FROM MARK PERRY in The Wall Street Journal:

Based on Department of Education estimates, women will earn a disproportionate share of college degrees at every level of higher education in 2016 for the eleventh straight year. Overall, women in the Class of 2016 will earn 139 college degrees at all levels for every 100 men, and there will be a 610,000 college degree gap in favor of women for this year’s college graduates (2.195 million total degrees for women vs. 1.585 million total degrees for men). By level of degree, women will earn: a) 154 associate’s degrees for every 100 men (female majority in every year since 1978), b) 135 bachelor’s degrees for every 100 men (female majority since 1982), 139 master’s degrees for every 100 men (female majority since 1987) and 106 doctoral degrees for every 100 men (female majority since 2006). . . .

Now that there’s a huge (and growing) college degree gap in favor of women such that men have become the “second sex” in higher education, maybe it’s time to stop taxpayer funding of hundreds of women’s centers that promote a goal of gender equity that was achieved more than thirty years ago in higher education, at least in terms of earning college degrees? And perhaps the selective concern about gender imbalances in higher education should be expanded to include greater concern about the new “second sex.”

Of course, that will not happen. Feminists can still argue that there is great inequity in certain fields, such as engineering and mathematics. The reason there are not more female mathematicians is, of course, that girls are subject to “cultural norms that favor boys.” Ironically, the more women “succeed,” the more justification there is for government spending to help them “succeed.”

— Comments —

Margaret writes:

It would seem (perhaps ironically) to me that the current state of affairs in colleges is probably pretty reflective of the distribution of IQ across the genders. I would assume, and I may of course be incorrect, that there are many more women in the middle range of intelligence, from slightly below to reasonably above average, and that both male geniuses and men with very low IQs greatly outnumber women at similar IQ levels. [Editor: Yes, this is confirmed by IQ testing.] This is just my own observation, and of course there are men with average IQs, women with very low IQs, and female geniuses as well, but I would assume that the majority follow the pattern I described. And then there are probably many more men than women who will go off on their own (such as the geniuses) to be entrepreneurs or artists, or to work in technical or manual labor fields that don’t require college. And obviously the disproportionate number of men in science is entirely due to the choices of both women and men and not due to discrimination.

My point is to say that it seems things have settled out to what they would “naturally” be, across the genders. Women often enjoy community, security, and reading/writing (again, on average) more than men, and the place to find those today is, perhaps unfortunately, college–or at least where they think they will find it. Meanwhile, men often prefer science, math, business, and independence, so it would make sense for them to focus on one of those fields or go off on their own. However, the response to this is always hysterical, as if it needs to be tweaked and coaxed and incentivized and “fixed” so that we can force some idea of an agendered society. It makes no sense. Why not take things, including gender differences, as they are? We don’t need to ban women from the sciences or men from art and education, as various people have made valuable contributions in all those fields, but we also don’t need to change the natural gender differences that WILL and do exist along those lines. Unless we are trying to force a point…hmm?

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