NY Times: "At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust"

<p>I'd like to see the breakdown of male grads' majors. Unless they were at tech schools, it might look very similar to the list above.</p>

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Where this kind of ethic has gone with boys is a mystery to me.

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<p>In the private coed progressive school my sons attended, outright competition, the kind that boys love, was outlawed by the administration. In their traditional boys' school, there are all kinds of prizes and honors to be had.</p>

<p>Cheers:</p>

<p>Competition was de-emphasized at my kids' school, too, but it reflected parents' wishes as much as the school's ethos. In fact, at graduation, I heard lots of parents grumbling that some kids got too many awards and others not enough, and all awards should be eliminated. The same kind of rhetoric was used to support the elimination of honors classes in the high school. Some of the most vociferous supporters of this elimination were white middle class parents. Had they not been so vocal in support of our misguided principal, we would have retained the honors track. As it was, the heterogeneous classes were a disaster for all kids, the struggling ones as well as the insufficiently challenged ones.
I do think that we often get the schools and the politicians we deserve.</p>

<p>It may take some digging in google but I found some #'s from the Yale Daily news supporting some of those claims: I'm sure the US dept of education must keep those figures someplace.</p>

<p>From the article:</p>

<p>Three decades of a 'gender gap'</p>

<p>In the 2005-'06 school year, anthropology, environmental studies, art history and psychology are among the majors in which women are most overrepresented. At the same time, women are underrepresented in many of the physical sciences, including electrical, chemical and mechanical engineering, mathematics and physics.</p>

<p>Women make up 42 percent of all science majors, but only 32 percent of science majors other than biology and molecular biophysics and biochemistry. They are also underrepresented in several mathematics-heavy social science disciplines, such as economics, where 26 percent of majors are women.</p>

<p>In contrast to the sciences, women make up 62 percent of majors identified as "other" in University data, which include interdisciplinary programs such as East Asian studies, as well as art and architecture, which are connected to the professional schools. There are only four science-related majors in the "other" category: cognitive science, environmental studies, applied mathematics and history of science, history of medicine. Of those four, women comprise a majority of students in all but applied mathematics.</p>

<p>I was personally struck by the fact that at Harvard which has one of the top math departments in the country, only 39 students graduated with a major last year, out of a graduating class of more than 1600.
There may well be a gender imbalance in different disciplines, but the list you presented in the earlier post was not sufficient to draw that kind of conclusion.</p>

<p>xNYer: And your point is . . . ?</p>

<p>Cheers: My kids used to go to an elite progressive private school where overt competition is frowned upon and all academic (but not sports) awards were discontinued. Needless to say, the kids are furiously competitive; they compete at being co-operative, among other things. The boys do fine. Anyway, my kids switched from there to a math/science-oriented large public magnet, where EVERYTHING is an overt competition and it wouldn't shock anyone if they started awarding daily prizes for who can pee farthest. (I have never seen so many damn prizes in my life. My son is good at accumulating them, and there were times this spring I wished I could prick him with a needle and let some of the hot air out.) The kids are furiously competitive. The girls do fine.</p>

<p>[Cue broken record.] If there is a boy crisis, it has absolutely nothing to do with high-end pedagogical fashions.</p>

<p>I, by the way, was a comp lit person before I went to law school. With a minor in econ, and time off to do a 6-month internship at a significant Wall Street financial institution. Although women were a majority of the students in comp lit at the time, it was a thoroughly male-dominated field, and it was the most competitive thing I have ever experienced -- far more than an all-male prep school, sports, a securities trading desk (that was #2, though), law school, law. Every time anyone opened his mouth, it was Shoot-Out at the OK Corral. Point-for-IQ-point, the literature professors were, in my estimation, considerably smarter than my econ professors, my law school professors (at a top law school), my law review board, and everyone on the Supreme Court since 1976. (Richard Posner is probably that smart, though. And I think Robert Coover was, too.) Success in that field was unbelievably difficult to achieve. </p>

<p>Anyway, MY point with that little rant is that, while I fully accept that undergraduate grading is easier in the humanities, "easier" majors are not the same thing as intellectually deficient majors. I knew, and know, lots of successful scientists and engineers who could not have survived a week in the literary theory Terrordome.</p>

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If there is a boy crisis, it has absolutely nothing to do with high-end pedagogical fashions.

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<p>Not even a possibility? That's really certain! Based on what?</p>

<p>JHS: Great post - I'm going to use it to start another thread! Hope you don't mind.</p>

<p>See "surprisingly competitive majors" in the cafe.</p>

<p>Perhaps this has already been linked (if so, I apologize), but here's another article on "the problem with boys":</p>

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<p>Women are going to rule the US of A, one way or another, sooner or later. I accept it. It's gonna happen, and there's nothing I can do about it.</p>

<p>gender gaps must be considered when looking at these statistics. lots of research has been done between male and female students. for ex. researchers found the women work more coopertively in a group than men...women study longer hours...etc...my guess is that these statistics will continue</p>

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Subject: Girl Majors the stats (81% take easy majors)

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<p>I'm with JHS. You can say "easier grading" and often "less rigorous" (although that is less the case). Where it really hurts is the low end. The sciences are far more likely to hand out an F or a D or far more Cs than the humanities (and often the social sciences), but that doesn't make philosophy, for instance, easy. I'd like to see majors by sex for males, and again am convinced that grading differences partially explain why the SAT I score is overpredictive of male GPA and underpredictive of female GPA.</p>

<p>I didn't read all the previous posts, but in my opinion, women will never "leave men in the dust" as long as they continue to take cream-puff majors over the hard sciences and engineering. With a much higher proportion of males in those majors with grade deflation, it's expected that average GPAs are lower for males, even if they performed better than females on average.</p>

<p>C'mon, im_blue, we all know that the real reason men won't leave women in the dust is the patriarchy and men repressing women.</p>

<p>:rolleyes:</p>

<p>But really, what are your cream-puff majors? Philosophy? History? English?</p>

<p>There are majors filled with women that are even more cream-puff than those you listed, like psychology, sociology, communications, international relations, and foreign languages. In fact, if you ranked the majors by percentage of men, that would very closely parallel the ranking of difficulty as well. Coincidence?</p>

<p>I think it's foolish to write off majors like philosophy as "cream-puff" (largely because you probably have little idea about it- for instance, do you think logic is "cream-puffy," one of the major components of philosophy?) and really history and English can be ( and often are) very rigorous and very serious, just as engineering or the sciences can be fluffy. Do you look more highly upon philosophy and think that it's more challenging if I tell you philosophy has far more men than women in it? It's high on your list, but I guess it's an exception to your correlation? </p>

<p>Are we to conclude that women gravitate to easier things because they're lazier?</p>

<p>I really don't know what sort of things fall into your "difficulty," and it's much harder to agree about things like that. Can't we just talk about grading standards instead? it's much easier to agree that the humanities and social sciences have a higher average GPA and generally tougher grading standards than the sciences and technical subjects than talk about how difficult it is for part of society to memorize formulas and vocabulary vs. read texts and write essays. Anyway, reputable research in the fields of modern psychology are far from creampuff, although sometimes programs in the field, particularly for undergraduates, can be less demanding than others, and often grades easier than other disciplines (such as the sciences and technical fields). I hope you don't write off disciplines and their findings because of your opinions about the undergraduate programs and their difficulty.</p>

<p>Actually, I've taken logic as a math major, and I do think that philosophy is indeed one of the harder liberal arts majors, which is why I gave you my list of "cream puff" majors. That philosophy has a relatively high percentage of men illustrates my point.</p>

<p>I'm not concluding that women purposely take easier majors due to laziness, but they do tend to be more interested in them for some reason (I'll leave the speculation up to you). Thus, it doesn't make much sense to point to a high percentage of women graduates as evidence that "women are leaving men in the dust."</p>

<p>Grading standards obviously do play a large role in "difficulty." Even supposing that all fields are equally rigorous and challenging, the fact that tech students are subjected to harsh grading curves means that they have to work much harder to achieve the same "performance" as measured by GPA. "Cream puff" majors are easy because of their lax grading policies as well as their inherent "difficulty."</p>

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Anyway, reputable research in the fields of modern psychology are far from creampuff, although sometimes programs in the field, particularly for undergraduates, can be less demanding than others, and often grades easier than other disciplines (such as the sciences and technical fields). I hope you don't write off disciplines and their findings because of your opinions about the undergraduate programs and their difficulty.

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<p>I agree that it's important to make this distinction. Most would agree that it's pretty easy to breeze through a typical psychology curriculum, but that doesn't necessarily mean that psychology research is unrigorous.</p>

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Actually, I've taken logic as a math major, and I do think that philosophy is indeed one of the harder liberal arts majors, which is why I gave you my list of "cream puff" majors. That philosophy has a relatively high percentage of men illustrates my point.

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<p>So in the liberal arts, you would probably put it right behind the sciences and mathematics, I take it? Did you know that as a math major, you were a liberal arts major?</p>

<p><a href="http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/liberal%20arts%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/liberal%20arts&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Sure, I would put philosophy and economics right behind the sciences. And it says "College of Liberal Arts and Sciences" right on my diploma, but I wonder why universities call it "Liberal Arts and Sciences" or "College of Arts and Sciences" if the sciences are included in liberal arts?</p>

<p>Not sure . . . ever since the 1800s, the sciences have tried to differentiate themselves from other things. <em>shrug</em></p>