Yesterday I declared that the feminisation of education was complete and we should all start worrying about other things now. I was, as I am wont to be, a tad hasty perhaps.

For there is something which still isn’t quite right. That is the occupational segregation in hte education system. It is indeed true that more degrees are awarded to women now than are to men, but it’s also true that the subjects studied can be wildly different.

As you can see, there are huge differences in what it is that men and women choose to study.

Now this doesn’t surprise us much around here. For the very basis of our EQSQ personality test is that there will indeed be such differences on average. Human minds are arrayed on a spectrum, from those interested in systems and processes (what we call “systemisers”) to those interested in other people (”empathisers”). Everyone has a little of both, of course, but we do find men clustered at the systemising end, women at the empathising. Do, please, note that this is about averages, not an individual. An individual can of course be anywhere upon that spectrum.

OK, so it’s also not too much of a stretch to think that these brain types might also influence job or career choice, right? It might be what it is that a certain brain type enjoys or it might be what it’s good at. But we can all accept the thought that certain people will be predisposed to certain activities….and that this split might not be equal between men and women.

Now to the extent that the choices in the chart above are made for such rational reasons we’re of course delighted. But there is something of a problem still.

I have no problem if women want to spend four years at college studying (at their own expense) the role of indigenous women in the postmodernist Marxist movement of 1960’s Paraguay, or whatever.  However, I do have a problem when these same folks later complain that their income is below average or they are under-represented in the board room.

College degrees most dominated by women include library science, consumer science, social science, education, language, psychology, and gender studies.  Top college degrees most dominated by men include construction trades, engineering tech, transportation, military technologies, engineering and computer science.

Sorry, but I cannot imagine any possible restructuring of society and the economy where the first list is more valuable and has higher income potential than the second list.

There’s part of the gender pay gap right there. In the subjects that men and women differentially decide to get their training in. And I agree, I cannot think of any method (short of a full blooded and bloody Marxist takeover) which would reorder society so that, say, librarians were paid more than computer engineers.

So we’re rather stuck at a little bit of an impass here. That people go and study what they want, what they’re suited for is great. But it does seem to be one of the things leading to the pay gap later on in working life.

I’m not sure there’s any solution here at all. It just depends upon which trade off you prefer I guess.

I’ve been less than complimentary about what I see as the feminisation of education over the past few decades. This feminisation to me is about the reduction in the importance of exams and tests and more weight being put upon course and project work.

Of course, I’ve no real proof that this is in fact “feminisation”, that’s really rather just prejudice on my part. Well, except for the fact that those pushing for these changes did so because they insisted that an education system based purely upon test results was something which favored competitive boys rather than girls.

However, there’s another meaning to the “feminisation of education” phrase and that’s one that I fully support. That is, that in the upper reaches of the education system, at college, more women than men are now getting their degrees.

The proof is here at this Carpe Diem post.

Now we all know that women make up the majority of those entering college….and we’ve all also known that the majority of Bachelor degrees have been to women for some years now. But the important point to be made now is that since the mid 1980s, more Masters degrees have been awarded to women than to men.

That still doesn’t show equality in education of course: what about higher degrees, Doctorates for example? Will the feminisation of education get that far? Actually, it already has. Since 2006 the majority awarded go to women.

In every year before 2006, men received more doctoral degrees than women, and in every year after that women are projected to earn more doctoral degrees than men (see graph below). By 2016, women will receive slightly more than 55% of doctoral degrees vs. less than 45% for men.

I’d say that shows that the education system is pretty well feminised now. Whatever it was that we needed to do we have done. It’s fixed, so perhaps we can stop worrying about it and go on to some other problem?

For all the complaints we hear about the structural inequality of our patriarchal society, it is true that equality continues to advance.

Now to understand this you’ll need to grasp something about the British legal system. Firstly, that it’sactually teo systems, one for England and Wales and another for Scotland. Secondly, that we have two different types of lawyers. While the differences are slightly fading away, there’s still a distinction made between solicitors and barristers. Solicitors are the people that do the office work. Wills, property transfers, all that sort of stuff. They also do the office work of preparing a case for a trial. Then they hand over to the barristers who do the actual getting up on their hind legs and talking in court bit.

Slightly odd I agree, but it does allow people to specialise.

Now, for solicitors the intake has been majority female for well over a decade now.  For barristers not so much. Actually, they’re called advocates in Scotland but it’s the same thing, the talking in court bit.

…the Faculty of Advocates passes a significant milestone next week with the arrival, for the first time, of as many female trainees as male ones.

Over the previous 20 years, the ratio of “intrants” starting their nine-month training at the Bar has generally been three or four males to every female. One year in the early 1990s, the intake was 19 men and one woman.

The percentage of women joining more recently has varied between 35 and 40 per cent. This autumn’s intake, however, is a near 50-50 split.

It may take some time for the equality in numbers to filter through to the top. The Scottish Bar is small, with 462 practising members of whom 110 - or 23 per cent - are women. Amongst the 96 silks, or QCs, the percentage of women is only 16 per cent.

(Just to add more detail, silks are the senior lawyers.)

Now this reflects on of my favourite contentions. It’s no good looking at the earnings of all women, or the number of women at the top of a prfession, or even the number of women in total in a career or profession. For we know that in years gone by there was indeed discrimination against women. When we try to work out what needs to be done about equality we need to look at it all by age cohort.

Are wages for women in their 20s the same as mens’? Actually, umm, yes, they are. Are there roughly equal numbers of men and women entering the traditionally highly paid professions? As above, yes, there are.

So it would seem that, at least in part, we’ve already done the heavy lifting required to make access to professional careers equal. We now have to simply wait for the current generation to work their way through the system and we’ll have solved it all, yes?

Well, no, not quite. For we’ve still got this career break for motherhood thing to contend with.

But it is still true to say that equality advances: in many, if not most areas of life, we have at least got to the equality of opportunity stage for both men and women. Perhaps not yet perfect but better than it was, no?

No, not that male crisis at college, where women are now the majority of most incoming classes. Rather, something I’d never thought about.

When Aman Kidwai arrived at the University of Connecticut, he was scared, nervous and anxious like most young men. And, like most young men, he didn’t talk about it.

He had played football and run track in high school, and while he might have played sports at a Division 3 school, he wasn’t going to play at UConn. He was used to the highly structured life of high school, with every moment spoken for, ever-vigilant parents and teachers and a team full of friends.

The university felt cold and impersonal and he had a hard time connecting with people, much less discussing his uncomfortable feelings.

“Those are tough feelings to emote,” said Kidwai, now a senior, “tough feelings to tell anyone about.” He found himself skipping classes just because he could.

While most kids — young men and young women — have a mix of anxiety and excitement when they head off for college, experts on men and masculinity say that young men handle those feelings differently from young women and therefore often experience different problems and sometimes greater difficulties in the transition.

The article then goes on to discuss the ways in which colleges might help those who find this transition difficult. For example, we’re used to the idea that there should be a women’s center on campus. Should we now have a mens’ center as well? Or those student counsellors that already exist: can we make sure that they’re not entirely female focused and are willing and able to deal with the different ways that men deal with and express their emotions?

This is all very well but there’s a part of me that wants to deride all of this.

Jason Zelesky, wellness outreach coordinator at Clark University in Worcester, Mass., said that “the whole formation or the social construction of masculinity sends young men these lofty and unfair messages about what it means to be a young man,” and that it’s “a narrative of violence, confrontation, fierce independence, of a sort of emotional apathy or non-communication of emotion with the exception of anger.”

“Our dashboard indicators are pretty convincing that for the most part it is men who are the predominant judicial load (at the university); men acting out in residence halls, men transported to the hospital for drinking too much,” Zelesky said. “The numbers bear that out.”

The real question is whether this is indeed part of the social construction of masculinity or whether it’s something innate about masculinity? Of course, not every man drinks too much, or has a propensity for violence, but on average men are more likely to do both than women are. Is this innate or learned behavior?

We’re not going to solve that nature/nurture argument here in a blog post but it’s difficult to think that none of it is innate…the argument is how much is nature and how much nurture, surely?

So I find myself a little conflicted about all of this. Aiding people through one of the great transitions of life, from child to adult, is of course a great and valid thing to do. But to wrap it all up in therapy speak just doesn’t work for me, sorry.

This is an interesting new thing to worry about I think: college gender imbalances. It’s only what, a generation ago (from my aged view point, perhaps two from yours) that we were all decrying the manner in which women were so discriminated against in their not being able to go to college in the same way that the men did.

Now the question is being asked the other way around: women are at most colleges 60% or more of the entry group so how is this going to affect matters?

The fear is that in a society where women (and the assumption is that most women of college age in hte US are either sexually active or at least desire to be: not an entirely outrageous assumption in either my experience or expectation) are in such a majority that the norms of monogamy, even of the serial kind, will fall away. Men find it so easy to get a date that they don’t worry too much about fidelity to such a date: women similarly are so interested in a date that they don’t demand said fidelity.

It all actually sounds rather attractive from the male point of view, to be sure, but I’m not convinced that it’s actually that much of a problem. People do after all leave college and while those young men might be able to make hay (or sow wild oats to switch analogies) while there, boy, are they going to get a shock when they come out into the 50/50 world outside the halls of academe.

Serves them right of course: no one is allowed to enjoy themselves in that manner….well, certainly not from the point of view of one who went to college some decades ago when the sex ratio was 70% male anyway.

Well, in one way of coursemen are discriminated against, just as women are. In fact, all of us are discriminated against all the time: that’s just peopleusing their own mixtures of judgement and prejudice to decide things about us by our looks, accent, height, weight, whatever.

But in the more specific sense, are men now sexually discriminated against? There does seem to be some evidence that there is, as this quoted by Dr. Helen shows.

According to a 2006 survey commissioned by Kelly Services, a firm that finds temporary and permanent staff for companies, 34.8% of men said they believed they had experienced discrimination over the past five years at work compared with 33.3% of women. Similar findings were reported by University of Toronto sociology professor John Kervin. In a survey of business students at an Ontario college, Prof. Kervin found that just as many men as women — 21% each — felt their professors were biased against them because of their gender.

It’s the classic workplace discrimination scenario in reverse: All things being equal, if a man and woman are up for the same job, the woman has an unfair advantage, say men’s rights advocates. And they blame decades of affirmative action initiatives that have encouraged companies to promote women and minorities.

There’s a branch of socioligical thought which says that men cannot be discriminated against in this manner. It’s very closely allied with the idea that racial minorities cannot be racist themselves. Only those in the position of power in a society can be guilty of such discrimination. Thus minorities cannot be raciost (which will be huge news to those who have encountered such racism first hand) and men cannot be discriminated against in a patriarchy.

This particular strand of sociological thought is worth even less than most others in that benighted discipline of course. Discrimination is discrimination whether it is of the affirmative kind or not.

But if we’ve reached the point that just as many men are being discriminated against as women, might it not be time to call that whole policy of affirmative discrimination into question? If what we’re trying to do is wipe out such unfairness, it doesn’t seem very sensible to be adding to it ourselves, does it?

A key trend in modern society is the rise of assortative mating. It explains so many diffferent things that people complain or worry about.

Briefly and simply what we mean by “assortative mating” is that, to a much greater extent, like is marrying like. No, we’re not making some sly joke about gay marriage here, rather, that looking along many of the different fault lines that divide society, more people are marrying those who are like themselves than used to be the case.

Marriage used to come pretty much from within that group of friends and family that one knew. Maybe from high school even: but things have, as we know, rather changed. We’re all marrying later, we’re more likely to marry someone we met either at work or college, thus we’re more likely to marry someone who has been pre-selected to be like us anyway.

If we marry someone from work, it’s likely that it will be someone who works in the same field as us: so if there is anything genetic that makes one likely to be an engineer, or a nurse, then it’s likely that this whatever it is will be fortified in the next generation. This is pretty much Simon Baron Cohen’s view of the rise in autism. Certain characteristics (roughly measured by our EQSQ personality tests) do indeed make you more likely to be in one job or profession than another and that like marrying like (say, systemisers marrying systemisers) reinforces those traits and thus we get that rise in autism (which he describes as a form of”super systemiser”).

But this isn’t the only such fault line. Assortative mating has also been used to explain the divergence in houshold incomes in the country. We are marrying later, as above and we are meeting out prospective mates at college or work. So we who go to coeelege are choosing our mates from that pool of people who have also gone to college. Or lawyers and other professionals are choosing from a pool of other similar professionals.

Thus we see the rise of the two professional household: and of course its side effect, the rise of the no professional household. This, whatever is happening to individual incomes, whatever is happening to he wage distribution or inequality in general, is going to have a very large effect on the household income distribution.

Further, given that we calculate the inequality rate from household distributions (because that is the way the tax data we use is collected) then it’s highly likely that we will be overstating the effect of economic changes upon inequality, rather than the more social aspects such as assortative mating. As, indeed, many economists try to point out.

What’s prompted all of this is a snippet of information from the TaxProf blog:

A key finding of the report is the partner status of full-time faculty:

• Academic Partner:  36%
• Employed, Non-academic Partner:  36%
• Single:  14%
• Stay-at-Home Partner:  13%

That is assortative mating for you: professors are marrying professors. It’s one thing if, say, someone earning $60 k a year marries someone earning $30k or so: but when there’s two $60k salaries in the same household that’s a household income up in the top 10% straight away. But more importantly, these figures give us an actual number for how prevalent assortative mating is.

There’s nothing wrong with it of course: we certainly wouldn’t want to change people’s behavior either, or even try. But it is a powerful explanation for many of the changes which are going on in society.

About the only divider which I know of which isn’t leading to more such assortative mating is race: there are many, many, more inter-racial marriages than ever before, an excellent outcome as it gives us the hope that the issue of race will, over the generations, simply dissolve away.

This is a really interesting paper about the management gender gap. Instead of trying to work it all out from first principles they’ve gone looking (rather like Levitt in Freakonomics) for a data set that will let them test different possible explanations for why there are more men in top management than there are women.

Women are under-represented in top management positions on both sides of the Atlantic. The academic literature suggests a number of explanations for this underrepresentation, including self-selection, investment in family and child bearing, lower female human capital investment, or gender discrimination.

OK, that’s a pretty good reading of the usual expanations. Their postulate is that:

A new strand of research considers another hypothesis – that the sexes perform differently under competitive pressures, even if these differences do not exist in non-competitive settings.

Now that makes sense to me to begin with: I’ve seen often enough (and complained about it) that girls do better when education is based around coursework, boys when it is all about exams. Indeed, that’s been hte justification for the swing from purely judging grades on competitive examinations to coursework over recent decades. So we all pretty much agree that it works at the lower levels of education.

The authors of the paper look at the entrance exams to one of the extremely competitive French graduate schools (fewer than 10% of applicants get in, but those who do rise to the very top of French society).

A gender gap in entrance exams

On average, men perform slightly better than women in both the written and oral exams despite evidence the female candidates are ‘better’ in the sense that:

• in the same cohort of candidates, the females performed significantly better than men in the national baccalauréat exam two years prior to the sitting of the HEC admission exam; and
• among the sub-sample of candidates admitted to the school, females outperform the males during the first year of their core curriculum classes at HEC.

Male performance has greater variance

The male performance distribution has greater variance – in the top quartile of examinees, men outperform women, while their written exam scores in the lowest quartile are worse than women. Female candidates’ performance is more concentrated around the median. Since only a small fraction of the initial candidates are admitted to the school, men are more likely to be admitted than women, even though roughly equal numbers of men and women apply.

Now that is interesting, don’t you think? We’ve got that higher male variance thing which is what got Larry Summers into so much trouble at Harvard. And we’ve got the point that in competitive exams, men do better than women. That is, better than their performance in non-competitive tests.

Given that getting into top management is much more like a competitive exam than it is like a non-competitive one (there can be only one CEO for example) we might indeed have our explanation for why there are more men than women in those sorts of jobs.

If you’re a fan of evolutionary psychology you might want to extend this a little too. Most women who are physically capable of having children and want them have, over the history of the species, done so. This isn’t true of men at all. Indeed, it’s said that 40% of men who’ve ever lived had no offspring. So, in evolutionary terms, men are indeed in a much more competitive environment than women are.

Which leads rather to a reductio ad absurdam. The reason there’s more men in higher management is because, well, they’re men.

There’s been some interesting research about the differences in the way that men and women present their own creative work online. At first the results look slightly odd. Men do more creative work than women? Really?

Men are overrepresented online when it comes to sharing creative work, according to a new report from Northwestern University.

What’s he reason for this? Is it men showing off more? Using shown creativity to get the babes, as the usual status display activities of males are about? Well, no.

Researchers Eszter Hargittai and Gina Walejko found that men were much more likely to post their writings, photos, videos, and other creations on the Internet than women, despite the fact that they were equally likely to participate in such activities.

Or, in fact, maybe. If the two sexes participate equally in creative endeavours then perhaps he men do display it online as a method of showing off?

Umm, well, again, no, as the researcher’s own blog post points out.

The post reports on a study in which we found that male college students are more likely than their female counterparts to share creative content online even though both men and women in the sample are equally likely to create such content. However, when controlling for online skill, the gender differences in posting go away.

And again, controlling for skill is the important point:

Curious to see what explains these differences in sharing, we looked at whether various measures of Internet experience account for the divergences. We controlled for years of Internet use, frequency of Internet use, number of Internet access locations, and online skill. Of these four, skill was a significant predictor of sharing activity. In fact, once skill is in the model, gender is no longer a significant predictor of posting one’s material.

So the study actually found, in the end, that, assuming a similar familiarity with the internet, that there’s no difference in the propensity to either make creative works or to show them off on the net between the sexes.

But we do have this imbalance in what does in fact get shown: which leads us back to another rather interesting question. The difference in what is shown, men showing more than women, comes from the fact that the men seem to have greater familiarity with and skill in using the net itself.

So, where does that come from? Is it simply another manifestation of the male brain, as described in our EQSQ personality tests? That geeks are more likely to be male?

I have to admit to a certain confusion at the information here. You understand of course, that I’m English, and so view American society through a slightly distorted lens. I’ll tell you of my confusion later: the first part of this information set causes me no confusion at all.

Someone went out and surveyed the state of virginity or sexual experience amongst the undergraduates at Wellesley College (which I am pretty sure is still an all female college). They were able to find not one single virgin (although I do have to admit, that state or not of the hymen was self-reported rather than physically checked) in the Studio Art program. While 83% of the women in the mathematics program were indeed still virgins.

There are some departments which seem to deviate a little from what we might expect but the general pattern could have been culled from an examination of our EQSQ personality tests. Moving along the continuum, from those subjects which we would expect to be colonised by the empathic types, along to the hard sciences which we would expect to be full of the systemizers, we pretty much see that the virginity rate rises the more likely the students are to be systemizers.

Not too hard to understand: those at the systemizing end do indeed have greater problems with human relationships than those at the empathic end.

So I’m not confused by that part. But I am as I said above by another.

Now my exposure to American teenagehood is of course minimal, really only from the movies and TV (I have lived in the US, but at an age when if I were thought to be taking an interest in the sex lives of teenagers I would be at best run out of town on a rail) so it is of course a very partial view.

But certainly the impression I get is that all of that virginity thing is taken care of by the time people go to college, isn’t it? In fact, I’m under the definite impression that driving home from the Prom date is written into everyone’s personal organiser.

Isn’t it?