<p>" As a growing number of young women obtain advanced degrees, the U.S. Census Bureau pedicts more women than men are expected to become doctors, lawyers and professors.
Nearly six out of ten adults holding advanced degrees between the ages of 25 and 29 are women, the census reported Tuesday....</p>
<p>The study also revealed the gap between men and women older than 25 holding advanced degrees has shrunk since 2000.</p>
<p>About 10 percent of women over 25 possessed an advanced degree compared to about 7 percent of women in 2000. In comparison, the growth for men over 25 holding advance degrees was much slower, the Census report shows. About 11 percent of men over 25 had an advanced degree compared to 10 percent in 2000." More</a> women than men get advanced degrees - CNN.com</p>
<p>I think that for decades, females have been out performing males academically, but it has only been in recent years that females have been able to get the opportunities that their academic performances deserved.</p>
<p>I started noticing this 20 years ago. I don’t know if that’s what you mean by decades. Title 9 was where it became an issue in the public from my perspective.</p>
<p>Even in the 60s when I was in high school, girls were academically out performing the boys, but there were fewer opportunities for girls. Many families chose not to send their daughters to college because they felt that girls didn’t need higher education.</p>
<p>Teachers steered bright girls to secretarial school instead of college.</p>
<p>There also were many colleges that accepted males only or deliberately accepted low numbers of women even though the women applicants were stronger. Harvard is just one example. </p>
<p>Medical schools and other professional schools greatly limited the numbers of women whom they’d accept. It was hard for women to get internships and clerkships.</p>
<p>Unlike the situation today in which women now are favored for engineering schools, it was very difficult for even outstanding female applicants to get accepted to those schools and to get jobs in those professions. </p>
<p>It also was much more socially acceptable for women to go to college only to snag a husband, and then to drop out, get some kind of secretarial job to put their husband through school.</p>
<p>Interesting!
In the field of sciences, (physics, engineering,…) things might be different.
It’s interesting to know though that more women are getting into medical field.</p>
<p>Actually, I heard someone on NPR talking about the fact that the best and brightest women used to just be funelled into teaching is one of the reasons our educational system used to be more effective, back when there were so few real opportunities for academically brilliant young women. He pointed out that kids used to have the benefit of teachers in science who would now be the same women competing for the nobel.</p>
<p>It was a really interesting point of view, I thought.</p>
Well, duh, as we used to say in junior high. More young women are going to college than young men. More are going to grad school. So it’s a surprise that more are going to hold jobs that require advanced studies? Tell me my tax dollars didn’t pay someone to come to this obvious conclusion!</p>
<p>Here’s an idea for someone’s thesis in education. Do, say, Chinese (or fill in the blank for other countries) students do better because of some intrinsic ability, or because they have had better teachers because until very recently high ability women in (fill in the blank country) had fewer choices, so the kids got very able teachers?</p>