You are an interesting poster. I find myself reading your post alternately agreeing and disagreeing.
" What some of us are pointing out is that it is inconsistent to point to statistics of say the number of women pursuing engineering degrees and find discrimination, while at the very same time ignoring statistics that show an ever widening gender gap in those attending college."
I don’t see this as inconsistent at all.
Engineering and Computer Science are the last bastions of the old school male dominated majors. Furthermore, the work culture in these areas also has been inhospitable to women.
Here is a recent survey of women in Silicon Valley. How do you get more women into this culture and really change it?
Additionally, this is not a man hating exercise in my mind. The majority of guys are well behaved. However, a modest percentage of men who are serial offenders can offend a lot of women.
I would add that plenty of the routing of women away from these areas comes from other women. A lot of adults believe that boys are better at math and girls are better at reading. When a girl is having a hard time with math, a well intended woman may say, “That is okay, I wasn’t good at math either.” Once the girls decides she is no good at math and stops practicing, it quickly becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. There is also research that both male and female teachers are likely to compare a boy and girl with identical scores in their classes and say that the boy is a stronger student.
The point is that it is not at all inconsistent to think that there are still issue in computer science and engineering even though women are earning the majority of college degrees.
Lol. Well, it would be a boring old world if we all agreed with each other about everything. Course it could be that I am just completely mixed up. I am a guy who sucks at math, much to the everlasting shame of my mother the math teacher, who used to buy me flash cards for Christmas. Trust me, I am still working that one out.
And I am in no way saying there are not barriers to women in some fields. I spent the bulk of my career in BigLaw, not the most welcoming of environments, especially when I started a hundred years ago. Like I said in a point that got buried earlier, a lot of guys (I assume the same is true for women) view successful traits thru a kind of gendered lens. I think it is very difficult to understand and recognize that others may achieve success by exhibiting traits other than those you see in yourself. I think that is a big challenge, in probably most fields with significant gender imbalance.
What I am saying is that it is wrong to accept challenges to one sex while ignoring or minimizing challenges to the other. Especially when the evidence of such is similar for both. The inconsistency just offends me. Maybe it is as simple as that.
On a more personal level, I never wanted to make my daughter (or my son) other than what she is. She has the aptitude and mind to be a great engineer. But absolutely no interest in the field. She would rather save the world by being nice to everybody. Like what you like, study what you want. Don’t accept external conditions. You will face challenges. Life is unfair, deal with it. Build your life on your terms.
Starts way earlier too. D was asked if she wanted to take a test that would put her into Algebra in 6th grade. She declined, because she was the only girl asked to that test. I wasn’t consulted and I am still annoyed about that, actually.
In this case, guys didn’t push her out, she pushed herself out, because she didn’t want to be the only one.
Does that happen a lot? I don’t know.
Does something like that happen to boys? Are they asked if they want their poetry submitted to a contest and they decline because it’s all girls?
^ The creative writing club I started in high school is now all female, according to the picture I saw in someone’s yearbook this year. (Unless no guys showed up for the picture, which is possible, because those things are sparsely attended.) That made me sad – there were several active male members when I was there. I’d be doing outreach if I were still in it.
Luckily the book club I’m involved with now has a pretty even split.
I do think there are academic hurdles boys face due to American cultural standards baked into the system. Two I can think of off the top of my head that were apparent to me as a parent of a daughter and son throughout the elementary and middle school years:
Boys can be more physically active, antsy, and rambunctious especially during the early years of formalized education. This is not conducive to traditional classroom structure, teaching style, and time management. In some places where recess is curtailed or cut out completely, I think it puts the average male student at an early disadvantage and that kind of feedback can have repercussions in later education settings as well.
Boys can receive a lot of societal and cultural signals about what kind of attributes are favored in males over others. Athleticism vs. studious and brainy, for example. I know this was a struggle with my own son in middle school years, where he seemed to feel a need to hide his intelligence and academic ability. There were certain academic clubs he didn’t want to join, despite prodding, because of the reputation they had. He was a great athlete and student but the student part usually came as a surprise to his peers until awards were given out because he downplayed that part. And this was from a kid with a decent amount of self-confidence, well-liked and a student leader, and parents who tried to counter it.
Point being, there are a lot of factors that play into things, which I know @Ohiodad51 touched on before.
Sure. Ask the guys in the drama department, or on yearbook. More generally, guys in certain groups are not supposed to care too much about school. Everybody knows that the football and basketball players are just dumb jocks, right? A more interesting question is whether guys or girls are more susceptible than the other to such societal pressures, and why.
Totally agree about the hurdles for boys. But has that changed much over the years? What about the current situation is new? 30 percent of freshman men dropping out over the last 10 years is huge.
The article links this stat:
The statistics are disconcerting. Over the past decade, about 30% of young men have dropped out of college during their freshman year (Hartley). For those who remained, 38% completed their bachelor’s degree in four years and 58% finished within six. (National Center for Education Statistics). According to researchers, the struggles of male college freshmen have not changed much through the years, but many of today’s young men, compared to those of the past, are less resilient with regard to the challenges.
Those stats are interesting but since they don’t do a comparison to the past, it’s hard to know how significant they are in terms of reflecting a change or are just par for the course. Also, are more people attempting college now that wouldn’t have in past generations, hence more dropouts, etc. if that is the case. Increased length of time to finish degrees is often attributed to affordability, and we know college is a lot less affordable than in the past.
I have my own unsubstantiated theories that the internet might play a role. Attention spans, distractions, gaming, etc. Both sexes overuse online time but I think they use it in different ways.
I would posit that some of it is economic. If you are not succeeding/liking college, and you can go learn a trade and get a good job for less than half of the expenditure, then the wise course may be to drop out and go to trade school. And frankly, some people shouldn’t be in college in the first place. The sooner you figure that out, the better. I assume these same factors hit women as well, but completely off the top of my head I think it is probably true that there are less favorable working conditions for the average woman without a bachelor’s degree than for the average man. There just aren’t that many female carpenters, welders, plumbers, electricans, etc. So women who maybe would not stay in school if there were favorable opportunities there for them instead gut it out, because there is no clear path to a solid middle class career absent the degree.
I do also think that the enviornment on some if not most campuses plays a role. Believe it or not, men view the current sexual assault policies promulgated by OCR as a detriment to them. They are also less likely to appreciate the diversity/sexual assualt seminars most are required to attend early in their careers. Or the constant drum beat of white and male privilege that effects much of our university communities. Whether it is true or not, there is a persistent and widely held belief that the educational establishment in general is more faovorable towards women. If you are looking for what has changed over the last decade or so, that is one thing that has. Maybe it is a net positive, maybe not. But it probably has its effect.
“Whether it is true or not, there is a persistent and widely held belief that the educational establishment in general is more faovorable towards women.”
Funny, that. So why are there so few women university presidents, particularly on the elite school level? Could it be that the educational establishment in general is more favorable towards women because they don’t DEMAND their due in terms of power and earnings?
And you don’t see any reason for hostility towards men if women get more degrees AND get better grades, yet still earn 75 cents on every dollar that a man makes?
I will just add one more personal anecdote that may or may not be applicable to other colleges, depending on how they are structured: our academic advising office is a busy place, filled with young men and women who are bright, motivated, and interested in doing everything right to earn their degree. It’s hard to make solid assumptions because we have more women than men enrolled overall, but on any given day, you will see a waiting room filled with women and just a few men. It wouldn’t be uncommon to see all women, but if I walked in and saw all men, I’d probably fall over with shock.
@ohiodad51 "What I am saying is that it is wrong to accept challenges to one sex while ignoring or minimizing challenges to the other. "
I have a son in high school and would be concerned about any unique challenges for boys. I am just not aware of any at this point. Balancing 2 sports and academics is a challenge, but is was for his sister too.
Your economic theory raises an interesting question. I think whether this dropping or for trade school is a problem greatly depends on the profile of the boys dropping out. Are they top students who are failing to capture their potential, or were they very marginal college students?
If the kid dropping out for trade school had an ACT of 16, that is probably a good decision. If he had an ACT of 34 and a 5 on BC calculus and Physics C, then I think it was probably a poor decision.
@Much2learn, I don’t know what sports your son plays, but there are cultural issues in the major sports relative to academics. Trust me. I played, my son is playing now. Some teachers, and maybe more importantly some peers, tend to view athletes as predominately non academic. If and when he goes to college, some profs will be just shy of openly hostile to having him in the class. Been that way for a long time. And don’t even get me started on coaches, lol. Of course there are advantages as well. My son reports that several of his profs are ecstatic to have a football player in the major or in their classes who is an unabashed geek.
And yes, I agree that the profile of guys dropping out is significant. I am assuming, as I think most are, that those most at risk of dropping out are not the most engaged or successful of students. You would think that guys (or girls) who had succeeded at the level of a 34 ACT and a 5 on BC calc in high school would have already developed the traits to succeed at the next level. Now that is not to say that the kid who is a straight up genius doesn’t suddenly wake up one day during sophmore year and decide to move to New Zealand (which actually happened to a buddy in college, he works on a sheep ranch down there to this day) but I would think that in the main we are mostly talking about marginal students to begin with. And yeah, if we are not then that is a whole nother set of problems.
We had a similar experience with one of our daughters. She was the the only non-Asian female in her advanced math middle school class. The other girls who were eligible to move up declined because they wanted to stay together in the same math class one grade level lower for social reasons. Moving on through high school, the same gap persisted.
The 75 cents on the dollar statistic has been debunked time and time again.
“We had a similar experience with one of our daughters. She was the the only non-Asian female in her advanced math middle school class.”
In the MV Calculus class I mentioned earlier with 21 boys and only 4 girls, D1 was the only white girl too the other three were of Asian descent. The school overall is about 70-75% white.
I do hear that girls, and their parents, sometimes decide to move themselves down a level from the one they tested into. Why doesn’t this happen so often with boys? More to do with our culture, I think. I also observe that all the stud NRA know who the academic superstar boys are, but many of the girls keep it on the down low.
@PetraMC Sounds like the old adage saying that men are loathe to ask for directions when driving. Perhaps a willingness to acknowledge a need for and ask for help is something more prevalent among females per your anecdotal experience. I could see that leading to greater support and therefore success in a college setting.
If this 75 cents on every dollar was remotely true, wouldn’t a smart woman (or man) create a company that hired only other women, and took advantage of the tremendous wage discrepancy to either realize huge profits or drive all the other competitors out of business?
We missed out on a lot of this kind of stuff because we sent our kids to single sex high schools, so I haven’t really thought deeply about it. I wonder if GPA protection plays into this as well? Certainly my daughter was much more concerned with her GPA than my son.
You’re omitting the fact that a part of that skepticism towards athletes is due to a very widespread anti-intellectual/anti-academic climate within many sporting subcultures…especially those which feed into Division I athletics.
And this goes decades back. At the Big-10 some older cousins attended and one cousin participated as an athlete to an extent*, the athletic subculture was such that if one loved academics or associated hobbies such as heavy reading/poetry, they’d be wise to keep that hidden from their teammates at the risk of being harshly teased or worse.
This also extends to many mainstream US high school environments where athletes tend to be at the top of the social pecking order. In those environments, it’s the high academic achieving nerds who are singled out for social ostracism and violent bullying(including physical beatings) from athletes and their sympathizers.
Lost count of how many HS and college classmates chose to attend the public magnet HS/LAC precisely because they’ve experienced such bullying and wanted a more conducive academic/social environment for themselves.
Tossed due to too many disciplinary/academic issues even back in a period when Div I athletes were able to get away with far more than they would nowadays.