Speaking of the dumb idea that recent male/female imbalances on campus are a social catastrophe, Echidne of the Snakes nicely illustrates just how empty the complaint really is.
Can you imagine reversing this? Take something like the military which is predominantly male. Do you see articles written about how the poor men must suffer, not having any women to date? How they can’t get married, due to the predominantly male environment? How they therefore should allow more women in and possibly relinquish their own jobs in consequence?
You don’t see those articles, and neither were reversal articles of this type written when colleges were filled with nothing much but men. Nobody worried that those poor men couldn’t be able to find a wife or a date for the weekend, nobody. And this has never been a concern with all-male colleges even today. It is only a concern when women have become the majority of college students.
The reason, of course, that people didn’t worry about skewed balances of men improving their prospects is that right down to rules about wearing or removing hats society was structured around men with earning power finding and keeping women with none.
What needs to change isn’t the ratios of women to men in college, or in the workforce. What needs to change are those seriously obsolete ideals about who should support whom, who should earn more than whom, how men should value themselves and each other only by their net worth, and how women should value themselves and each other by their ability to “catch” partners with greater earning potential.
Aside: while I almost always pin responsibility for gender issues on men (not least because, as a man, that’s my responsibility) this is an area where women are really going to have to give it up too. The Maureen Dowd’s laments are no less dangerous to gender parity than those moronic Superbowl commercials about “pussywhipped” men.)
For what it’s worth this 60/40 ratio is almost certainly an artifact of just one or two generations of women’s efforts to bootstrap themselves, and their daughters, out of the income, education, and employment imbalances of the status quo prior to around 1980.
If nothing else, those same lower-to-upper middle-class women who are now either graduating at higher rates or finding service jobs at higher rates than their husbands and brothers aren’t going to let their sons sink below their daughters. But neither are they likely to let their daughters fall back behind either.
So minor generational fishtailing notwithstanding men’s and women’s earnings, accomplishments, and standing are going to come closer and closer to even. Since that’s actually going to be good for pretty much everybody maybe now would be a good time to stop whining about it.
I think I've seen more
Submitted by PattyCake (not verified) on Thu, 2010-02-11 20:27.I think I've seen more articles on how ridiculous this trend story is than I've seen articles on this trend. In fact, I think I've seen one NYTimes article. Then I saw your brace of articles, a couple of articles on Gawker, including one that stated one of the interview subjects - a journalism major - feels like a fool for letting herself be quoted out of context, and of course the articles on various trend watch blogs ridiculing it. I've seen more copy ridiculing it than seems worth a "style" piece. Of course NYTimes "style" trend pieces are ridiculous. They create wonderful linkbait for all seven sides of the debate.
Next: a NYTimes trend piece on blogs creating multiple blog entries covering a single NYTimes trend piece - and the blogs who react to them.
[I'm sympathetic to your point, Patty, but I think there's been so much reaction in part because this isn't so much a trend topic as an evergreen one. This article's particularly annoying because it's based on a book that was expanded from a largely uncorrected article from The Atlantic Monthly a few years back. Anyway, if people would quit writing new versions of the same perennial stories we'd quit reacting to them. --fl]
I agree, PC…the TON of
Submitted by Kaija (not verified) on Sat, 2010-02-13 07:23.I agree, PC…the TON of articles I’ve seen critiquing the NY Times piece is surprising, but I think I see it as:
a) A good example of the interactive nature of web media; even such a holy publication as the Times can’t just print a fluffy trend piece and expect it to be passively consumed and digested…people now have the ability to “talk back” and define the culture rather than having it defined FOR them from on high (let’s hope this also is happening in other power and communication structures as well). If the dark side of the internet force is hateful and trolling “comments”, the response pieces may be the light. The Times and other established/venerated media sources may have to start writing more thoughtful and nuanced articles that encompass a wider range of info and interpretation because their readers and responders are more savvy consumers than they used to be (I hope!).
b) A tide of social/gender/cultural criticism and critical thinking where analysis and discussion, and often rebuttal or alternative explanations for observations, take place from a variety of camps. And as a feminist, I LOVE the slew of feminist and feminist-leaning writers who have jumped in on this one. :)
Same thing has been happening with Gottlieb’s “article turned book” about how women should stop being so picky and “settle” for some man who will marry them before they pass their expiration date. There’s been more critique and rebuttal than previously versions of that chapter and verse have seen.
I agree with your comments in
Submitted by Kaija (not verified) on Fri, 2010-02-12 06:57.I agree with your comments in the other post on this subject, figleaf, that this notion that women (or men) are trying to find a lifetime relationship in college is sort of outdated and silly. No one I went to undergrad with was looking for a spouse during college dating. We weren’t looking for rampant weekend hookups either, since most of the “reporting” on this topic seems to cast this one of many social issues as an “either/or.” We gravitated towards mostly healthy, longer term relationships where people hung out together and did normal things like studying, attending sporting events, going to parties, weekend trips out of town, etc, not formal “dinner and a movie, flowers and a nightcap” dating. No one was getting ready to play house and most people knew that the relationships would end before or at graduation when people took jobs, chose grad schools etc., though some did not. Most of my cohort is settling down in permanent partnerships around 30 or after.
Most of the women AND the men I knew well in undergrad were very focused on their education and getting established in a career or preparing for more training in grad school. Most of us came from modest to just scraping by backgrounds and saw education as our ticket to an autonomous and secure yet rewarding life and made it a priority; dating was something that just happened without a lot of games and hang-wringing over “The Future”. This idea of college as a four-year playground, party park, and matchmaking service for privileged kids who agonize about how much their lives are not like the fairy tales just seems like more NY Times “oh how hard the rich have it” BS. Near equal ratios of men and women in college sounds like a good thing, but it’s probably never going to be 50/50 EXACTLY.
[That was my experience too. Both hanging out with people in college when I wasn’t, and hanging with people who weren’t in college when I was. I mean, yeah, I guess you’re thinking “will we stay together after graduation” but even then for a lot of people there’s grad school or first-time job opportunities and no matter how thick you are with each other you get a real good sense that the long distance relationships you think you’re going to be able to pull off aren’t going to work out. Which is a long way of saying yeah, it’s nice to have relationships in college but like you most people I know weren’t looking to build lifelong partnerships there. Thanks, Kaija. —fl]
The majority of the guys I’ve
Submitted by Holly Pervocracy (not verified) on Fri, 2010-02-12 10:24.The majority of the guys I’ve dated do not have college degrees. In fact, now that I think about it, it seems l know a LOT of women with degrees dating men without. (n=like 4. A LOT.) The “how will girls earn their MRS now?” argument is specious.
The fairness argument isn’t. I would find a 40-60 ratio sexist, so I find a 60-40 ratio sexist. It’s not right that either sex would be underrepresented, and I don’t want to fall into victim-blaming arguments like “well, boys just don’t focus as well.” Unequal gender ratios are a problem.
Albeit not necessarily a “reverse sexism against men!” problem. I think a bigger issue (which Echidne mentions) is that these guys without college degrees still had good jobs. They were skilled laborers, IT workers, armed guards, store managers. They had good, non-degree-requiring, and exceedingly manly and male-dominated jobs. If women could get more of those jobs, fewer women would feel like they had to go to college.
The first obvious problem
Submitted by Lynn Gazis-Sax (not verified) on Sat, 2010-02-13 14:57.The first obvious problem with this kind of (repeated) trend article is that it always tends to read as if we jumped from the 50s to the Aughts, and until just recently, everyone was going steady and getting pinned in college and expecting to get an MRS degree on graduation. I’ll be getting notices for my 30th reunion in a couple of years, and when I went to school people mostly weren’t looking to get married, either; they were doing the same thing they apparently are now. Lots of more or less long term relationships in which people hung out and did ordinary stuff rather than going on dates, some hook ups, a very few people getting married right away to their college sweethearts (as a very few do now), and a few more getting married after some time to people they’d known in college. And when I applied to colleges, pretty much all of them except the women’s colleges had male/female ratios where men outnumbered women (I remember this clearly, since the ratios were all listed).
If I accept the Marginal Revolution argument that figleaf referenced in the other post, that even small imbalances in dating ratios can shift gender norms a lot, the question is why all the changes that are supposed to result from women outnumbering men actually happened earlier. And the obvious answer is: they don’t have anything to do with gender ratios, because, as you and figleaf have pointed out, colleges aren’t a closed dating market.
Now, I can understand why people assume that women who are going to college won’t date men without college degrees, because, after all, we women are supposed to be innately status seeking and all that. But the problem with the model, is that in order for “people are having more hook ups because men are now running the show” to be true, two things have to be simultaneously true about men. Men have to both be the unchoosy sex who will hop into bed with anyone at the drop of a hat, and really just want as much uncommitted sex as possible with as many women as possible, and also so status conscious that men in college would never, ever sleep with women who aren’t in college, even back in the days when most women didn’t go to college. This seems to me a highly improbable combination.
An economist suggested to me
Submitted by Mary Kaye (not verified) on Sun, 2010-02-14 09:02.An economist suggested to me that when people make career decisions they’re guided partly by a sense of what salary they want/need. Women’s expectations have increased faster than their actual salaries. Thus, it makes perfect economic sense for more women than men to be in college, because they need to overcome the 70-cents-on-the-dollar wage disparity.
I don’t remember thinking about expected salary when I did my career planning, personally, but I was an oddball. And I do note that all three of the PhDs in my extended family are female, and in at least one case, the PhD’s spouse chose to stop at a Master’s degree because that left them with more or less equal income, and it was enough income for the household. (My parents, making these decisions in the 1970’s.)
If this is true, then genders will even out again once pay rates even out, and the sooner the better for that.
Mary Kaye