NY Times: "At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust"

[DRab]

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What I have tried to argue is that the “crisis” is not an educational one, caused by a more “feminine” ethos, a compound of a female-dominated teaching profession, pedagogy that is more suited to girls’ learning style and a grading system that rewards behavior again more associated with girls than boys.

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<p>I’m curious as to what you think of this, marite. I take summer courses at UCR, and when walking around one of the buildings, saw some posters from a group interested in increasing the number of minorities in the teaching profession (I assume pre-k to 12 only for this group). They reasoned on the poster that over 40% of the kids in public schools in America were minorities, while less than 10% of the teachers were. If that makes sense, would it also make sense that about 50% of the students are male, while x (I would guess 15-20%) of teachers are also male, so they should be increased? I would guess that most of whatever percentage of overall teacher the males occupy are primarily in the high schoo level (followed by middle school), with the sex being near absent from pre-k to 6th grade. But if women really do benefit the students most, I think it would be okay to have them disproportionatly represented as teachers (research to study this would be good), and I would guess that if it is the case that women do disproportionately benefit the students most, it would be true in the younger ages (again, research . . . mmm).</p>

<p>Do you at least think grading partially explains things insofar as women tend to be in subjects that give out much hire average grades and often demand less time investment than men? I’m a male humanities (some say social science) major and find this obviously true- the average GPAs in engineering and the sciences are much lower than the humanities and social sciences, and the humanities and social sciences have far more women present than the science and techinical fields such as engineering. And philosophy, one of the harder grading (if not the hardest grading) humanities (or social science) course is often domniated by men, skewing things a bit further!</p>

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In last week’s Sunday NYT magazine, Barbara Ehrenheich had a tongue-in- cheek article. Men will come out ahead of women even with lower college GPAs because employers are de-emphazing academic performance and stressing personal qualities. So the male college slackers who spend their time socializing will have an advantage over the conscientious females who toil in their college library and do the assignments.

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<p>I don’t think this is a new phenomenon, and I also don’t think GPA is the best indicator to choose which person to hire. If it were, the people in the harder grading disciplines would be so screwed (and they tend to be for medical and law admissions), while the subjects with higher average grades given would be even more rewarded.</p>