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

Parents Forum
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<p>Dadguy:</p>

<p>You make some interesting observations. May I ask what line of work your company is in?</p>

<p>Taxguy:</p>

<p>In the humanities and social sciences, essays do count for a lot; but many of these essays are assigned as homework, i.e in book reports, term papers, response papers, and these are usually produced electronically.</p>

<p>While men may still do better in the math/sciences, it would be useful to have more information about the proportion of men who go into the humanities and social sciences, and why, if they tend to do better in the math/sciences fields, they do not go into these fields.</p>

<p>On the subject of math/science majors having to take liberal arts classes, the number of such required classes can hardly account for the lower performance by men. General ed requirements typically are for 2 humanities, 2 social sciences and 2 math/science classes. So while this distribution plays to the strengths of humanities/social sciences students, 2 extra courses in writing-heavy disciplines can hardly account for the discrepancy in performance between men and women.</p>

<p>In some ways, your comments about men's greater physical energy during the late teen years echo those made by Cheers. And as I said, while the effects are definitely felt in the field of education, the causes are not educational and the solutions should be sought outside. Already middle-class parents are keeping their sons back an extra year before sending them to kindergarten. A gap year for boys after high school would also be a good idea.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Hmm, doesn't this bother the diversity crowd? And is AA for men really appropriate given the fact that men still earn more than women? Interesting to hear the reaction to this. Men are hardly a group that has suffered historically from discrimination.

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As one who agrees with diversity, none of this matters to me in the least because I don’t think there is a “boy crisis”, at least not for white boys. We are only talking about a very narrow slice of time here, and even in this narrow slice of time we are dealing only with a few percentage points difference. I think when we call this a “crisis” we are just being alarmist.</p>

<p>Should women continue to occupy more spaces at colleges so that they comprise 91% of college enrollment, when as a result of their superior education they are hired over men by margins of ten to one, when they eventually find themselves heading companies by a ten to one margin, when their ensuing power gets them resources so that they comprise 90 percent of American governorships, when the American House contains only five boys, when the Senate contains only one or none at all, when this non-male Congress makes laws from its perspective that govern commerce, family and finance, and when this has gone on year-after-year for at least a century, THEN we will have a genuine “boy crisis” in America.</p>

<p>Currently, we only have an interesting statistic here, one that means very little when we consider that the schools as a whole contain just about equal numbers of men and women, and when business is still by far ruled by men, and when Congress is still almost totally dominated by men, and when America has never had a female president in its entire history. I simply cannot see a crisis here. Indeed, I don’t even see a crisis in the making.</p>

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<p>I think taxguy is correct in his assessment. Cornell publishes its median grades for all of its classes. Looking at the median grades for male-dominated engineering courses versus female-dominated LA courses you clearly see a marked difference. While one could conclude that this is just because males aren't as smart/applied as the females, I think taxguys' analysis is more likely the answer. Certainly no one would argue that those in engineering work less than those in LA majors.</p>

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<p>Great post, Drosselmeier.</p>

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<p>The primary reason why women have the majority in college representation has absolutely nothing to do with academics, but rather economics. In poorer families, younger men need to find jobs to work at while women are usually given more money to go to college. </p>

<p>This also has nothing to do with job representation. Papers cite sexism because men still dominate some professional fields. At the vast majority of colleges, Women usually still go to college to study things that they do not intend to use in their job, whether it is teaching, marketing, criminal justice, or any of the other current "hot fields" where there is now a demand. Many of the fields which women dominate are considered "soft sciences" or "humanities" and these fields have my greatest respect. However, most women that study these
do not intend to be historians, artists, or psychologists.</p>

<p>Anyway, the bottom line is, men are more job focused in our society usually than women, and that is why there are fewer of them on most college's campus's.</p>

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<p>At the top three tiers however, the situation is different. Women don't outnumber men much there and if they do, here are some possible reasons why.</p>

<p>There are more women than men in high schools usually, or at least in the academic groups. </p>

<p>Women are encouraged more than men.</p>

<p>Women receive affirmitive actions in areas where they are lacking. Men rarely receive gender based affirmitive action as a rule.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
As for MIT... well, I was one of the women rejected, me with my 1550 SAT and top grades. My ex-boyfriend, with worse stats and ECs, was admitted the following year. Yes, you can look at acceptance rates, but, fact is, the women who apply are more qualified. Few women apply because they "might" get in - most of them are absolute superstars.

[/quote]

Are you making this observation based merely on your own individual experience in being rejected? Or do you actually have some studies/statistics to back these "facts" up? If so, i'd be interested in reading them. It makes no sense to say that the only reason fewer women choose to apply to MIT is simply because they fear that their chances are slimmer. </p>

<p>By all logic, the exact opposite should be true. If MIT is like nearly every other top tier college in the nation, they are scrambling to scoop up every minority they can in order to keep a diverse student body. In MIT's case, that minority is women, and the result can clearly be seen in the more than double acceptance rate that women have there over men.</p>

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<p>Well, to be fair...</p>

<p>
[quote]

  • At Brown University, men made up not quite 40 percent of this year's applicants, but 47 percent of those admitted.

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</p>

<p>For another interesting stat, we could take a look at the same numbers for Caltech, where the converse is true, and to probably a significantly greater degree. It would be more useful to look at nationwide stats if we want to draw any conclusion.</p>

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[quote]

  • At Harvard, 55 percent of the women graduated with honors this spring, compared with barely half the men.

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</p>

<p>So 55% of women graduated with honors, and just a little over 50% of men. This particular stat line isn't all that significant, is it? </p>

<p>


</p>

<p>I agree with mo24 here; the "fact is" you can draw no conclusions based on the applications of you and your ex-boyfriend.</p>

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<p>
[quote]
Fewer boys bother to take the SATs so the published SAT average reflects a truncated sample. The boys who don't show up to take the test are more likely to have been those who would have been in the bottom tail of the distribution. Thus, with this kind of systematic sample bias, it's not surprising that male reported SAT medians are slightly higher than female SAT medians.

[/quote]

Actually, this is not the reason. That might appear to be true from the national average, but if you break it down by state, you'll find that it clearly is not.</p>

<p>In states that have an almost equal number of men and women taking the SAT, the disparity still exists, with men scoring significantly higher in math and marginally higher in verbal. In fact, even in the states where more men actually take the SAT than women, that score difference still persists and is relatively unchanged. Also, keep in mind that women make up more of the US population than men, so a larger number of women taking the SATs would also reflect that.</p>

<p>No one knows for sure why there is such a significant score difference between genders on the SAT, but it definitely isn't because more women are taking the test.</p>

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<p>marite,</p>

<p>I'm an actuary in a consulting firm. Definitely a math field.</p>

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<p>Dadguy:</p>

<p>You have actuaries who think outside the box? Pension actuaries, I imagine?</p>

<p>A quick actuary joke (hope you don't mind. One of my brood is an actuary).</p>

<p>Q: If you go to a party with accountants and actuaries, how can you pick out the accountants?</p>

<p>A: The accountants look at your shoes.</p>

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<p>An important question to ask about this article is what kind of achievements those men came away with at Harvard.</p>

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<p>Thanks, dadguy.</p>

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<p>Property-casualty actuary, here.</p>

<p>One of the things we do is to prepare rate filings; for example, for auto insurance. Periodically, we review class factors. You know, how much someone's rate should depend on where their car is garaged, their driving record, the make and model of car, etc. </p>

<p>There are standard ways of determining how much each thing will get weighted. But an example of thinking outside the box is to develop a rating factor that no one had thought of yet. That involves figuring out how to test something like that before putting it to use, figuring out how to collect the information on policyholders, etc.</p>

<p>The first part of the job, knowing what the standards methods are and deciding which combination to use is really the type of thinking that is found in most of your college education and is what manifests itself in grades. The second part, the insight and developing ideas synthetically from different things you've learned is really something that doesn't get measured by college grades.</p>

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<p>Dadguy:</p>

<p>Thanks for the explanation.</p>

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<p>Dadguy:</p>

<p>The insights and thinking outside the box type of skills in math seem to me to be the kind of skills developed through math competitions and other kinds of math education. For example, to do well on the AMC/AIME, it may not be necessary to know more advanced math but to know how to approach high school-level math problems. At least, that's what I've been told.<br>
So it might be interesting to find out how many girls vs. how many boys participate in math competitions. At the IMO level, very very few.
I know some girls who excelled in math in high school (AP-Calc in sophomore year, for example) but did not choose to enter math competitions and chose to pursue non-math/science careers. Why this is so, I do not know.</p>

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<p>How about the grading differences between mathematics, sciences and technical majors versus social science and humanities majors on average (liberal arts includes the sciences, people, sorry). This might also have to do with the degree to which SAT I scores unpredictive grades between males and females.</p>

<p>
[quote]
and even in this narrow slice of time we are dealing only with a few percentage points difference. I think when we call this a “crisis” we are just being alarmist.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Which statistic are you talking about? They're not all a few percentage points different.</p>

<p>
[quote]
Should women continue to occupy more spaces at colleges so that they comprise 91% of college enrollment, when as a result of their superior education they are hired over men by margins of ten to one,

[/quote]
</p>

<p>These are all true? And these are all dependent solely on sex and not at all on other factors, such as choice (if you're an engineer it's probably easier to get a job, and much higher paying one, right out of college compared to say, psychology)? Education, specifically college education (either undergraduate or graduate- women greatly outnumber men in each) is a factor in those hiring decisions?</p>

<p>But dross, the most disturbing part of your post is that until a bad situation has gone on for a hundred years or more, it simply isn't a worthy of the title "crisis" or very much attention. Hey, I think your correct, many times the use of the word crisis is alarmist, inflamed rhetoric, often unwarranted with regard to the current situation, usually meaning potential or likely future crisis resulting from a current negative situation. How is this different than other so-called crises? </p>

<p>You seem to say that for any unfair situation to occur in any case, things must generally and greatly be against those receiving it, that the specific thing is not enough to constitute something being unfair. That doesn't make sense to me (and this is not specific to this issue).</p>

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<p>marite,</p>

<p>The answer is: "it depends".</p>

<p>My S competed in the MathCounts (MC) competition in middle school. A little background. Schools send teams of 4 (along with 4 alternates) to regional competitions. There are a number of written problems that the kids work out and both the team and the individual receive scores at the end of the day. The highest scoring individuals face off in a "quiz show" type format at the end of the competition.</p>

<p>The top scoring teams in the regionals move on to the state (the exact number from a reigional depends on the number of teams in that regional) plus any top scoring individuals who weren't part of a team that was already going (i.e., my S). The process is repeated at the state level to determine who goes on to the nationals. Unfortunately, my S's road to glory stopped at the state, so I'll have to fund my own retirement :(</p>

<p>Well, the girls were in a minority but they were a sizable minority. More to the point, was that some schools took this very seriosuly and had the kids meet after school at least twice a week to go over all sorts of sample problems and to develop strartegies for solving probelms. The teachers there had sort of boiled things down into a road map, but I don't think you could call it teaching "insight". </p>

<p>On the other hand, my S has a strong math intutiion and likes to do the problems without pencil or paper. I think the contrast shows that there is more than one path to success in math.</p>

<p>P.S. I've aslo seen high school girls who have shied away from math even though it was apparent that there was some aptitude there. Maddening.</p>

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<p>Daguy:</p>

<p>I was thinking more of the AIME level problesm where knowing MV-Calc might not give you an edge, but having encountered similar problems before would. In our hs, the science team is far stronger than the math team which threatens to dissolve every year. Part of the reason is that the science team is seen as much as a social club as a learning club, and it attracts boys and girls in almost equal numbers. Preparing for math competitions, however, is not seen as a social occasion. You get together in a room, but work on problems on your own. In college, however, math study groups are quite common.</p>

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<p>
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Preparing for math competitions, however, is not seen as a social occasion. You get together in a room, but work on problems on your own.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Not necessarily. </p>

<p>Many high school math competitions (e.g., ARML, HMMT, NYSML, and a variety of other regional math contests hosted by colleges around the country for high school students, including a new one starting up this year at Princeton) have a team component to them, in which the entire team collaborates on a set of problems together. Some also have relay components in which one student's output is the input to the next student's problem and so on.</p>

<p>As a result, the most effective math teams usually spend most of their practice time working together rather than independently. (You can work independently by yourself anytime, so group practice time is most effectively used to practice team rounds and relays.) A very important aspect of math teams is learning to communicate and collaborate effectively.</p>

<p>Note: Some of the collaborative math team events require travel, but some are mail-in contests that are administered locally at each high school, e.g., ARML Power Contest (which happens twice a year), Mandelbrot Competition (four times a year), and several newer less well-known ones. The mail-in locally administered contests are quite inexpensive (reasonable registration fees and no travel costs) and have problems at a variety of different challenge levels, so that everyone from rookies to veterans will find some appropriate challenges to work on.</p>