See, Christina Hoff Sommers, "Baseless Bias and the New Second Sex," and Mark Perry, "Women Now Dominate Higher Education at Every Degree Level; The Female-Male Degree Gap Grows."
Hat Tip: RealClearPolitics.
Thursday, June 11, 2009
The Second Sex in American Higher Education
I just covered gender equality in class today. At least one of my students is well trained in the ideology of "institutional racism and sexism." I normally just nod my head and say, "good point," unless there's an immediate factual issue in dispute. I do often mention that more women attend college and graduate these days than do men. Another student raised the point that on average women make 75 percent of a man's earnings. It's about 80 percent nowadays, so the gap is closing. I expect the gap to close entirely if we see increasing returns to education in the years ahead, and if boys and men continue to fall behind women at all levels of education.
See, Christina Hoff Sommers, "Baseless Bias and the New Second Sex," and Mark Perry, "Women Now Dominate Higher Education at Every Degree Level; The Female-Male Degree Gap Grows."
See, Christina Hoff Sommers, "Baseless Bias and the New Second Sex," and Mark Perry, "Women Now Dominate Higher Education at Every Degree Level; The Female-Male Degree Gap Grows."
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1 comments:
Larry Summers was famously mocked, and eventually driven from the presidency of Harvard, for suggesting that there might be innate differences between men and women which explain why tere are so few women at the top of the professions in math and the hard sciences.
Should this topic continue in the next session of your class, perhaps you might note for the student trained in the ideology of institutional racism and sexism that my older daughter, an engineering major at Penn State (on a temporary hiatus for Army BCT and AIT!) was one of the few women in her classes and her major.
Do a quick survey of how many men vis a vis women are taking engineering or physics or high-level math. Another interesting observation would be how many white, Asian and black students are in these classes. But the point is: students choose their majors themselves, and select their classes themselves! If only 10% of the students in a physics class are women, it's because only 10% of the people who signed up for the class were women.
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