Women’s fault
And what are these bad clever women supposed to do?
Men fall behind women, and that’s a problem
More female graduates will change work for the better but create a dangerous pool of underachieving and alienated men.
Oh I see, it’s our fault. We create dangerous pools of alienated men who don’t do much. How do we create them? By being cleverer and doing more. The evil just never ends, does it. It might be best to kill most of us off, even things out a little.
Via
The “dangerous pool of underachieving and alienated men” will then put on gender identities and go into the women’s changing room, where they will immediately stop being dangerous. Problem solved!
He really needn’t worry himself overmuch. As long as men maintain the old-boy school networks built in the frat houses and secret societies, men will hold on to the power structure.
But seriously, how did men get to be such a batch of spoiled wilting ninnies? Where are the achievers, where are Ayn Rand’s Heroic Men striving to overcome any obstacles? How have they decided that the competition from women is so hard to overcome that they just give up on striving in the Captitalist System?
One would almost think that the drive against abortions is fed by men’s insecurity about competing with women.
I take quite a bit of sympathy to Jeff Maurer’s take on this issue; not everyone is suited for University, and outsourcing vocational training to the academy has deeply perverted what the academy purports to be about.
But…yes, if we collectively say that everyone *must* go to University in order to have a worthwhile life (or, more derangedly, in order to be a worthwhile person), and more and more men find themselves simply incapable of meeting these standards…there simply will be a large number of angry, frustrated, directionless men for whom it will be all too easy to blame the more-successful women for everything they could not achieve. Women as a group did not rig the game, but there is a good chance they’ll be left holding the bill.
I recommend we convince companies to do their own vocational training, and we collectively value manual labour much more than the ability to write an incisive essay, and we let as many women as wish to go to University.
Seth, I’m sort of onboard with you, but you lost it with that last sentence. You are effectively saying we should value “men’s” work more, and devalue “women’s” work. Well, that’s already happened. That has happened throughout history. Women are allowed to succeed in fields the men don’t value, and there is no reason to devalue the “ability to write an incisive essay” (and education is much, much more than that); we can just strive to value other worthwhile professions as well.
This fiendish meme of male underachievement has been going around for a long time; I’ve seen it over and over. “Boys aren’t doing as well as girls, so we have a crisis.” When girls were forced into Home Ec and you never saw them in Chemistry class? Not a crisis, no, that was the natural state of things.
It reminds me of an article I was reading a while back about the “dangerous” loss of male OB/GYNs. The field is now dominated by women (imagine that!) and this is a horrible, tragic, disastrous, the world going to come to an end type problem. They interviewed some female medical students specializing in OB/GYN, and reported that the “girls” wished there were more men in the field. They felt, and my jaw dropped, that they needed to have the male perspective. Excuse me, but WTF? Why? And why aren’t there similar articles bemoaning the lack of women doctors doing prostate exams? Why is the need for a “female perspective” not important in men’s health?
No need to answer; it’s rhetorical.
Seth, thanks for posting Jeff Maurer’s article. I find it quite humorous, e.g.
That’s far better than what I have to say about proclamations like Gerard Baker’s:
How can a recent trend can be at the root of social pathologies? That’s bad writing at best. But maybe Baker doesn’t know how plants work. Roots before fruits, bro!
Maurer’s analysis seems more reasonable: more guys are foregoing college because it costs too damn much.
A lot of guys can get jobs right out of high school these days. There’s a massive shortage of builders and landscapers now, and we have a 5.2% national unemployment rate, which is considered “full employment.” I’d hire a high school graduate tomorrow if he could bother to learn the difference among plants and didn’t get exhausted after working for an hour, like I do.
I used to teach at the college level, and I saw a lot of kids who had no purpose in being there – they were just pumped through the educational tube by peristalsis and ended up in college wondering why. They were ill-served by the insistence that they had to go to college (and, mostly, had to borrow massive sums of money to do it). Meanwhile, there are good jobs, apprenticeships, etc. going looking right now.
I’m from the generation where progress stalled, Gen X. We couldn’t just rake it in out of the gate like the Baby Boomers could. Many of my age peers graduated college and just went back to whatever they would have done without college. For some, it took a decade (and further college) to get on a professional track. After us came Gen Y, which was the first generation to look forward to lower earnings than the previous. This was all over the press by 2016.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/mar/07/revealed-30-year-economic-betrayal-dragging-down-generation-y-income?CMP=Share_iOSApp_Other
The generation following that is now at college age. If they’ve been paying attention at all, why would they see the debt and underemployment of the previous generation and say ‘sounds good, let me turn down this available job and roll the dice on college?’
The jobs going looking for employees now include such male-dominated fields as construction (91% men), firefighting (96% men), EMTs, paramedics, ambulance drivers… half of men who aren’t college educated work in a heavily male-dominated field like these.
https://www.indeed.com/lead/fastest-growing-male-jobs
It’s a very sensible idea for a young fellow to be a bricklayer for a decade and then go to college when his knees give out. Why are more women going to college? Because that plan makes far less sense for them.
This is poorly written. There’s a big difference between saying the women are creating the problem (“look what you did, Karen!”) and saying a situation involves both positives and negatives. The headline does the former, but presumably intends to do the latter. Needs appropriate tweaking.
Came up in the B&R Paige Harden interview: why is are many of society’s benefits gated behind education. She was talking about it in the sense that academic ability would vary by what your genetics are capable of and improving outcomes based on that but it seems relevant.
Headlines and subheads are so often badly written. It gets on my nerves.
One explanation I’ve heard, by a woman who wrote a book on the scam of for-profit “universities,” is that the substance of the university education can be irrelevant, but what it shows employers is whether you’re good at learning or not. Jobs require learning, so they want to know that. I think part of her point was that university education doesn’t have to be strictly vocational, because even learning about poetry or medieval history is a test of ability to learn.
Yes, here it is:
I had an employer tell me in an interview that a liberal arts education is more valuable to an employer in the long run even though a vocational degree may land someone a job initially at a higher salary; because the liberal arts degree shows that a candidate has had a more formalized educaiton in learning structure and is more adabtable to changing conditions, while a voational degree shows that a person has training in a job as it is right now.
If men are largely going the vocational route to have good-paying jobs right now, such as in construction or autobody work, perhaps they will gain enough experience working with women who are their managers with college degrees, that they won’t be in such a snit about women running the company.
We’re not all babies.
Yes! I think that’s what Cottom was saying – that vocational training isn’t as useful as people think and liberal education is a lot more so than they think, because of the learning to learn aspect.
This is how I remember things were for those of us born in the fifties. When I left secondary school in 1976, all general education was still being run, and paid for, by the government. So they had a vested interest in making sure that, insofar as possible, only those teens who would stick at studying and actually gain a good degree were funnelled into university. So kids were tested at eleven to assess what kind of further learning they were suited to, and the more academically-minded kids were sent to grammar (arts and sciences track) and technical (engineering track) schools, and those of a more practical bent were sent to secondary moderns (vocational training track). Of course, regardless of the intent of the inventors of the ‘eleven-plus’ pseudo-psychological/IQ test, everybody regarded it as a simple ‘pass or fail’.
Above all this, and quite separate from it, was the for-profit educational system, of fee-paying schools. Public schools being those which would accept any child whose parents could afford the fees, and private schools being those which had stricter criteria (in addition to being able to afford the fees/qualify for a bursary or scholarship).
Regardless of intent, with few exceptions the working class kids largely went to secondary moderns and, after getting their CSEs, went into basic jobs such as shop assistants and labourers, or community college; after earning City and Guilds certificates, they went on to become nurses, secretaries and mechanics. The middle class kids largely went to grammar and technical schools, and armed with GCEs went into nice, middle-class jobs; or, with ‘A’ levels, university; and became doctors, vets, engineers, architects and the like. The upper class kids went to Oxbridge and became lawyers, CEOs and politicians.
The socialists didn’t like this at all. Dividing kids into classes at the age of eleven on the basis of an elitist IQ test is manifestly unfair, so Labour tried their best to destroy the old three-tier system and make all children go to the same secondary schools regardless of their class, and receive the same education and study for the same exams (GCSEs). It worked; unprecedented numbers of working class children started to qualify for a university education, and join the middle class. The reactionaries didn’t like this at all; they like to have people stay in nice categories for them to boss about. At the first opportunity the Conservatives introduced fees for attending university again, putting social climbing once again out of reach for most. However, once your university is making a profit from its students, you’ll want to have as many students as you can get in through the door. Community colleges became universities, and could issue degrees instead of certificates. The reactionaries have responded by regarding a basic bachelor’s degree as the equivalent of a nice set of ‘A’ levels or a certificate, thus making it harder for anyone to get into a good job to earn the money needed to pay for a university education.
Add in the rise in house prices fueled by wealthy speculators, and thus cripplingly expensive mortgages, ‘Boomer’ parents like me have found it very difficult to have enough money in savings to pay the costs of educating our children, never mind helping them with housing. The only winners have been, as usual, the upper class. Don’t blame ‘The Boomers’ for the current situation; blame the wealthy, and the left wing parties for being too absorbed with ambition and in-fighting to fight for the rights of their natural constituency.
[…] a comment by tigger the wing on Women’s […]
So, that whole meritocracy thing? Where are all the sides on this now, LOL!?
The person who gets the highest score on the test and the highest grades wins according to meritocracy theory, but when women get an even playing field to compete and start taking all the top spots by MERIT, suddenly we must not take what we rightfully earned because some men feel those prizes should never be rightfully ours?
Maybe we should be telling these men to get therapy, work on the “soft” side of their skill-set, smile more, be kind and, most of all, be gracious when they don’t get their every wish fulfilled.
That is certainly how we view it at my firm, at least at the level of a bachelor’s degree. For the stuff that we hire new graduates for, there’s really no university training that is of any specific use, but having earned that degree demonstrates that they can commit to a years-long program and see it through, too. That’s a big deal. Our projects require a person to be able to stick to it for years and not give up in frustration after a few failures. Of course, being a technical firm, we tend to attract engineering undergraduates, but we recently hired a graduate in History. Will she tire of the technical work and move on? Maybe, maybe not. She’s doing a great job writing harness code that was completely new to her, though, so she could stay if she wants to. Like all the rest of our undergraduate hires she was basically worthless for a few months before suddenly cresting the learning curve and becoming useful. At the level of a master’s degree it’s different, in that there are specific focuses/specialties that we need and look for the student having expertise in. If I need you to design a test simulation for a stochastic process then you need to have studied that and done it in your master’s program; I can’t afford the years it will take you to come up to speed if the concepts are all new. But if I need you to write a half dozen Go scripts with well-defined inputs and outputs, I can just toss you a copy of “The GO Programming Language” and tell you to read it and come back in six months and you’ll be good. The person with the bachelor’s degree excels at that.
Interestingly, at the level of a doctorate, it’s once again unimportant; it’s enough that they saw the program through (because we can generally count on anyone who has fought for funding and ground through all the requirements of a PhD like professional writing, research, conferences, peer evaluation, peer development, etc. to have learned enough to be able to transfer those skills).
James, I think you’ve described the importance of college degrees in the corporate world very well.
That was my road. I made a lateral jump at the end of my PhD to a completely unrelated job (which paid a lot more than being a professor out in the sticks) and the things I learned during my academic career helped me excel at that job, and earn further knowledge-based qualifications. And, yes, my ability to learn to code very quickly (in my case, VBA scripts to parse data logs) was important later in my job and certainly something I improved at through the mental calisthenics of college.
That said, like the men discussed above, I would also have been unready to do, and uninterested in doing, that kind of work when I was in my early twenties.
The job I got right out of college was not related to my degree, but it was interesting to note who seemed to last in the job – women. The men left quickly, or didn’t survive probation, because they weren’t use to taking crap, I guess. About two years after I got the job, they changed the requirements on the job description to prioritize liberal arts degrees, because those were the individuals most likely to succeed.
I remember about two years before I left, they announced that their next round of hiring (15 examiners) was going to be all white men, because there were so few white men. Well, that was rather bogus. How they arrived at that was to count all the black women and men working there (including custodians and typists), but only count the examiners when they counted the white men. The white men mostly moved to higher levels soon after hire if they survived probation, so there weren’t as many among the examiners, which were dominated by white women (who moved up only slowly if at all). Within the year, they had changed the standards to prioritize the liberal arts education. Go figure.
Also, I suspect that having a liberal arts education, besides not training you for a specific field, made jobs less available so people were less likely to leave.