Save the males. The girls-boys gap in education is widening!

In what seems like eons ago, when my daughter was in high school, I began sensing ground-level data on my intuitive understanding that girls were beginning to outperform boys in school.  The data was this--my daughter was one of the girls who got elected to the student body.  That year, not a single boy in any elected position in their student government.  The girls then felt the need to bring on at least one male, and they made sure to recruit one into an appointed position.  "Affirmative action" I recalled joking with her.

Since then, I have closely watched what I refer to in this blog as "save the males."

The intuitive understanding, and the ground-level data, had pretty much only one solid intellectual support--from Christina Sommers, about whom I had a lengthy post a year ago.  A year into my daughter's undergrad program, when she was home, I asked her for feedback on this piece that Sommers had written.  She barely read the first page and then gave the magazine back to me with a comment along the lines of "tell me something that I don't know."

Teaching at regional public universities, first in California and then in Oregon, I have witnessed nothing but more of the same trend--female students outperforming males.  To begin with, the gender ratio is highly skewed.  Even more so when it comes to certain programs--in one class that I am teaching this term, the female/male students ratio is nearly six to one!  I am not the only one,of course, to note these trends. There are those who even write satirically about these--like my favorite "Valentine's Day note to amorous undergraduate females."

Of course, through all these, the observation that led drove Larry Summers out of the presidency at Harvard continues to persist.  Summers made a mistake of loudly thinking about an intellectual point in this gender issue: he wondered what the reasons might be for boys to outperform girls at the highest end, and to underperform girls at the lowest end, while girls occupy a vast middle.

I am reminded of all those and more thanks to this piece in the Economist, which notes: "Boys are being outclassed by girls at both school and university, and the gap is widening."

Until the 1960s boys spent longer and went further in school than girls, and were more likely to graduate from university. Now, across the rich world and in a growing number of poor countries, the balance has tilted the other way.

 As my daughter did, I too should merely shrug my shoulders.  But then, I can't!

The reversal is laid out in a report published on March 5th by the OECD, a Paris-based rich-country think-tank. Boys’ dominance just about endures in maths: at age 15 they are, on average, the equivalent of three months’ schooling ahead of girls. In science the results are fairly even. But in reading, where girls have been ahead for some time, a gulf has appeared. In all 64 countries and economies in the study, girls outperform boys. The average gap is equivalent to an extra year of schooling.

Sixty-four country data!

I often wonder whether the "gender studies" programs--including at my university--address such issues, or whether they continue to operate as if the world has not changed in the last fifty years.  What do you think is the case? Hint: their world has not changed ;)

The average 15-year-old girl devotes five-and-a-half hours a week to homework, an hour more than the average boy, who spends more time playing video games and trawling the internet. Three-quarters of girls read for pleasure, compared with little more than half of boys. Reading rates are falling everywhere as screens draw eyes from pages, but boys are giving up faster. The OECD found that, among boys who do as much homework as the average girl, the gender gap in reading fell by nearly a quarter.
Once in the classroom, boys long to be out of it. They are twice as likely as girls to report that school is a “waste of time”, and more often turn up late. Just as teachers used to struggle to persuade girls that science is not only for men, the OECD now urges parents and policymakers to steer boys away from a version of masculinity that ignores academic achievement.

Will you be ok if I wrote, "I told you so?"  I just did! ;)

Women who go to university are more likely than their male peers to graduate, and typically get better grades. But men and women tend to study different subjects, with many women choosing courses in education, health, arts and the humanities, whereas men take up computing, engineering and the exact sciences. In mathematics women are drawing level; in the life sciences, social sciences, business and law they have moved ahead.

Hey, what?  I have been correct all along?  Tell me something that I didn't know already! ;)

the return on investment in a college degree for women was lower than or at best the same as for men. Although women as a group are now better qualified, they earn about three-quarters as much as men. A big reason is the choice of subject: education, the humanities and social work pay less than engineering or computer science. But academic research shows that women attach less importance than men to the graduate pay premium, suggesting that a high financial return is not the main reason for their further education.

Come on, enough already.  Anything new at all for me?

At the highest levels of business and the professions, women remain notably scarce. In a reversal of the pattern at school, the anonymous and therefore gender-blind essays and exams at university protect female students from bias. But in the workplace, says Elisabeth Kelan of Britain’s Cranfield School of Management, “traditional patterns assert themselves in miraculous ways”. Men and women join the medical and legal professions in roughly equal numbers, but 10-15 years later many women have chosen unambitious career paths or dropped out to spend time with their children. Meanwhile men are rising through the ranks as qualifications gained long ago fade in importance and personality, ambition and experience come to matter more.

Seriously, anything new at all?

The glass-ceiling is the only thing left for the males to hold women back.  But, as Hillary Clinton (gasp, I am quoting her!) famously said:

Although we weren't able to shatter that highest, hardest glass ceiling this time, thanks to you, it's got about 18 million cracks in it.  And the light is shining through like never before, filling us all with the hope and the sure knowledge that the path will be a little easier next time.

On this International Women's Day, here is to hoping for a better future, where gender will not be an issue at all.

Where have all the young men gone ...?

To be out and about on a pleasant evening is a pleasure all by itself.  There was no way I was going to waste an unusually awesome spring evening.

I picked up the copy of the New Yorker, which I planned to read while sitting in the car and overlooking the cityscape.  Water bottle, cellphone, and wallet. The garage door was opening as I realized that I hadn't had dinner yet.

I drove up to the Taco Bell and waited behind a Pontiac Trans Am with its distinctive growl.  After I placed my order, the voice through the box said "2.97 at the window."

We have to wonder how healthy the food will be when I am able to buy three items off the menu for 99 cents each.  The Pink Lady apple that I picked up at the grocery store the other day was about 75 cents.  For one apple.  And here I am getting a dinner for $2.97?

I reached Skinner Butte.  It was a busy, happening place.  I wasn't the only one with the bright idea to enjoy the twilight from up there.  And was I happy to slide into a parking spot in between a monstrous pickup truck and a sedan.  Within a few minutes after, the place was packed with no parking space at all.

I finished the food with an enormous sense of guilt.  As if I were doing cocaine in a public park.

More and more people were streaming in.  Perhaps they had even hiked up the butte.  It seemed like the entire town was up there.

The strangest thing was this: there were very few men.  And, even among the few men that we were, it didn't seem like there were more than a couple of young men.

The overwhelming majority were young women.  Young women in groups of threes and fours and fives and sixes.  And they were all loud.  Loudly having fun. Yelling and screaming in delight.

The monstrous pickup had a sole occupant.  A non-white, like me.  Out of his vehicle came the sounds of country music.  But, that was drowned out by the loud pop music from the sedan, in which the three young women and the only guy were sitting and singing (in their atrocious voices) and waving their arms away to the beat of music that even I knew.

I stepped out to take in the air and the festive environment, and to admire the city lights against the slowly darkening sky.

Life is wonderful, indeed.  The wonders come in different colors, sounds, shapes.  That day, it was the gorgeous spring evening, spent on a butte overlooking the city, with a whole bunch of pumped-up people.

Very few men, however.  And that was strange.

When I was younger, back in India, very few young women were out in the public.  We young men had to compete against each other to get their attention. What a contrast to that was this experience.  Perhaps this particular evening was unusual.  But, given that this is a college town, and with colleges increasingly dominated by females, it is quite likely that it was not all that unusual.

As I walked around, I was impressed with the society in which I live where young women could feel so free. Atop one car were three young women chatting away.  Sitting on the top of a large SUV were a bunch of young women.  Another group of women at the observation deck taking turns posing for photos.  Against all the horror stories of women and girls being raped and beaten up when in the public space, to see young women having such fun was reassuring that the world is quite ok, really.

The breeze picked up and the flag fluttered.  The land of the free it certainly was that evening at Skinner Butte.

Colleges are good matchmakers. No way can MOOCs do that service ;)

A couple of months ago, I noted here:

When I was relatively new in my Oregon stint, one bright female student, "K," came to talk with me about her law school plans.  I asked her if she was free enough--without any significant other--to go wherever she wanted to.  Her reply was funny then, and is funny now, but is also a reflection of these gender issues.  "K" replied that she hadn't met anybody even her equal, let alone being better than her, and so it was all the more the reason for her to go far away from this part of the world.  I wonder whether she did find her soul-mate in graduate school.

Though on a lighter vein, it was a post on a serious issue that I have been blogging for a long time: how female students are doing wonderfully well, especially when compared with their male peers.  The world of higher education does not resemble in any way, and thankfully so, the bad old days when females were not provided with the opportunities that white males had.  How different are things now?

"A lot has happened since Betty Friedan wrote her book ["The Feminine Mystique"] in 1963," says Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economic historian. "It's amazing." More than 57% of the bachelor's degrees awarded in 2011 went to women,according to the Department of Education. So did 51% of doctorates, 48% of M.D.'s, 47% of law degrees and 45% of master's degrees in business.

It is a phenomenal achievement over a couple of generations.  It is yet another demonstration of what we humans can achieve if we put our minds to it.

This female advancement has also led to drastic changes in male-female relationships.  To quote Hanna Rosin:

Young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s—are generally better off than young men. They are better educated and earn more money on average. What made this possible is the sexual revolution—the ability to have temporary, intimate relationships that don't derail a career. Or to put it more simply, to have sex without getting married.

This very issue that young women are beginning to be choosy about when to get married, if they want to get married, made an interesting topic of discussion in the online academic world thanks to a mother of two boys, both at Princeton, writing an open letter in the university paper advising the girls to marry!

At your core, you know that there are other things that you need that nobody is addressing. A lifelong friend is one of them. Finding the right man to marry is another.

She set it up well; after all, a Princeton alumna herself.  And then came the blunt advice:

Here’s what nobody is telling you: Find a husband on campus before you graduate.

Why?

Of course, once you graduate, you will meet men who are your intellectual equal — just not that many of them. And, you could choose to marry a man who has other things to recommend him besides a soaring intellect. But ultimately, it will frustrate you to be with a man who just isn’t as smart as you.

What she writes here is a restatement of what that student "K" remarked a few years ago, right?  "K" wanted to improve the odds of finding somebody smarter than her.  This Princeton mom takes that one step further--if not at Princeton, then odds will be against finding a comparable spouse.

To which, a Harvard economist, Edward Glaeser, writes about his own personal experience and suggests:

While I don't feel I can provide advice to young women, I am comfortable, based on both personal experience and the infallible majesty of economic theory, urging young male Princetonians to view your female classmates as prospective long-term friends and spouses (the qualifications for the two roles having much in common), rather than short-term amorous encounters.

I just wish that Glaeser hadn't used such a complicated academic way of writing that sentence ;)

Anyway, he adds this:

The role that colleges can play in forging lifelong friendships, and even marriages, also makes a deeper point. Princeton has nothing to fear from online learning. The face-to-face experience is just too important, not only as a tool for education but for creating the social relationships that are the real stuff of life.

No MOOC can offer this, and residential college-based higher education will be around for a while ;)

Premature male dropout. As in sex, so in college?

Way back in high school, we read a HG Wells short story about a sighted fellow wandering into a valley of the blind.  Wells (I am pretty sure he was the author of that story) did a fantastic job of turning upside down the adage about the one-eyed man being the king of a country of the blind.

As one who for years has been reading, thinking, and writing about boys and men falling behind girls and women in higher education, I find it rather bizarre that by and large society itself pays very little attention to this phenomenon.  For now, I suppose I should simply be thankful that I have not been forced off a cliff, which was the case with the sighted person in the Wells story.

Thus, it is neat to have company with whom I can share this misery.  This book review of The Rise of Women notes:

Starting with the people born around 1950, the rate of men’s bachelor’s degree completion stopped growing, and it stayed stagnant for years. In 1970, 20 percent of men and 14 percent of women finished college. By 2010, women’s graduation rates had “skyrocketed” to 36 percent, DiPrete said, while the rate among men grew only seven points, to 27 percent.
Today, women outpace men in college enrollment by a ratio of 1.4 to 1.

Ok, you say "a ratio of 1.4 to 1" and I have always preferred expressing that as a 60/40 split.  Sometimes, I make it even powerful a point by saying that there are three female students in college for every two male students.

My suspicion is that this ratio will widen a tad more and then stabilize.  I suspect it will get closer to a two-to-one ratio.

I have always reasoned that this trend is is caused by equal opportunities opening up for girls, with boys simultaneously simply assuming that the world hand't changed a great deal and that they would be successful no matter what.  

Boys have historically been trained to think that they needn’t obey rules or work hard because men used to be able to drop out of high school and still earn wages comparable to better-educated women, thanks to jobs in fields like manufacturing, construction and travel. That’s not the case anymore.
Even today, DiPrete said, young men are “overly optimistic” about their ability to earn a livable salary, even though they’re less educated than women. That may cause them to “under-invest” in schoolwork, lowering their academic performance and probability of completing college.

Exactly!  It is not any skills gap as much as the getting things done.  Two days ago, I wrote in an email to a male student "your days are numbered, man :)" and added:

The new reality requires a different approach to understanding gender roles in society.  However, I am worried that gender studies in universities focus more [on the past] atrocious discrimination of anyone who was not a white male

But, as with anything else, it will be a while before academia catches up, thanks to its glacial speeds. 

The review ends with this:

Full-time working women in 2011 earned only 82 percent of what men earned. That’s up 20 percentage points from 30 years ago, thanks in part to women getting more education and access to high-paying managerial positions, but also an internal motivation to get a degree as “insurance” to be able to make a middle-class living.

Yes, female students are playing that long game that life is.  And that is what this Jezebel commentary notes:

[Women,] rather than men, who have the more realistic long-term view of the relationship between debt and earnings. As the study makes clear, it's not that women are more inherently comfortable with a heavy debt burden — it's that women are more likely to see borrowing for education as a worthwhile long-term investment. As Gender and Society editor Joya Misra puts it, "Women's recent advantage in college graduation rates is associated with their relative disadvantage in the job market. At the same time, men's seeming advantages in the short run can lure them away from a surer path — college completion — to longer term economic security."
Precisely because young men still benefit from an enduring wage gap, they are apparently more likely to deceive themselves into imagining that a college education may not be worth the price.

Another student seemed to be concerned that his wife will outearn him, and that could even force them to seriously consider him--the man--as the stay-at-home parent of their infant child.  I reassured him that he will not be the first, and will be joined in that "secondary" rank by many more males in the coming years.  Of course, I then sent him this piece to read as well.  A male architect writes about his life as a full-time homemaker:

All choices have a cost. My architectural skills have a shelf life, and it's likely that I am damaging my prospects for future employment. In general, architecture isn't something I can do halfway, and given the choice, I choose the quality of life we are afforded by me being a full-time homemaker. Our circumstances may change and I may be forced to re-evaluate, but for now, feeling that the benefits far outweigh the professional cost, I want to be a great homemaker supporting a fantastic spouse.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 33 percent of wives outearned their husbands (who may or may not have been employed) in 2006, one-third higher than the figure of 24 percent in 1987. As this number rises, more men will be faced with the decision of what to do when their work is no longer “necessary.” In the case of couples with children, I expect the decision is more sharply defined; for other couples with no plans for children (like us) how will things play out?
Me? The stay-at-home dude abides.

I will keep on blogging about this topic, even if one day the blind mob drives me off the campus!

Save the males! Sex has become too cheap for them

A topic that is not new by any means to this blog and, as a male, I am not sure whether it is my pleasure to add one more post to that collection, or whether I ought to regret this :)

Hanna Rosin, about whom I have blogged before, is getting ready to publish her book, which means, naturally, we can expect quite a few opinion essays like this one that she has authored in the Wall Street Journal.  Rosin writes there about how sexual freedom has transformed women's success:

In the 1970s the sexual revolution was really mostly about sex. But now the sexual revolution has deepened into a more permanent kind of power for women. Young women in their sexual prime—that is, their 20s and early 30s—are generally better off than young men. They are better educated and earn more money on average. What made this possible is the sexual revolution—the ability to have temporary, intimate relationships that don't derail a career. Or to put it more simply, to have sex without getting married.

If women are more ready than ever to have sex with men without forcing them to get married, then there is an important corollary: the evolutionary argument is that males have to work a great deal to have sex.  If they don't have to work hard to gain sexual favors, then, well, they don't have to, for instance, work hard for their grades and try to have successful careers, do they?

sex is clearly cheap for men. Women's "erotic capital," as Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but it can't assure her love and lifelong commitment.

Rosin writes that this lack of love or lifelong commitment doesn't hassle women all that much.  Their unhappiness comes from having way too many choices now, in the bedroom and on their way to the boardrooms!

Someday, the GOP, too, will begin to understand that we are way past the Eisenhower era :)

The good men haven't gone anywhere--they are having a great time :)

So, a few days ago I blogged about a WSJ article that was about the perception that young men increasingly don't "man up" ... Because my students had made similar remarks in class weeks ago, I had emailed that article to them and they are continuing to discuss it even a week later, and the educator in me is having a great time that students are passionately arguing. (Note to concerned taxpayers and partisans: the discussions on this topic have been happening in cyberspace, and we don't waste the contracted class time for it. So, there!) Hey students, are you reading this?

But, all we are doing--in class and in society--is just about beginning to wake up to a new reality. A reality in which women, who now have freedoms that even our grandmothers could not have imagined it in their wildest dreams (creepy to think of my grandma having wild dreams!) are beginning to mean it when they say "anything you do, I can do better"

If we keep thinking along these lines, then a question arises: why do young men seem to have the upper hand even whey are failing in life?

while young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don't forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because men will work for sex. Today's young men, however, seldom have to. As the authors of last year's book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." They're right. But then try getting men to do anything.

That is right: if men are slacking off, it is women's fault!

Yes, sex is clearly cheap for men. Women's "erotic capital," as Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but it can't assure her love and lifelong commitment. Not in this market. It's no surprise that the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who are married has shrunk by an average of 1 percent each year this past decade.

Leave it to academics and researchers and their highfalutin language to make even sex a boring topic :)

Where have the good men gone?

Wait, here is one--blogging away :)

Ok, jokes aside, the title of this post is the title of an article in the Wall Street Journal.
(editor: do you want your socialist colleagues to know you read this capitalist publication?  Hey, it is not like they get me Christmas gifts even now!)

The article is yet another addition to my ongoing blogging on the the rapidly disappearing males--"save the males" as one author put it.

Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends. Still, for these women, one key question won't go away:
Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers

How might we look at this from the perspective of a young male?

Today's pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.
...
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven—and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do. They might as well just have another beer.

Ouch!  I wonder when "gender studies" in American universities will begin to address this situation.  (editor: was that a rhetorical question? We are supposed to say "never," right? Awshutup!)



I am not at all surprised with these developments--after having grown up with an elder sister, who excelled in school, and having been educated in a coeducational setting where girls gave us boys pretty good competition for grades and ranking (no, make that pretty girls who gave us boys good competition for grades and ranking), and then having lived a family life with talented women.  If not for men restraining women through centuries, well, this day would have arrived a lot, lot earlier.

Mystery solved: why boys like sticks!

I have always been tempted to pick up a stick when I see one while walking/hiking.  Sometimes to fling them. Sometimes to simply carry.  And sometimes to simply poke the plants :)  If Will Rogers thought that there was never a dollar bill he didn't like, I suppose there are very few sticks that I have never liked!

And my non-random observation right from when I was young was that boys in general liked sticks, and girls did not.  I thought it was merely a gender thing.

Turns out that this was the number one question that intrigued Slate readers too, and am mighty glad that there is an answer as well :)

The question of the year (2010) that Slate's Explainer examines is:

I've always pondered why boys like having sticks. Whether it be walking down a hiking trail with a stick they picked up or running a stick across a white picket fence, boys (including me when I was small) seem to have a knack for having a stick. Is there some kind of explanation for this behavior?

What is the answer you ask?  Click here for the explanations, where you will also find out how porcupines use sticks.  Am not kidding ...

Note to the amorous undergraduate female reading this

A new term begins. 

As always, female students will outnumber male students in classes, reminding me of a quiet revolution.  Or, simply, whatever!

Anyway, while thinking about classes and syllabi and assignments, there I was reading a blog post (ht) on where the author ends with this postscript of a Note to the amorous undergraduate female reading this:

When you scan the campus and realize what your choices are, I know it is tempting to open a vein and slide into a warm bath. But here’s the thing: you may be an average undergraduate female, but there are above-average undergraduate males out there who are nearly your equal. They are out there. It’s just that you outnumber them about 100 to 1. Still, that’s no reason to open a vein and slide into a warm bath.

The end of men?

While having "the end of .." in the title is a great selling strategy, I am not sure that such prognostications stand the test of time; right, Professor Fukuyama? :)
But, that aside, this essay in the Atlantic raises a number of issues that I have often brought to my students' attention--BTW, most of the students are female--and have also blogged about here.

What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men? For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, and that shows up now as a drive to win on Wall Street; women are programmed to find good providers and to care for their offspring, and that is manifested in more- nurturing and more-flexible behavior, ordaining them to domesticity. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order. But what if men and women were fulfilling not biological imperatives but social roles, based on what was more efficient throughout a long era of human history? What if that era has now come to an end? More to the point, what if the economics of the new era are better suited to women?

As I have even mentioned in this blog quite a few times, my reality from the time I was growing up was one in which I didn't know that men were "supposed" to be the dominant gender.  (I prefer "gender" to "sex" ... pedantic, I suppose!)  I think the biggest reason for this was Indira Gandhi.  Ever since I knew how to say "prime minister", well, it was Indira Gandhi.  Then the 1971 war with Pakistan when I was a kid and people--politicians and regulars alike--were comparing her with Durga and Kali.  One politico went as far as to rephrase the famous Louis XIV statement when he said "India is Indira, and Indira is India"

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The trend that I see as an educator is all the more about female students simply kicking butt.  In my second year at WOU, one fantastic female student, who later went on to a prestigious law school, commented that she didn't have a boyfriend because up and down the Valley she hadn't run into any guy who could stand up to her intellect!!!
Anyway, read this from that same Atlantic essay:

Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly turning into a matriarchy, with men increasingly absent from the home and women making all the decisions. Women dominate today’s colleges and professional schools—for every two men who will receive a B.A. this year, three women will do the same. Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women. Indeed, the U.S. economy is in some ways becoming a kind of traveling sisterhood: upper-class women leave home and enter the workforce, creating domestic jobs for other women to fill.
The postindustrial economy is indifferent to men’s size and strength. The attributes that are most valuable today—social intelligence, open communication, the ability to sit still and focus—are, at a minimum, not predominantly male. In fact, the opposite may be true. Women in poor parts of India are learning English faster than men to meet the demands of new global call centers. Women own more than 40 percent of private businesses in China, where a red Ferrari is the new status symbol for female entrepreneurs.

The Hillary Clinton and Sarah Palin aspects of the last campaign, and their continuing presence on national and international politics, is all the more the beginning of a trend of women showing up in places where they were previously not allowed.  Good for 'em, and us, I say!  I am guessing that the coming decade will be the decade of women in American politics--it will be transformational.  (Even though I don't care much for Meg Whitman's politics, and even though I am not a California resident, I am cheering her on because I am convinced she will be way better than Jerry Brown, who is trying to relive the past.  It is that kind of transformation I am looking for)

I still stand by my semi-serious joke that once scientists figure out how to make easy the biological reproduction without the sperm from men, well, that will be truly the end of men ... And that day of reproduction will come sooner than we think.

"The hurling habit dies hard" :)

Or, as one commenter has described it,

Wham, Bam, thank you Ma'am! 

BBC has blocked access to that clip, which includes footage after the victorious male meets the female.  The following clip stops with the male and female shaking hands, er, legs :)

What happens to female suicide bombers?

Reports indicate that the Russian blasts heard around the world were set off by female suicide bombers.  It is yet another in a long line of incidents where the bomber was female.  I wish I had access to my own op-ed on this topic; maybe I authored it before I returned to blogging.

First, Anne Applebaum, who almost became the first lady of Poland, asks "How Did Russian Police Know Who Bombed the Moscow Subway?," and writes:

I do hope the Moscow police will present the public with hard evidence that two Chechen women really were responsible for this truly grotesque attack before blaming the incident on North Caucasian terrorists.

I am guessing that Czar Prime Minister Putin knows fully well the Cheney approach to use such horrible incidents in order to pursue his own agenda.

If it was indeed the act of female suicide bombers, what is in it for them?  If Islamist male suicide bombers can look forward to being entertained by virgins after their martyrdom, for female suicide bombers?  Here is Michelle Tsai:

religious commentaries argue that paradise will make them beautiful, happy, and without jealousy. The fact that they fasted and worshipped Allah during their earthly lives will also make them superior to the virgins, who only exist in heaven. Some modern clerics argue that in heaven, husbands never grow bored of their wives, even with so many huris around. That may explain why some would-be female suicide bombers have spoken of becoming "chief of the 72 virgins, the fairest of the fair."

Ok.  But are there non-Islamist female suicide bombers?  Of course.  In Sri Lanka the LTTE made horribly effective use of them. India's prime minister, Rajiv Gandhi, was killed by one such bomber.

Going one step more, is terrorism a male-dominated activity?  Brian Palmer asks whether there is a glass ceiling of sorts for female terrorists; could Jihad Jane ever have risen up to bin Laden's CEO ranks?  Palmer writes:

Women do not hold leadership positions in any of the major Islamic terrorist organizations. When Ayman al-Zawahiri was asked about the highest rank held in al-Qaida by a woman, he replied that there are no women in the group, but the domestic service of a jihadist's wife is heroic. Women may even be second-class citizens in the suicide-bomber set....

Women in the al-Qaida family are frequently used as marriage fodder. Many top terrorists marry their daughters off to colleagues abroad as a way to strengthen ties between regional or international terrorists organizations, just as old-school European monarchs once did. Osama Bin Laden and Mullah Omar appear to be married to each other's daughters. Indonesian terrorist Haris Fadhilah gave his daughter to Omar al-Faruq, a major al-Qaida operative. These arranged marriages are thought to enhance collaboration and communication among terrorist groups, but there's little indication that the women wield any real power. (Many female Chechen fighters gained their status through marriage, as well. The "Black Widows" are a group of bombers who try to complete the missions begun by their martyred husbands, fathers, or brothers.)

Save the males, part two :-)

In August of last year, I blogged that we needed to worry about the males.
Now, two significant developments--one from economics and the other from science. (No, economics is NOT a science!)

In the world of economics, in this Great Recession, it turns out that males have been losing jobs, and finding it difficult to get employed again, than what has been the female experience thus far. So much so that apparently one economist has termed this the "mancession"--"a recession that hurts men much more than women, and we are allegedly in the worst mancession in recent history"

The huge loss in manufacturing has a significant gender implication. On the other hand, services like teaching holding steady to a large extent has kinds of gender implication.

Amidst this kind of an update from economists, comes a completely surprising, though not that unexpected, news from the world of medicine--reports, which are yet to be confirmed through independent studies, that scientists have been able to create human sperm without any help from a male! To which the BBC has assembled a bunch of funny and serious responses; here is my favorite:

The Daily Telegraph's Rowan Pelling says men are redundant but worth keeping for menial tasks.

"Yet I feel compelled - and not just as the mother of two small boys - to make a spirited defence of the weaker sex. Where would I be without my husband to read 80 pages of a car manual, in French, to find out how the back windscreen-wiper works? Who would tug the dried lumps of excrement from our cat's backside? Who would explain the rules of cricket to an American? Who would clear a blocked drain of unspeakable clotted matter? Who would take hours to demonstrate the dreadnought manoeuvres at the Battle of Jutland, armed only with salt cellars and jam jars? Without men, there would be no one to read Joseph Conrad or Norman Mailer, to remove spiders from the bath, or (important one, this) to tell women they're pretty."

So, if unemployed men had so far been lining up to donate at sperm banks, the prospects are getting dimmer, eh!

Save the males

A few years ago, I remember reading a lengthy essay by Christina Sommers in the Atlantic, on how girls were outperforming boys in school. I asked my daughter, who was then in high school, what she thought of that argument. Her response was essentially something like, "duh!"

Left leaning faculty don't like Sommers though. But, then left leaning faculty do not like any kind of dissenting opinion anyway. (Don't know about right leaning faculty--they are so few that it is a rare opportunity to even spot on, leave alone have a conversation with them!) So, the result is that instead of engaging in discussions on the content, well, .....

After I returned to academe, I have been only in teaching institutions. And in both the universities I have been--in Oregon and in California--female students outnumber males by 2:1. In the Honors Program, well, let me put it this way: one student commented that perhaps we ought to recruit male students with the tag line that they will get to meet lots of females if they joined Honors :-)

Which is why I am not at all surprised with this graph from Mark Perry.

All the more I think there is more than simple laugh line in save the males.

Obama, basketball, and the madness

I hate the multimillion dollar business that Division I sports have become. I mean, to such an extent that sports team logos of universities don't even include anymore the "U", which stands for "university" in their names. Even here in the state of Oregon: the University of Oregon goes simply with "O", and its rival, Oregon State University matches that with "OS." As my former neighbor jokes, he was surprised to find out that there are real buildings and people associated with the football team! (notice how athletics have their own domain names that has nothing to do with the "edu" of their universities?!)

So, naturally, I didn't care a shit when the President took time off his schedule to participate in the "March Madness"--another term I have come to dislike. On top of everything else, I agree with this excerpt from a report in the Christian Science Monitor:

USA Today columnist Christine Brennan is taking him to task saying that he “absolutely should have acknowledged” the women’s tourney.

“As the father of two athletic daughters, President Obama should know all about the importance of sports for women and girls,” she writes. “Which is why he should have filled out not only a men’s NCAA tournament bracket but also a women’s tournament bracket in his well-publicized appearance on ESPN last week.”

On the air

She also appeared on NPR this morning to discuss the snub.

“Even if one [tournament] completely overshadows the other, wouldn’t it be nice if the president showed some interest in the one that’s a bit smaller?” she asked

“And for those little girls playing basketball in the driveway, maybe say to them I care about your tournament too,” she said.

Adjectives

She’s got one more gripe with him. He didn’t specify that he was filling out the brackets for the “men’s” tournament.

“Those who don’t use that pesky little adjective — and you know who you are — are acting as if there’s no women’s tournament at all, or it’s so beneath them, it’s not worth mentioning. This is rather silly. It is 2009, after all.”

Gender in higher education

I wonder if gender studies at universities have started recognizing the trends shown in the two graphs here:

Assuming that the Source is right, of course.