as the President of a SWE chapter at a rather prestigious technical institute.
I couldn’t resist and asked the devious young fellow how he’d managed to get himself in that position. With a barely controlled smile he said, simply, “I ran and they elected me.” Now there was a young feller who understood the concept of opportunism. I’d wager he’s done well for himself.
djs;
You posted:
“The foundation stone of liberalism has always been the belief that everyone in the world is an essentially interchangable member of the class “human”.
Interestingly, this belief is in direct conflict with their faith in the impersonal forces of Darwinian evolution.”
It’s somewhat late and a bit off topic, but your post reminded me of the defition of a liberal as someone who believes that nothing (except sexual orientation) is genetic, while a coservative believes that everything (except sexual orientation) is genetic.
Curmudgeon
Simple and well made point. The best kind.
I’m a third year history major at a huge state university. There are definately more women than men on campus. I hate to generalize, but the women seem a little more serious and focused about their schooling, whereas the men are more likely to space out during the lectures, not do their homework, or just skip class altogether. I don’t really think it’s the teachers’ fault, as most of my classes have been hard, traditional history, not any kind of wymyn’s ways mushy stuff.
I don’t know what’s going on with the guys… but it worries me.