What does it mean to be a male?

I had drafted a blog-post. And then I read the news.

Now, I want to think more about "save the males."  That other post will appear later.

In this #MeToo context, "save the males" might sound strange.  But, it is not. Not to me.  I have been saying this, and blogging about it, for a mighty long time.

I am not referring to the rapists and the gropers and the assholes.  Nope. Not at all.  I have no sympathy for those males, and I continue to be shocked and angry that 63 million voters elected one such scumbag to the Oval Office.

The "save the males" that I have been writing about has many aspects. For one, boys are getting lost all the way from middle school on.  They are falling behind.  We have not been able to articulate for them what it means to be a man in a changed and changing world.

Right from the mid-1990s, I was talking with people and cautiously writing in op-eds that we were not paying attention to the developing trends of boys being neglected.  I deleted all the blog posts from 2001 to 2007 because looking back I felt they were rather sophomoric. I wish I had not.  Thus, the earliest I can cite as evidence from this blog is this one from November 2008.

I don't mean neglected as in abused, but neglected as in we were systematically redefining what it meant to be a girl in the changing world, but were not doing the same with boys.  And boys were falling behind in schools.  Men were falling behind in colleges. Masculinity was being re-made and men were not readying themselves.

Thus, when I read this NY Times piece, I was not surprised one bit.

For parents, raising a girl can seem as if it’s about showing them all the things they can do, while raising a boy is telling them what not to do, researchers say.
“There’s been a much more complete gender revolution for women than for men,” said Dan Clawson, a sociology professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. “If I’m raising a daughter, I’m raising someone who can challenge conventions, and that’s an attraction. On the other hand, if I’m raising a boy, am I raising someone who’s going to get in trouble, who won’t do well in school and so on?”
The fading bias against girls should cheer all who desire a more egalitarian society. But there are risks to society if what replaces it is a bias against boys.

I don't understand what it will take for American society to start talking about this.  But then we are the same people who don't talk about guns, about racism, about ...

One of the earliest scholars whose works I found to be extremely valuable in this is Christina Sommers.  Which is the reason I spent a good chunk of a Sunday, four years ago, watching her on C-Span.

Even early on, Sommers was sharply attacked by her critics. Now, those attacks have become even more vicious because she is a feminist from the right side of the political spectrum.  So much so that her scheduled talk in Oregon--in Portland--was interrupted and had to be wrapped up early because of protesters.

Sommers was labeled a "fascist" and protesters wanted her talk to be canceled!

I don't always agree with Sommers. But, to call her a fascist? To not let her speak on a college campus?  It is one thing to protest against a Richard Spencer or a Stephen Bannon. They are thugs. Fascists. Neo-Nazis. But why shut down Sommers?

Lost in all this brouhaha: The much needed discussion on what it means to be a male, and what we ought to be teaching young boys about masculinity!

No Belles, Hombres, and Equalism

David J. Thouless
F. Duncan M. Haldane
J. Michael Kosterlitz
Jean-Pierre Sauvage
Sir J. Fraser Stoddart
Bernard L. Feringa
Yoshinori Ohsumi
Juan Manuel Santos
Bob Dylan
Oliver Hart
Bengt Holmström

If you are like me, then reading "Bob Dylan" in that list of names is the clue that explains that they are the people tapped with the Nobel honors this year.  Well, except the last two on the list--theirs is a fake Nobel!

The listing of names reveals something, right?  No females honored with that stratospheric honor.  In fact, "it’s been 53 years since a woman won the Nobel Prize in physics."  Most of that is political--a process that keeps deserving women away.  My favorite in this context is Rosalind Franklin.  While controversy abounds, from what I can understand, I am convinced that sexist politics kept her out of the picture.

But, here's what we also find--males tend to be found in high percentages at the high achieving end, and they also seem to be overwhelmingly the gender in everything from mass shootings to drug-dealing to the population in prisons.  Of course, for even thinking about this, Larry Summers was kicked out of his job at Harvard; recall that brouhaha?

Most of us in our regular lives do not ever cross paths with the high achieving end nor the other extreme.  And, what I find in that vastness of regular life is this, and about which I have been thinking and blogging for the longest time: Men are in trouble.

Consider some startling statistics.
More than a fifth of American men — about 20 million people — between 20 and 65 had no paid work last year.
Seven million men between 25 and 55 are no longer even looking for work, twice as many black men as white.
There are 20 million men with felony records who are not in jail, with dim prospects of employment, and more of these are black men.
Half the men not in the labor force report they are in bad physical or mental health.
Men account for only 42 percent of college graduates, handicapping them in a job market that rewards higher levels of education.
Lawrence H. Summers, the former Treasury secretary and now a professor of economics at Harvard, estimates that a third of men between 25 and 54 without college educations could be out of work by midcentury.
Well-paying jobs that don’t demand a college degree have been shrinking for generations — and technology is accelerating that trend.

That report from the NY Times is filled with rich evidence, which is why:

Alan B. Krueger, a professor of economics at Princeton, recently conducted a study of working-age men. “I came away thinking our biggest social problem is men,” he said. 

Take your time to read through and digest all that.  A point there reinforces something that I have been talking about for a while--we need to seriously reconsider what it means to be a man in these rapidly changing times.

Succeeding in the new economy and culture may well require rethinking conventional ideas about masculinity.

I cannot understand how and why we as a society are not engaging in such important conversations and are, instead, wasting away our time and money on frivolity.

Where have all the young men gone?

I went to listen to the president give his annual state-of-the-college address.  He, like most educators these days, talked about how student enrollment growth is critical for the fiscal future of the university.  He used phrases that one would hear from a factory owner: production, products, pipeline, and--of course--how more students mean more money.  There was no detailed presentation, however, on how well the products (graduates) are selling!

Despite repeating the flat--or even a negative growth--enrollment scenario, the president talked in plenty about the new building construction that has been completed, and another that will soon begin.  How is it that people with PhDs do not see the contradiction in massively increasing capacity even when knowing well that the demand won't be there?  Was there a KoolAid drink that I missed sipping?

Was I also the only one who thought it was yet another profound evidence when the president said that female students accounted for 65 percent of the incoming freshman class?  From 55-45, to 60-40, we have now reached 65-35.  Amazing.  Simply astounding.  What is this evidence for?  It adds more to the 'save the males" that I have been talking and writing about for almost two decades now.

Teenage boys and young men are simply not understanding that the world has changed rapidly in the past two decades.

For low-skilled men in their 20s, employment rates have fallen by about 10 percentage points over the last 15 years—from 82 percent in 2000 to only 72 percent in 2015. This decline is staggering. You might think it’s matched by a rise in school attendance for this age group. That is not the case.
The following may be the most shocking number I give you today: in 2015, 22 percent of lower-skilled men aged 21–30 had not worked at all during the prior 12 months. Think about that for a second.

Yes, think about all that data. Take more than a second.  Take ten minutes.  In fact, you should ponder those data for a long, long time.  One in five young men between the ages of 21 and 30 had not worked (for wages) over the 12 months.  One in five!

If you are a thinker--and you are; after all, you are here reading this--your immediate question is: "If they are not working, where do these young, low-skilled men live?"

You have an answer, right?  And you are correct about that:

In 2014, 70 percent of lower-skilled men in their 20s without a job lived with a parent or close relative.

Are you now beginning to have a little bit of an anxiety? Perhaps a tinge of panic?  If so, hold on to something, and get a brown-bag if you are beginning to hyperventilate.

If they are not working, how do these young men eat? We—the parents and relatives—feed them. When they are in our basements, they come up for food from time to time and raid our refrigerators. I have no information on whether or not they are showering.
Are these young, nonworking, lower-skilled men who are living in their parents’ basements married? You may be surprised to hear this: they are not. The age of marriage is increasing for this group. In summary, these younger, lower-skilled men are now less likely to work, less likely to marry, and more likely to live with parents or close relatives.

There is an interesting twist to all this.  You ready for that?

If we go to surveys that track subjective well-being—surveys that ask people to assess their overall level of happiness—lower-skilled young men in 2014 reported being much happier on average than did lower-skilled men in the early 2000s. This increase in happiness is despite their employment rate falling by 10 percentage points and the increased propensity to be living in their parents’ basement.

Those young men are happy.  The parents and close relatives hosting these young men might not be happy, but that is another story!

They are happy now. Yes. But, how about life after 30?

There is some evidence that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s and 40s. They haven’t accumulated on-the-job skills because they spent their 20s idle. Many eventually get married and have kids. When this happens, living in their parents’ basements is no longer a viable option. Playing video games does not put food on their tables. It’s a bad combination: low labor demand plus the accumulated effects of low labor supply makes economic conditions for these aging workers pretty bleak.
These labor-market outcomes affect many facets of society. They affect the take-up rates of government transfer programs. They may explain voting patterns for certain candidates in recent periods. There is rising evidence that lower-skilled workers in their 30s and 40s are increasing their drug use. We have also seen increased suicide rates for lower-skilled workers in middle age. The effects of changing technology on the labor markets of lower-skilled workers will likely have repercussions within the US economy for years to come.

When I yell about the urgency to re-write the social contract, to find alternative outlets for testosterone, to figure out ways in which we can help people be productive if they don't want to, or are not suited for, college, well, all those are not random independent issues.  Nope.  These are all inter-related issues that require a great deal of our time and energy.  Our time and energy as in all of us.  And for that, in a democracy, we need leaders who understand these nuances, help shape the conversations, and work out strategies for collective action.  Ain't gonna happen in the democracy that we have and the one that we will wake up to on November 9th :(

Oh, btw, if you thought all the quotes were excerpted from some left-wing nutcase's rants, ahem, it is from as academically rigorous right-wing economics as you can possibly get--Erik Hurst is an economics professor at the University of Chicago.  So, when a U. of Chicago economics/business professor says all those, well, you ought to be scared shitless by now.

The end of men. Why can't it be the end of mice, instead!

For years, nearly two decades now, I have been worried about boys lagging right from middle school on, and young men beginning to fall behind.  I have even tagged many of those posts with "save the males," as I have done in this post too. But then neither mice nor humans care about Sriram's views!;)

The worry is because this is not any zero-sum game in which girls and women advancing means that boys and men have to lose.  Instead of a win-win-win-win, the Y chromosome is failing.  Sometimes failing badly.

Talking about males and females has become a political landmine as well.  It is a charged topic.  But then, come to think of it, which topic is not charged.  It is unfortunate that even as we have become more educated as a society, we have not developed the abilities to have constructive and productive discussions.

But then people will take notice when the issue becomes a cover story at the Economist, which has apparently woken up to this issue, finally!  Let me give you the magazine's bottom-line first:

The growing equality of the sexes is one of the biggest achievements of the post-war era: people have greater opportunities than ever before to achieve their ambitions regardless of their gender. But some men have failed to cope with this new world. It is time to give them a hand.

I tell ya, it does piss me off that nobody listens to me.  But, heck, it is such an awesome feeling within that I am doing a good job of connecting the dots.

The magazine notes:

Men cluster at the bottom as well as the top.

When trying to talk about boys and men clustering at the ends, Larry Summers missed a step or two and he was soon pushed out of the presidency at Harvard; remember that?  I cannot understand why this has to be such a political issue!

Anyway, back to save the males; what's the net result?

 Poorly educated men in rich countries have had difficulty coping with the enormous changes in the labour market and the home over the past half-century. As technology and trade have devalued brawn, less-educated men have struggled to find a role in the workplace. Women, on the other hand, are surging into expanding sectors such as health care and education, helped by their superior skills. As education has become more important, boys have also fallen behind girls in school (except at the very top). Men who lose jobs in manufacturing often never work again. And men without work find it hard to attract a permanent mate. The result, for low-skilled men, is a poisonous combination of no job, no family and no prospects.

Yep, all the issues that I have blogged about in plenty.

The economic marginalisation this brings erodes family life. Women who enjoy much greater economic autonomy than their grandmothers did can afford to be correspondingly pickier about spouses, and they are not thrilled by husbands who are just another mouth to feed.

Ouch!

Hanna Rosin talks of “plastic women”, who adapt deftly to economic and social change, and “cardboard men”, who fail to adapt and are left crumpled.

If boys and men aren't adapting, or at least fast enough, then shouldn't the rest of us think about what to do?

Oh, btw, here's a video clip from the wise Stephen Colbert talking about Rosin's article and interviewing her, which I blogged about five years ago--almost to the date ;)

The Colbert Report
Get More: Colbert Report Full Episodes,The Colbert Report on Facebook,Video Archive

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!

A Valentine's Day note to amorous undergraduate females

Am re-posting here most of an entry from two years ago.  That was in the context of male students rapidly falling behind their female counterparts, and universities like the one where I teach having a 60/40 split with men in a shrinking minority.  I think it will work in the context of Valentine's Day too :)

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.

It is funny, every single time I read it :)

I wonder how I came across to young girls/women when I was in high school/college.  No thanks to me, did a few young ones prefer to bash their heads against the wall than talk to me?  Or, was I so insignificant that I didn't even blip in their radars?

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.

But then, if men are slacking off, it is the women's fault, especially for misusing their erotic capital!

Valentine's Day greetings in advance to y'all!

Women flying high in the US and India. But, grounded in Iran!

Maybe the end of men is coming sooner than expected!

First, in India:

A first-hand account on the conception of a satellite, its transition into a working reality, and finally its launch into space marked the inauguration of Electronics and Communication Engineering (ECE) Association of National Institute of Technology-Tiruchi (NIT-T). N.Valarmathi, India’s first woman project director to head a Remote Sensing Satellite Project, encapsulated her 28-years tryst with space technology in an attempt to motivate youngsters to tackle the multilevel engineering challenges involved in building satellites. 

There was one even before her:

 Ms. Valarmathi is the second woman to be the satellite project director at the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) after T. K. Anuradha, who headed the communication satellite GSAT-12 programme, but she is the first woman to head a remote sensing satellite project.

India's women are reaching new heights in a country that has had quite a few women as chief ministers in a number of states and, of course, as a prime minister too!

Here in the US, the senior-most position of the President's cabinet has been held by women for twelve of the last sixteen years: Madeline Albright, Condoleeza Rice, and Hillary Clinton.  So much so that Foreign Policy notes, in somewhat of a tongue-in-cheek fashion, "Is America ready for a male secretary of state?"

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has visited more than 100 nations during her tenure, flown 897,951 miles, and spent 376 days abroad. By making it to 110 countries in just one term, Clinton broke the previous record for most countries visited by a secretary: 98, held by Madeleine Albright. And although Condoleezza Rice visited fewer countries, she did log more than a million miles in the air. 

 A chuckling advice to the GOP contender:

Maybe as Mitt Romney struggles to gain traction in the presidential race, he will be tempted to engage in some classic special-interest politics and promise to appoint a man as secretary of state. The move would certainly be welcomed by American men who often feel aggrieved and underappreciated in the workplace. And certainly men remain an important minority when it comes to presidential voting (they constituted 46 percent of voters in the 2008 elections).
We just hope a man would be up to the task.

What a contrast these stories from India and the US are to this latest one from Iran!

More than 30 universities have introduced new rules banning female students from almost 80 different degree courses.
These include a bewildering variety of subjects from engineering, nuclear physics and computer science, to English literature, archaeology and business.
No official reason has been given for the move, but campaigners, including Nobel Prize winning lawyer Shirin Ebadi, allege it is part of a deliberate policy by the authorities to exclude women from education.
"The Iranian government is using various initiatives… to restrict women's access to education, to stop them being active in society, and to return them to the home," she told the BBC. 

 It is not Iran's attempts to produce nuclear weapons that ought to worry us as much such prehistoric policies ought to.

As Slate notes:

Like in the United States, Iran’s universities have more female students than male students. Female Iranians are surpassing their male peers in traditionally male-dominated studies, like science and engineering. The trend is clear. Iran’s leaders must think that the only way to prevent the “end of men” in their country is to make it illegal for women to succeed.

Maybe it is a good thing that Iran's ayatollahs want to hold women back--if not, by now Iran would have produced quite a few nukes!.  In any case, whether or not the end of men is for real, the end of these "religious" men is coming. Soon. Real soon.

In college, boys will be boys, and girls will ... kick butt

The Chronicle has two interesting takes on gender issues in higher education--welcome to my world!  Not the gender issues related to faculty or administrators, but students, who are the ones we ought to truly focus on when we talk about education, right?

Of course, I have blogged many, many times here on how much boys seem to be rapidly falling behind girls when it comes to education.  A male author worries about the underachieving males, and writes:

If the United States simply accepts that males will continue to lag behind their female counterparts in academic interest and performance, the consequences will be profound. This is no abstract issue: Ultimately, it could lead to a country in which millions of young men live with their parents and work lousy jobs with few or no benefits, and in which a class of highly educated, professionally engaged women is expected to support underemployed husbands.
The issue is not whether well-educated males should stay at home and take care of the kids. Today's "modern family" can work when it is a function of new opportunities, rather than a forced adjustment to limited horizons. If a husband can stay at home and run a successful online business while his wife practices medicine, great. But if he struggled in academics, dropped out of high school, and resents his wife's power and prestige, it will be a raw deal for all involved.

Not so fast, writes a female author.   She expands on the following three first:

• Women underestimate their abilities and express lower levels of self-confidence than their abilities suggest. Men overestimate their abilities and express higher levels of confidence than their abilities warrant.
• Men in college spend significantly more time in leisure activities (especially, for example, video-game play and athletic pursuits) than do women. College women are hyper-scheduled participants in co-curricular activities.
• Women have higher GPA's than do men—when they enter and leave college—even when the sexes show equivalent aptitude on standardized tests.

She ends with this:

while we were focusing on gaining access for girls and women, we neglected the needs of boys and men. We didn't plan well for the consequences of a society that taught one sex that it had to work harder to gain access, and the other sex that access was guaranteed. We find ourselves surprised each time we learn that the educational system is not serving boys and men as well as it might. We've barely begun to explore higher education's role in finding a balance that is good for all of our students and good for our country, and it is time we got started.

Yep. In fact, it is way past time that we got this discussion started.

Men are finished! Save the males :)

So, the Intelligence Squared debate on whether men have lost out in the battle between the sexes ended yesterday :

After hearing the arguments, the audience made its final decision. With 66 percent voting in favor of and 29 percent against the motion, and 5 percent remaining undecided, the majority of the audience agreed that men "really are finished."

Before the debate began, as is customary in this format, the audience was polled about this, and "22 percent of the audience voted for the notion, 54 percent against and 26 percent said they were undecided."  That is some serious swaying of the audience then!

Of course, these debates are not to establish the ultimate proofs for either side, as much as they are to help us think through some of the pressing issues of the day.  The difference in opportunities and performance of males and females is one of those, and one which has significant implications for social policies too.

The debate hasn't ended by any means.  Well, maybe it is the beginning of the end ... of males :)

Intelligence Squared: Save the males

You did not read it incorrectly; it is  "save the males," and not "save the whales." :)

This topic is not new in this blog, even going back three summers, as a quick search will show. 

This topic will be debated, and the speakers include Hanna Rosin, who will

debate for the motion that "men are finished" during the Sept. 20 live Slate/Intelligence Squared U.S. debate at NYU.
Why are men finished, exactly? Rosin says they've failed to adapt to a modern, postindustrial economy that demands a more traditionally—and stereotypically—feminine skill set (read: communication skills, social intelligence, empathy, consensus-building, and flexibility). Statistics show they're rapidly falling behind their female counterparts at school, work, and home. For every two men who receive a college degree, three women will. Of the 15 fastest-growing professions during the next decade, women dominate all but two. Meanwhile, men are even languishing in movies and on television: They're portrayed as deadbeats and morons alongside their sardonic and successful female co-stars.

In an interview with Slate, Rosin says this:

Slate: That's something you bring up in the piece—this failure of men to adapt. Ideally, of course, we'd have gender equality in all industrial and domestic spheres. But is this even realistic? Will men eventually assimilate to the new economy?
Rosin: I'm not prepared to answer that question. Some people say it's biology and brain makeup that make women do better at this moment. Obviously that's partly true: There's some way in which women are wired to kind of concentrate and focus and do better in school. On the other hand, it may be because they're the underdogs, that they're getting this extra juice somehow. Sometimes I look at this new class of women who are surpassing their husbands and really hustling, like in places like pharmacy school, which is where one of my book chapters is set. And they remind me of new immigrants. They're this class of people who are trying to get somewhere in a real hurry, and the men just seem to be sitting around in no hurry. One of the young guys I interviewed put it to me: "I just feel like my team is losing." They feel like women have clocked them, and it came as a surprise to this young generation of men, so I don't know that they can't catch up. They might.

However, popular culture is being very slow at catching up with these rapidly changing gender issues.  For instance, on TV:

You might think that this one-two punch of promising-sounding sitcoms about young women and fairly repugnant shows about middle-aged men (Man Up thinks that using "vagina" as an insult is the height of hilarity), would mean that this is the moment for young, female creators to really say something bold about the women of their generation women who dreamed of being Claire Huxtable, not June Cleaver.
Unfortunately that's not the case. Instead, the slew of new lady comedies rehash old stereotypes about long-term relationships between men and women, the elaborateness of female grooming rituals, and using feminine wiles to get what you want.

And, that ultimate stereotyping of females--beauty or brains, not beauty and brains, tragically, continues to be marketed:

While things have gotten much better in many regards, however, not all sexist prejudices about girls and intelligence have fallen by the wayside. For some reason, Forever 21 felt this girl's T-shirt that says "Allergic to Algebra" would still have an audience, after all, suggesting that the stereotype that girls are naturally bad at math is alive and well. (This stereotype is so pernicious that within a few years of my graduating high school, I found myself having to correct relatives who "remembered" me as struggling in math classes, when in fact my grades were about equal in all my classes.) Equally distressing is that this shirt--discovered right on the tail of an outrage over a JCPenney shirt that said "too pretty for homework"--suggests a persistent belief that intelligence and attractiveness are mutually exclusive. 

Rosin says she was a mega-debater in high school.  I can't wait for the debate to be aired.  Meanwhile, here is Hanna Rosin losing to the debater-extraordinaire, Stephen Colbert, on the topic of the end of men, which I blogged about in June 2010:

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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.

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.

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!

The Chinese save because? .... Read this!

I don't think the following explains it all; yet, an interesting point that the NY Times' Floyd Norris brings to our attenion:

In a working paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research today, two economists, Shang-Jin Wei of Columbia University and Xiaobo Zhang of the International Food Policy Research Institute, note that “By 2005, men outnumbered women at age 25 or below by about 30 million.” In 2007 there were about five boys born for every four girls.

“Families with sons compete with each other to raise their savings rate in response to ever-rising pressure in the marriage market. Competitive saving by these families spills over to greater savings by other families, possibly through raising the prices of nontradable goods such as housing.”

“Across Chinese provinces, there is clear evidence that local savings rates tend to be higher in regions with more unbalanced sex ratios.”

In other words, parents want their sons to marry, and they figure that girls are more likely to want to marry rich boys.

The authors note that while they looked only at China, “other economies known to have a strong sex ratio imbalance include Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore and India. These countries also happen to have high savings rates.”

Maybe in the new academic year, I can bug a few Chinese students about this :-) and, BTW, ever wonder what happens to the money saved? Click here.

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.

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.

Save the whales, er, males that is!

Men have been domesticated to within an inch of their lives, attending Lamaze classes, counting contractions, bottling expressed breast milk for midnight feedings – I expect men to start lactating before I finish this sentence – yet they are treated most unfairly in the areas of reproduction and parenting.

Very funny paragraph in that excerpt from the Times piece, which is an extract from Kathleen Parker's book, Save the Males.

I expect gender issues to come up a lot more over the next couple of decades. How societies--here in America and elsewhere--deal with that will have profound impacts in a number of ways. There is something happening here.

All the more the reason to be reminded of a piece that was in Slate a long time ago--well, in 2004--that reviewed Bastards on the couch. An excerpt: The bastards' stories make clear that they know better than to believe in quick, across-the-board fixes. Nor do they seem to set much store by a one-size-fits-all diagnosis of the problem. There's plenty of tinkering, not just talking, ahead for all us—and aren't men famously good at that?

If you liked that, then read the other piece on The Bitch in the House. Excerpt: "Every woman I know is mad at her husband, just mad mad mad at everything," a friend informs Cathi Hanauer, the editor of the best-selling anthology The Bitch in the House (subtitled 26 Women Tell the Truth About Sex, Solitude, Work, Motherhood, and Marriage) .... "Why … hadn't I been warned of this—the loss of identity, the potential claustrophobia, the feeling of being utterly trapped?"