Too many women getting educated emergency
It appears that women are getting too educated.
The gender imbalance in educational attainment is getting larger every year. That may spell good news, ultimately, for income and employment equality—but it presages increasingly problematic social conditions for generations of men and women.
According to the U.S. Department of Education, more than 57% of the class of 2018 who graduated with bachelor’s degrees were female. The gap for master’s degrees was even wider: 59% to 41%.
In terms of economic justice this is good news, Gerard Baker admits, but what about The Mate Quest?
Most studies of human heterosexual attraction suggest both that intellectual capacity and achievement is an important attractor and that people tend to gravitate toward a partner with roughly the same level of attainment.
But every year, the pool of eligible male graduates is getting smaller relative to the number of women.
What about when it was the other way around?
Well it’s like this. When it was the other way around, it was fine, because women aren’t supposed to be clever or educated.
Kinda feel that the anti-female type movement in higher ed just might be a gut level reaction to seeing too many girl people in classrooms.
So the dating pool is increased for smarter men… how is this bad?
BKinSA, this is bad, bad, bad, because Billy Bub and Bubba Bill are losing Peggy Sue to the intelligent, educated segment of the culture.
In education, we are constantly hearing about how education is too “geared toward girls” and it is turning males away in disgust or boredom. Funny, it wasn’t that long ago that the same educational model was deemed to be something girls couldn’t deal with; it was male oriented, geared toward how a male thinks.
Perhaps the problem isn’t that too few boys are getting educated; perhaps it’s that those educated boys are still more likely to get the good jobs than their female counterparts. And studies suggest that women tend to work harder for those degrees, though I have my doubts about how they measure that. I haven’t seen the actual studies.
As for my husband, when he went to a dating service, he was nearly turned away (he was turned away from one) because they said his desire for an educated woman and his level of education made him unable to be matched. Then, voila, I walked in the door, and they eventually figured out that we would be a good match (once they got my personality test straightened out so they quit matching me with fundamentalist Christians because my piety score was so high — oops, sorry, we read it backwards. Our bad, but no, you are not entitled to be reimbursed for being sent out on dates with people who brought bibles on first dates just because we screwed up).
But I still see a lot of my educated female friends “acting dumb” so they won’t make the males feel inferior.
iknklast, I know a very happily married couple, she is my son’s sister-in-law, and he is one of my son’s best mates.
She has taught Physics at the most prestigious and expensive Girls’ School in the state. He drives trucks.
As is often demonstrated in real life, education and intelligence are not the same, and so-called “uneducated” people can be highly intelligent, great conversationalists, and all-round good people to socialise with.
I dunno. At my boys’ elementary school award assembly, no one seemed to think it was problematic or odd that going classroom by classroom, two awards per class, from kindergarten to Grade 8, the first boy to get a reward was in Grade 7. If it was a 50/50 white/visible minority population school, I suspect it would have been alarming.
Surely any outcome that is significantly different from the ~50/50 population is problematic? Your comment ‘well it is like this’ sounds rather vengeful.
Vengeful? What do you mean?
What other reading is there to the sentence below, other than the idea that anyone expressing concern about the situation of gender imbalance should just accept it because the inverse was true about a generation ago.
“Well it’s like this. When it was the other way around, it was fine, because women aren’t supposed to be clever or educated.”
Naif, there’s nothing vengeful about pointing out how something that has typically been a male-dominated area suddenly becomes ‘problematic’ when the balance shifts in favour of women. I can’t see what part of that you find vengeful at all. In fact, I don’t even see any gloating, and if I was a woman I’d be gloating all ways ’till Easter.
Naif, another thing is that something not being exactly 50/50 isn’t inherently problematic; it’s when that imbalance results from inequality of opportunity or obstacles in the way of achievement. As far as I can tell (as an education professional, I do have an insider seat in this situation), there are absolutely zero obstacles in the way of males utilizing the educational system that are not also there for women, the chief obstacles being money and ability.
In addition, the fact that there are fewer males than females utilizing the educational system is being treated as a crisis of major proportions, one that we are suddenly supposed to worry about, adjust our teaching styles around, etc, to make sure we get the numbers of males back up (and the unspoken goal: to get them back to being higher – much higher – than females).
And, as I indicated, we are being told that the educational methods we use are not suited to male brains and ways of learning, including methods being used in the past when we were told women couldn’t succeed in college because the means of teaching weren’t suited to women brains and ways of learning. There was no reason to allow women in colleges because they simply couldn’t learn that way. Now they’ve proven they can (and as education adjusts and ‘innovates’, women continue to learn in the new ways), it must be that we are shortchanging men. The system must be changed in such as way that men can learn (the unspoken thing here being that, so what if it’s a way that women’s brains can’t learn – and the automatic assumption that there is a different brain style and way of learning for women and men).
Naif – what other reading is there? Well there is the “why is this a concern when it’s women when it wasn’t a concern when it’s men?” reading. That’s not “vengeful,” it’s asking why the exclusion and subordination of women has been taken for granted (and cheered and imposed and defended) for so very long.
It’s a problem because so many men can’t swallow their pride and marry women more accomplished than they are. Suckers. Give them time, they’ll catch on.
Papito, my ex loved that I had more education. He felt that others would view him as smarter by default, without him having to do all the work of going to college. Plus, it increased my income, and he certainly wasn’t unhappy about that.
I am one of the odd women, those who were trophy wives not only for their looks (which I had back then) but also for their brain.