"Gender studies" is usually used as a dog whistle for low rigor Liberal Arts programs like Psychology (as opposed to high rigor STEM programs like Physics). Co

"Gender studies" is usually used as a dog whistle for low rigor Liberal Arts programs like Psychology (as opposed to high rigor STEM programs like Physics). Colleges aggressively enroll low-SAT high schoolers in these low rigor fields, because they want their federal student loan money at overinflated tuition. Colleges have only incentive to overproduce students and hand out diplomas like candy in exchange for student loan money. The problem with over-enrollment of low-SAT students in low rigor fields is Replication crisis[1]. A lot of "research papers" are being produced every year due to sheer over-production of graduate students in these fields, and with pressure to "publish-or-perish" a lot of research ends up bogus, fake, non-replicated or p-hacked. This NYT claim caught my attention because they used words "average wage per gender/race" - which is telling sign they used simple Excel's AVERAGE() to get their "insights". In a more rigorous field like econometrics/statistics, you would be laughed at if you make such claim because average numbers hide a lot of nuance, required to understand the field. If one were to control for certain confounding variables, one would get a much better understanding of a "wage gap" or "racial gap" issue and understand each individual components of the gap, rather than blaming everything on strawman "institutional racism" or "institutional misogyny" or whatever 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Replication_crisis