29 ms·

Women earned the majority of doctoral degrees in 2020 for the 12th straight year

156 points by hncurious 5y ago

roguesupport 5y ago
Half of these degrees are PRETEND. A "liberal arts" "doctorate" means EXACTLY NOTHING. The entire society is going to pay a heavy price for pretending unequal things are equal. Your GenderFaggot Studies degree does NOT equal my Doctorates/Masters in Engineering, Computer Science and Medicine. I refuse to pretend that they are. You should too.
whatshisface 5y ago
Demographic statistics where men are behind are a perfect neutral laboratory environment to study demographics because there's no menminism movement to put their fingers on the scale, and also no matriarchy to put their finger on the scale. At most you get a few tweets making fun of the situation or using it to indirectly make fun of feminists or something, and that's fairly encouraging by normal environmental standards.
- monksy 5y ago
  > Menism Everytime an issue is brought up.. people just completely ridicule the person bringing up the issue.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    If you sound like the biases against you are significant, you're sounding like you don't have a lot of extra resources to absorb the biases with. It's not possible to complain about biases from a position of strength, and it's not possible to get anyone to care about you from a position of weakness. As long as that catch-22 exists there won't be a way for menminists to frame their issues that will be accepted. There is a way around that, which is smuggling menminist issues in cultural devices that result in menminism but don't advocate for it. One example would be the precepts of organized religion which often given certain privileges to men, but on the basis of an authority less pitiful than "the guy from Ms. Doubtfire seems really sad, we should help him." That attitude gets people mocked on Twitter. If I had to predict where menminism will go in the next 100 years, I would expect someone to invent a way to motivate it on anti-pitiful non-victimized grounds. Then it will start gaining traction in modern culture.
    - leereeves 5y ago
      > it's not possible to get anyone to care about you from a position of weakness If that were true, there would never have been any civil rights movement anywhere. Civil rights exist because people do care about oppressed people.
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        Let's break down what we saw in the Civil Rights movement. There were speakers and big marches. There was a lot of pride. MLK focused on appealing to morals and the economic problems caused by discrimination, and the people who were defying authority were doing it to thumb their noses at it. The pathos wasn't, "help me they're fire hosing me :'(" it was, "I am tough and determined enough to get beat up and keep going. We're on the right side of history and they will give up before we do." The victims were calling their victimization endurance. The peace movement, the origins of labor organization... almost every popular movement in US history has been conducted from the perspective of class solidarity, endurance under difficult conditions, and an intent to fight to change something that forces outside the movement didn't want changed. How they're going to make that work for menminism is beyond me, but we're living in the time before the talking points seem obvious. When someone figures out what they are, then everyone will start repeating them until we all have them memorized. That's the way things go.
        leereeves 5y ago
        Yes, the activists were tough and determined enough to get beat up and keep going, but they were badly outnumbered and would never have won by their own strength. Their goal was to keep going long enough to make other people care, not despite but because of the forces deployed against them. Not by enduring oppression long enough that their oppressors got tired of fire hosing them; but long enough to awaken the conscience of people far away. That does take a lot of strength and endurance, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but one can be strong and still be greatly outmatched and in a position of relative weakness.
        5y ago
pimterry 5y ago
(In the US)
- fulafel 5y ago
  Here's Europe: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Number_of_tertiary_education_students_by_sex_and_level_of_education,_2018_(thousands)_ET2020.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Summarization from the parent page (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Tertiary_education_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...): "In 2018, women accounted for 54 % of all tertiary students in the EU-27; however, 52 % of the students following doctoral studies were men. "
cratermoon 5y ago
And after 12 years, what percent of women with PhDs are a. still in academia and b. tenured or working in tenure-track jobs? "While women represent just over half (52.9%) of Assistant Professors and are near parity (46.4%) among Associate Professors, they accounted for barely over a third (34.3%) of Professors in 2018." https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-academia/ https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-academia/ 2019: "female tenured associate professors are fewer in number now than when my colleagues and I began looking at the data in 2003." https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/03/29/though-more-women-are-on-college-campuses-climbing-the-professor-ladder-remains-a-challenge/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/... The Catalyst research doesn't address how many are no longer in academia, but the above cited Brookings article says, "Women experienced disproportionately high rates of leaving academia by their second or third semesters."
sentinel 5y ago
Cue someone talking about equal representation for men for these doctoral degrees :crickets:
- randomopining 5y ago
  Yeah but uhhh, yeah men are like privileged and stuff... uh... The patriarchy is bad.
  - zeppelin101 5y ago
    Eventually you get stories like "How come fewer men are going to college!!" to really blow up. But no one wants to think about the un-PC reasons for it. It's all so tiresome.
    - fidesomnes 5y ago
      When men solve the reproduction of humans without female bodies problem male liberation is going to be nuclear in comparison to women's liberation.
  - dang 5y ago
    Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly and we ban that sort of account. Also, we've already had to ask you this more than once. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
jfk13 5y ago
I notice that Engineering and Math/CS are still heavily male-dominated, though. So are these departments particularly hostile to women, or are women less interested in pursuing these subjects? If so -- in either case, actually -- why might that be?
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  are women less interested in pursuing these subjects? This has always been the case. Just as men are less likely to be nurses/grade school teachers, they don't play to each sex's strengths. And that's ok
  - ghaff 5y ago
    "Preferences" is probably a better term than "strengths" in that context though that doesn't really say anything about root causes.
  - CodeGlitch 5y ago
    Unfortunately HR departments just look at the employment statistics and decide that the numbers need to be 50/50, for some reason. Well they do at my work place anyway.
  - nicoburns 5y ago
    There may be an effect like this, but it’s worth noting that you don’t see these biases in the same way in single-sex high schools, which would indicate a high degree of social norms influencing things.
  - danShumway 5y ago
    This ignores many of the larger historical trends in fields like computing: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-718061/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi... It can often be a surprising exercise to look at the history of fields that are supposed to play to "natural" gender strengths and examine how they've evolved over time. > As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was "just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it's ready when you need it... Women are 'naturals' at computer programming." James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: "I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there's as much opportunity for a woman." Swap out some of the specifics, and the general tone of argument hasn't changed much since back then. It's just that we've now decided to substitute in other "obvious" conclusions about who is suited for which jobs.
fungiblecog 5y ago
I’m guessing this just reflects the declining usefulness of a PhD in the modern world. I received one in 2001 and never used it because the prospects for an academic were terrible and they don’t seem to have improved since.
- jack_riminton 5y ago
  This is also true of the Bachelors degree to a certain extent. With white males this is played out in the media as them lagging behind (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/white-males-fall-behind-students-university-uk-gcse-a-level-results-2v6b2cc6k https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/white-males-fall-behind-s...) but I think its more of a trend of people realising the earning potential of jobs that don't require a degree e.g. plumbing, welding etc.
  - syshum 5y ago
    There is also the fact that many of the traditional jobs that required a standard BS have become over saturated lower the pay for those jobs. While at the same time the push by public schools to send every child to univeristy meant skilled trades suffered from low talent pool driving up wages in those markets. This is a re-balance, and honestly employers need to be look at their positions that traditional they want a degree for, middle management, some IT roles, and other "information worker" roles to take a hard look if those positions really do need a degree. I suspect no...
  - chmsky00 5y ago
    Which is a side effect of educated workers demanding higher wages. Trickle down is purposely built into the political economy. Carmack was recently highlighted for saying it’s easier to educate a doer than motivate the educated. Frankly that almost feels like a nice of way of saying less educated have questionable negotiating skills. I can be busy collecting fractions of cents or lazy and earn more in an office doing data entry, not unstopping toilets. History has shown us a whole lot of those “get er done” programmers and projects just made fragile messes we had to babysit later. If we’re busy “doing” we aren’t negotiating social progress. The goal isn’t perfect mind control, just to persuade folks to move along.
bluGill 5y ago
The total is only 54% to 46% - not too uneven, I'd be very worried if the imbalance was much worse though as it indicates our education system isn't serving males well for whatever reason (the reason might not be the fault of the education system). However it is very insightful to notice that females are only 25% in engineering, and 76% in public administration. Those are the worst imbalances, but there are others almost as bad. There is a lot of work to do in getting real balance.
- dTal 5y ago
  Is the optimal outcome 50/50 representation in every walk of life? Or do certain career preferences naturally skew? How can we tell?
  - dagmx 5y ago
    I don't think 50/50 is a realistic goal. For one, it assumes a very binary split, when demographics are very diverse and combinatorial. What instead should be the case, IMHO, is two fold: - at each milestone level (school, college, hiring, promotions etc...) , we should aim to be within a certain small percentage of the previous milestone. E.g if a class in college starts with 20% Indian women, then it should ideally graduate with ~20% Indian women. The next milestones after that (hiring, promotion) should ideally be reflective of that to some degree. - we should analyze the percentage of people entering fields of education, and see how that represents similar demographic locally, and at the state and federal levels. Using that data we should see why certain demographics are skewed towards and against those fields. Using that we should see if there's any systemic issues keeping them away, and try and balance society accordingly.
    - DeathArrow 5y ago
      >Using that we should see if there's any systemic issues keeping them away, and try and balance society accordingly. What's wrong in letting the society balance itself?
      - 5y ago
Grimm1 5y ago
US education fails boys significantly starting all the way back in elementary school. I knew multiple teachers in high school who talked about how the system fails boys and doesn't know how to engage them and extends especially to minority boys. I think it's a pretty poorly kept open secret. This article basically covers what I've been told for years by educator friends. http://www.cpreview.org/blog/2021/6/why-are-we-failing-our-sons-an-inquiry-into-the-education-gap-that-plagues-young-boys-in-america-today http://www.cpreview.org/blog/2021/6/why-are-we-failing-our-s...
- watwut 5y ago
  The actual split is 54% to 46%, which is something that I would not qualified as significant. It is a difference, but hardly shows that men are disengaged masses.
  - maxk42 5y ago
    That's more than a 17% difference. Seems significant to me.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Significant for what? Understanding our society? For that, any statistically significant result is significant. For forecasting the life course of a person? Not as significant.
      - marcellus23 5y ago
        > For forecasting the life course of a person Where did this come from? When did the discussion apparently become about this?
        whatshisface 5y ago
        There have always been two closely related discussions going on whenever demographics come up. The first is a discussion about what course our society will take, and the second is a discussion about what an individual can expect to see as they make their way through life.
Ekaros 5y ago
Should there be some sort of quota in place? Maybe we should start positive-discrimination in selection of canditates?
- varjag 5y ago
  Some countries do that.
- adventured 5y ago
  In the US quotas only go one direction. You're not even allowed to have public discussions about fixing eg education disasters like what's happening with boys and young men. You'll get attacked, shouted down, called some atrocious names to discredit you, marginalized, and almost universally ignored by the media. Meanwhile essentially all education metrics are worse for boys than for girls, all the way through university and the gap keeps getting worse. At some point the US is going to have to start having a national discussion about it, or the consequences will get a lot more dire (and it's already quite bad).
  - seph-reed 5y ago
    The empathy gap is real. And it weirds me out that everything people truly value: community, love, relationships, romance, heritage, adventure, friends, family... none of these factor in. Just money and power; which are ultimately just more responsibilities if you aren't selfish.
    - redis_mlc 5y ago
      [dead]
- dzink 5y ago
  Should there be a funding quota based on gender for startup teams? Or a hiring quota based on gender for CEOs? In Bulgaria education is free and there are very competitive and selective free high schools that teach languages. When I was there, one high school had a gender quota. The boys admitted needed more than a letter grade less (out of 5) to get into the high school. Another high school had no gender quota and it was 90% girls. Because of the high % of girls in the second school, boys had a very strong additional incentive to be admitted there throughout the years.
Jensson 5y ago
This is actually very high internationally, I wonder why? USA doesn't have particularly high ratio of women in undergrad (they are more than men there as well, but women outnumber men in undergrad in basically every country), so it isn't that they have more women as a base, they just get more women into grad programs. Could international students be the cause? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nations-fare-in-phds-by-sex-interactive1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nations-fare-...
- mywittyname 5y ago
  I think it's that men have more options that don't require formal education. It's better today, but there's still a lot of discrimination and harassment in the constructions or mechanical trades.
  - xyzzyz 5y ago
    I do not think that it is “discrimination and harassment” that is the top reason why women do not become roofers, plumbers, and Diesel engine mechanics as often as men do.
    - mywittyname 5y ago
      My mom was trained in school to rebuild engines. She's pretty good at it too. I remember coming home lots of times to find her rebuilding carburetors, or with a mess of wiring diagrams laid out all over the garage because she's trying to add some feature that was available on one model Toyota, but not her model. She'd buy old beaters, fix them up, and have my dad sell them for spare cash. She also taught me everything I know about home remodeling. Together, she and I basically gutted her home and remodeled it, including dealing with sagging outer walls, poor plumbing installation, electrical wiring, cabinetry, hanging doors/windows. Yet, she never managed to get a job in the field. In the 90s, people just didn't hire women to do these kinds of things.
bell-cot 5y ago
One well-informed tidbit, for those who think that getting a Ph.D. might be desirable, or even a sane decision. (At least in the academic humanities.) - https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-... TL;DR summary - "So Should You Do it? [...] No, you should not. [emphasis mine]"
chipuni 5y ago
Good information. Terrible editorializing.
tomorrowproblem 5y ago
I fail to see why hacker news cares so deeply about this, considering that men continue to dominate the fields of Math, computer and physical sciences, and engineering, as confirmed by the first table in the article: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Grad1.png?x91208 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Grad1.png?x91... Why is an overall difference of 17% of major concern, but a 99.2% difference in the other direction between men and women in math/computer science isn't?
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  First, I don’t know where you got 99.2% from. Second, what is your point, we can’t talk about men being underrepresented anywhere until they are underrepresented everywhere?
- dont__panic 5y ago
  This is just whataboutism. Many of us are concerned about both things.
- go_blue_13 5y ago
  I think you're projecting. Not seeing a lot of 'deep concern' ITT.
- giantg2 5y ago
  I wouldn't say HN cares "so deeply" about this. "Why is an overall difference of 17% of major concern, but a 99.2% difference in the other direction between men and women in math/computer science isn't?" Based on my experience on HN, the community cares more, and discusses more, about the gender differences in computer science than this current topic. I feel they are both deeply related (gender based work preferences).
samuelizdat 5y ago
"Okay google, show me graphs on SSRI prescriptions since 2008." "Siri, show me fastest growing cause of death among women ages 30+ who are unmarried without children." "Alexa, show me how ACT scores are weighted by gender and race... now graph it." Fellas, I think we've been set up.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
GaryTang 5y ago
The gender gap is real but not in the way MSM presents.
smegcicle 5y ago
hundreds of thousands of women in crushing student loan debt.. everyone's talking about the glass ceiling but what's the floor made of?
theHIDninja 5y ago
Yes. that's what happens when you have an institutional bias against men. Why is anybody surprised about it? Why is there no discussion about it?
- ModernMech 5y ago
  It's not really an "institutional bias" against men though. Some programs are skewed highly toward men. Others are skewed highly toward women. There are biases in both directions and when they average out there are more programs biased toward women than men. So is it an institutional bias or a bias in the field of study? You can also see that the gender disparities in academia mirror the gender disparities in their related industries. e.g. more men get PhDs in tech and work in tech, but more women get PhDs in education and work in education. So is it academia that is the biased institution, or is it the related industry? Or are they creating those conditions by biasing who they teach? You can't really say given the statistics here, and you certainly can't use these statistics to support the claim that academia is biased against men! There's nothing here to draw a conclusion that strong.
  - theHIDninja 5y ago
    There are fundamental differences between the sexes and the representation of those sexes in any given field are a reflection of that.
EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago
As economy improves, society can afford more useless jobs, more useless pseudoscience "research", and more useless PhDs. That's it.

156 points by hncurious 5y ago

Half of these degrees are PRETEND. A "liberal arts" "doctorate" means EXACTLY NOTHING. The entire society is going to pay a heavy price for pretending unequal things are equal. Your GenderFaggot Studies degree does NOT equal my Doctorates/Masters in Engineering, Computer Science and Medicine. I refuse to pretend that they are. You should too.

whatshisface 5y ago

Demographic statistics where men are behind are a perfect neutral laboratory environment to study demographics because there's no menminism movement to put their fingers on the scale, and also no matriarchy to put their finger on the scale. At most you get a few tweets making fun of the situation or using it to indirectly make fun of feminists or something, and that's fairly encouraging by normal environmental standards.

monksy 5y ago
> Menism Everytime an issue is brought up.. people just completely ridicule the person bringing up the issue.
- whatshisface 5y ago
  If you sound like the biases against you are significant, you're sounding like you don't have a lot of extra resources to absorb the biases with. It's not possible to complain about biases from a position of strength, and it's not possible to get anyone to care about you from a position of weakness. As long as that catch-22 exists there won't be a way for menminists to frame their issues that will be accepted. There is a way around that, which is smuggling menminist issues in cultural devices that result in menminism but don't advocate for it. One example would be the precepts of organized religion which often given certain privileges to men, but on the basis of an authority less pitiful than "the guy from Ms. Doubtfire seems really sad, we should help him." That attitude gets people mocked on Twitter. If I had to predict where menminism will go in the next 100 years, I would expect someone to invent a way to motivate it on anti-pitiful non-victimized grounds. Then it will start gaining traction in modern culture.
  - leereeves 5y ago
    > it's not possible to get anyone to care about you from a position of weakness If that were true, there would never have been any civil rights movement anywhere. Civil rights exist because people do care about oppressed people.
    - whatshisface 5y ago
      Let's break down what we saw in the Civil Rights movement. There were speakers and big marches. There was a lot of pride. MLK focused on appealing to morals and the economic problems caused by discrimination, and the people who were defying authority were doing it to thumb their noses at it. The pathos wasn't, "help me they're fire hosing me :'(" it was, "I am tough and determined enough to get beat up and keep going. We're on the right side of history and they will give up before we do." The victims were calling their victimization endurance. The peace movement, the origins of labor organization... almost every popular movement in US history has been conducted from the perspective of class solidarity, endurance under difficult conditions, and an intent to fight to change something that forces outside the movement didn't want changed. How they're going to make that work for menminism is beyond me, but we're living in the time before the talking points seem obvious. When someone figures out what they are, then everyone will start repeating them until we all have them memorized. That's the way things go.
      - leereeves 5y ago
        Yes, the activists were tough and determined enough to get beat up and keep going, but they were badly outnumbered and would never have won by their own strength. Their goal was to keep going long enough to make other people care, not despite but because of the forces deployed against them. Not by enduring oppression long enough that their oppressors got tired of fire hosing them; but long enough to awaken the conscience of people far away. That does take a lot of strength and endurance, I'm not suggesting otherwise, but one can be strong and still be greatly outmatched and in a position of relative weakness.
        5y ago

pimterry 5y ago

(In the US)

fulafel 5y ago
Here's Europe: https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Number_of_tertiary_education_students_by_sex_and_level_of_education,_2018_(thousands)_ET2020.png https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php... Summarization from the parent page (https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=Tertiary_education_statistics https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...): "In 2018, women accounted for 54 % of all tertiary students in the EU-27; however, 52 % of the students following doctoral studies were men. "

cratermoon 5y ago

And after 12 years, what percent of women with PhDs are a. still in academia and b. tenured or working in tenure-track jobs? "While women represent just over half (52.9%) of Assistant Professors and are near parity (46.4%) among Associate Professors, they accounted for barely over a third (34.3%) of Professors in 2018." https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-academia/ https://www.catalyst.org/research/women-in-academia/ 2019: "female tenured associate professors are fewer in number now than when my colleagues and I began looking at the data in 2003." https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/03/29/though-more-women-are-on-college-campuses-climbing-the-professor-ladder-remains-a-challenge/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/brown-center-chalkboard/2019/... The Catalyst research doesn't address how many are no longer in academia, but the above cited Brookings article says, "Women experienced disproportionately high rates of leaving academia by their second or third semesters."

sentinel 5y ago

Cue someone talking about equal representation for men for these doctoral degrees :crickets:

randomopining 5y ago
Yeah but uhhh, yeah men are like privileged and stuff... uh... The patriarchy is bad.
- zeppelin101 5y ago
  Eventually you get stories like "How come fewer men are going to college!!" to really blow up. But no one wants to think about the un-PC reasons for it. It's all so tiresome.
  - fidesomnes 5y ago
    When men solve the reproduction of humans without female bodies problem male liberation is going to be nuclear in comparison to women's liberation.
- dang 5y ago
  Would you please stop posting flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN? You've been doing it repeatedly and we ban that sort of account. Also, we've already had to ask you this more than once. If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

jfk13 5y ago

I notice that Engineering and Math/CS are still heavily male-dominated, though. So are these departments particularly hostile to women, or are women less interested in pursuing these subjects? If so -- in either case, actually -- why might that be?

JohnWhigham 5y ago
are women less interested in pursuing these subjects? This has always been the case. Just as men are less likely to be nurses/grade school teachers, they don't play to each sex's strengths. And that's ok
- ghaff 5y ago
  "Preferences" is probably a better term than "strengths" in that context though that doesn't really say anything about root causes.
- CodeGlitch 5y ago
  Unfortunately HR departments just look at the employment statistics and decide that the numbers need to be 50/50, for some reason. Well they do at my work place anyway.
- nicoburns 5y ago
  There may be an effect like this, but it’s worth noting that you don’t see these biases in the same way in single-sex high schools, which would indicate a high degree of social norms influencing things.
- danShumway 5y ago
  This ignores many of the larger historical trends in fields like computing: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programming-used-to-be-womens-work-718061/ https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/computer-programmi... It can often be a surprising exercise to look at the history of fields that are supposed to play to "natural" gender strengths and examine how they've evolved over time. > As computer scientist Dr. Grace Hopper told a reporter, programming was "just like planning a dinner. You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so that it's ready when you need it... Women are 'naturals' at computer programming." James Adams, the director of education for the Association for Computing Machinery, agreed: "I don’t know of any other field, outside of teaching, where there's as much opportunity for a woman." Swap out some of the specifics, and the general tone of argument hasn't changed much since back then. It's just that we've now decided to substitute in other "obvious" conclusions about who is suited for which jobs.

fungiblecog 5y ago

I’m guessing this just reflects the declining usefulness of a PhD in the modern world. I received one in 2001 and never used it because the prospects for an academic were terrible and they don’t seem to have improved since.

jack_riminton 5y ago
This is also true of the Bachelors degree to a certain extent. With white males this is played out in the media as them lagging behind (https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/white-males-fall-behind-students-university-uk-gcse-a-level-results-2v6b2cc6k https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/white-males-fall-behind-s...) but I think its more of a trend of people realising the earning potential of jobs that don't require a degree e.g. plumbing, welding etc.
- syshum 5y ago
  There is also the fact that many of the traditional jobs that required a standard BS have become over saturated lower the pay for those jobs. While at the same time the push by public schools to send every child to univeristy meant skilled trades suffered from low talent pool driving up wages in those markets. This is a re-balance, and honestly employers need to be look at their positions that traditional they want a degree for, middle management, some IT roles, and other "information worker" roles to take a hard look if those positions really do need a degree. I suspect no...
- chmsky00 5y ago
  Which is a side effect of educated workers demanding higher wages. Trickle down is purposely built into the political economy. Carmack was recently highlighted for saying it’s easier to educate a doer than motivate the educated. Frankly that almost feels like a nice of way of saying less educated have questionable negotiating skills. I can be busy collecting fractions of cents or lazy and earn more in an office doing data entry, not unstopping toilets. History has shown us a whole lot of those “get er done” programmers and projects just made fragile messes we had to babysit later. If we’re busy “doing” we aren’t negotiating social progress. The goal isn’t perfect mind control, just to persuade folks to move along.

bluGill 5y ago

The total is only 54% to 46% - not too uneven, I'd be very worried if the imbalance was much worse though as it indicates our education system isn't serving males well for whatever reason (the reason might not be the fault of the education system). However it is very insightful to notice that females are only 25% in engineering, and 76% in public administration. Those are the worst imbalances, but there are others almost as bad. There is a lot of work to do in getting real balance.

dTal 5y ago
Is the optimal outcome 50/50 representation in every walk of life? Or do certain career preferences naturally skew? How can we tell?
- dagmx 5y ago
  I don't think 50/50 is a realistic goal. For one, it assumes a very binary split, when demographics are very diverse and combinatorial. What instead should be the case, IMHO, is two fold: - at each milestone level (school, college, hiring, promotions etc...) , we should aim to be within a certain small percentage of the previous milestone. E.g if a class in college starts with 20% Indian women, then it should ideally graduate with ~20% Indian women. The next milestones after that (hiring, promotion) should ideally be reflective of that to some degree. - we should analyze the percentage of people entering fields of education, and see how that represents similar demographic locally, and at the state and federal levels. Using that data we should see why certain demographics are skewed towards and against those fields. Using that we should see if there's any systemic issues keeping them away, and try and balance society accordingly.
  - DeathArrow 5y ago
    >Using that we should see if there's any systemic issues keeping them away, and try and balance society accordingly. What's wrong in letting the society balance itself?
    - 5y ago

Grimm1 5y ago

US education fails boys significantly starting all the way back in elementary school. I knew multiple teachers in high school who talked about how the system fails boys and doesn't know how to engage them and extends especially to minority boys. I think it's a pretty poorly kept open secret. This article basically covers what I've been told for years by educator friends. http://www.cpreview.org/blog/2021/6/why-are-we-failing-our-sons-an-inquiry-into-the-education-gap-that-plagues-young-boys-in-america-today http://www.cpreview.org/blog/2021/6/why-are-we-failing-our-s...

watwut 5y ago
The actual split is 54% to 46%, which is something that I would not qualified as significant. It is a difference, but hardly shows that men are disengaged masses.
- maxk42 5y ago
  That's more than a 17% difference. Seems significant to me.
  - whatshisface 5y ago
    Significant for what? Understanding our society? For that, any statistically significant result is significant. For forecasting the life course of a person? Not as significant.
    - marcellus23 5y ago
      > For forecasting the life course of a person Where did this come from? When did the discussion apparently become about this?
      - whatshisface 5y ago
        There have always been two closely related discussions going on whenever demographics come up. The first is a discussion about what course our society will take, and the second is a discussion about what an individual can expect to see as they make their way through life.

Ekaros 5y ago

Should there be some sort of quota in place? Maybe we should start positive-discrimination in selection of canditates?

varjag 5y ago
Some countries do that.
adventured 5y ago
In the US quotas only go one direction. You're not even allowed to have public discussions about fixing eg education disasters like what's happening with boys and young men. You'll get attacked, shouted down, called some atrocious names to discredit you, marginalized, and almost universally ignored by the media. Meanwhile essentially all education metrics are worse for boys than for girls, all the way through university and the gap keeps getting worse. At some point the US is going to have to start having a national discussion about it, or the consequences will get a lot more dire (and it's already quite bad).
- seph-reed 5y ago
  The empathy gap is real. And it weirds me out that everything people truly value: community, love, relationships, romance, heritage, adventure, friends, family... none of these factor in. Just money and power; which are ultimately just more responsibilities if you aren't selfish.
  - redis_mlc 5y ago
    [dead]
dzink 5y ago
Should there be a funding quota based on gender for startup teams? Or a hiring quota based on gender for CEOs? In Bulgaria education is free and there are very competitive and selective free high schools that teach languages. When I was there, one high school had a gender quota. The boys admitted needed more than a letter grade less (out of 5) to get into the high school. Another high school had no gender quota and it was 90% girls. Because of the high % of girls in the second school, boys had a very strong additional incentive to be admitted there throughout the years.

Jensson 5y ago

This is actually very high internationally, I wonder why? USA doesn't have particularly high ratio of women in undergrad (they are more than men there as well, but women outnumber men in undergrad in basically every country), so it isn't that they have more women as a base, they just get more women into grad programs. Could international students be the cause? https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nations-fare-in-phds-by-sex-interactive1/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-nations-fare-...

mywittyname 5y ago
I think it's that men have more options that don't require formal education. It's better today, but there's still a lot of discrimination and harassment in the constructions or mechanical trades.
- xyzzyz 5y ago
  I do not think that it is “discrimination and harassment” that is the top reason why women do not become roofers, plumbers, and Diesel engine mechanics as often as men do.
  - mywittyname 5y ago
    My mom was trained in school to rebuild engines. She's pretty good at it too. I remember coming home lots of times to find her rebuilding carburetors, or with a mess of wiring diagrams laid out all over the garage because she's trying to add some feature that was available on one model Toyota, but not her model. She'd buy old beaters, fix them up, and have my dad sell them for spare cash. She also taught me everything I know about home remodeling. Together, she and I basically gutted her home and remodeled it, including dealing with sagging outer walls, poor plumbing installation, electrical wiring, cabinetry, hanging doors/windows. Yet, she never managed to get a job in the field. In the 90s, people just didn't hire women to do these kinds of things.

bell-cot 5y ago

One well-informed tidbit, for those who think that getting a Ph.D. might be desirable, or even a sane decision. (At least in the academic humanities.) - https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-to-grad-school-in-the-academic-humanities/ https://acoup.blog/2021/10/01/collections-so-you-want-to-go-... TL;DR summary - "So Should You Do it? [...] No, you should not. [emphasis mine]"

chipuni 5y ago

Good information. Terrible editorializing.

tomorrowproblem 5y ago

I fail to see why hacker news cares so deeply about this, considering that men continue to dominate the fields of Math, computer and physical sciences, and engineering, as confirmed by the first table in the article: https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Grad1.png?x91208 https://www.aei.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/10/Grad1.png?x91... Why is an overall difference of 17% of major concern, but a 99.2% difference in the other direction between men and women in math/computer science isn't?

xyzzyz 5y ago
First, I don’t know where you got 99.2% from. Second, what is your point, we can’t talk about men being underrepresented anywhere until they are underrepresented everywhere?
dont__panic 5y ago
This is just whataboutism. Many of us are concerned about both things.
go_blue_13 5y ago
I think you're projecting. Not seeing a lot of 'deep concern' ITT.
giantg2 5y ago
I wouldn't say HN cares "so deeply" about this. "Why is an overall difference of 17% of major concern, but a 99.2% difference in the other direction between men and women in math/computer science isn't?" Based on my experience on HN, the community cares more, and discusses more, about the gender differences in computer science than this current topic. I feel they are both deeply related (gender based work preferences).

samuelizdat 5y ago

"Okay google, show me graphs on SSRI prescriptions since 2008." "Siri, show me fastest growing cause of death among women ages 30+ who are unmarried without children." "Alexa, show me how ACT scores are weighted by gender and race... now graph it." Fellas, I think we've been set up.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

GaryTang 5y ago

The gender gap is real but not in the way MSM presents.

smegcicle 5y ago

hundreds of thousands of women in crushing student loan debt.. everyone's talking about the glass ceiling but what's the floor made of?

theHIDninja 5y ago

Yes. that's what happens when you have an institutional bias against men. Why is anybody surprised about it? Why is there no discussion about it?

ModernMech 5y ago
It's not really an "institutional bias" against men though. Some programs are skewed highly toward men. Others are skewed highly toward women. There are biases in both directions and when they average out there are more programs biased toward women than men. So is it an institutional bias or a bias in the field of study? You can also see that the gender disparities in academia mirror the gender disparities in their related industries. e.g. more men get PhDs in tech and work in tech, but more women get PhDs in education and work in education. So is it academia that is the biased institution, or is it the related industry? Or are they creating those conditions by biasing who they teach? You can't really say given the statistics here, and you certainly can't use these statistics to support the claim that academia is biased against men! There's nothing here to draw a conclusion that strong.
- theHIDninja 5y ago
  There are fundamental differences between the sexes and the representation of those sexes in any given field are a reflection of that.

EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 5y ago

As economy improves, society can afford more useless jobs, more useless pseudoscience "research", and more useless PhDs. That's it.