Why aren't we talking about the real reason male college enrollment is dropping? (Celeste Davis, Oct 6 2024)
"White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.
White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.
Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.
Take veterinary school for example:
In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.
But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”
Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.
For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.
One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)
Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.
Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!
It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.
Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.
As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.
Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement - college is stupid and unnecessary.
A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)
When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.
Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)
School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.
But we don’t seem to want to talk about that."
very good tags from @downwarddnaspiral
literally saw this tweet this morning
I saw a dude say with his whole chest that biology isn't really STEM
Take a wild fucking guess as to which major has the most female students
Scientific disciplines with more women have lower funding success rates and researcher quality scores , are considered ‘soft sciences’, and see average pay drop as women enter. This is BECAUSE women do them, not a function of women mysteriously choosing lower-prestige, poorly-paid fields.
My go-to example on this last aspect is computer programming. It was initially heavily female (and at least in the US was a significant employer of Black women in mathematics and related fields, cf Hidden Figures etc), and a lot of those women had mathematical backgrounds, but it was described in terms like ‘precise’ and ‘detail-oriented’ - basically a more technical version of secretarial work. Then when men started moving into the field in larger numbers, the language shifts to describing it as creative and visionary, and the pay and prestige moves accordingly. Yeah.
It's ironic that women today must fight for equality in Silicon Valley. After all, their math skills helped launch the digital age
Women were welcome as computers partly because the work was viewed as a dull, low-status activity. Men with elite educations generally wanted no part in it. Not only were women hired, but so were blacks, polio survivors, Jews and others who were routinely iced out of job opportunities, Grier points out.
“The reason that these pre-electronic computation jobs were feminized is they were seen as rote and de-skilled,” says Mar Hicks, a historian and author of Programmed Inequality. It wasn’t true, though: “In a lot of cases, the women doing these computation jobs actually had to have pretty advanced math skills and math training, especially if they were doing very complex calculations.”
and later:
Though women programmers have made strides in some fields—such as “front-end” programming, for browser applications—the salaries in those specialties tend to be lower overall, simply because the industry regards anything being done by women as easy, according to Miriam Posner, an assistant professor of computer science at UCLA. It is becoming a pink-collar ghetto in coding, Posner notes, rather like the status of female human computers.
(most of my existing knowledge on this is from the UK and US but here’s another link on the UK)
From as early as the 1840s women have made important contributions to the development of modern computers. Discover the stories of three pio
