>I reckon economics is currently so male because of the way it's taught (as
>natural science, where all is, and you are, either right or wrong) and the
>degrees in which it is taught (professional - you are what you've studied) -
>so far that has meant a preponderance of male graduates. But, when the
>liberal-feminist moment of triumph comes, and half the world's graduating
>class is female....
Over on M-Fem, this topic came up a while ago, and this is what Katha, for instance, had to say on the matter:
At 12:27 AM +0000 8/28/56, Katha Pollitt wrote:
>Date: Tue, 28 Aug 1956 00:27:45 +0000
>From: Katha Pollitt <kpollitt at thenation.com>
>To: M-Fem at csf.colorado.edu
>Subject: Re: Issues of Control and Domination
>Sender: m-fem-owner at csf.colorado.edu
>
>the point isn't that girls get good grades etc, as they have done for
>years. It's that girls are systematically discouraged in certain areas
>-- which just happen to be the areas in which big jobs and salaries lie
>-- math and science, for ex. Nobody cares if girls are best at some
>"faggy" subject like French or art or creative writing. I think
>christina Hoff sommers -- a big liar, btw, I'd be v suspicious of her
>stats and facts -- is ignoring a lot. Sexual harrassment, for ex. and
>the role of SATS and other tests at which boys do better. for instance,
>at my daughter's middle school, girls do much better than boys,
>including in math and science. It was really noticeable at the Honor
>roll ceremony, for which you need at least a 90 in every major subject
>-- at least two-third of the honorees were girls (and very few black
>kids of either sex). But every year, more boys than girls from her
>school get into Stuyvesant, the public exam school that is one of best
>high schools in the country. that's because all Stuy looks at is the
>test--which doesn't even have a writing section, where girls would
>outshine the boys.
>
>
>katha
And here's an article on gender, college degrees, & earnings in the USA:
***** <http://www.usnews.com/usnews/edu/college/coboys.htm>
>From the 2/2/99 issue of USN&WR
Where the boys aren't
Women are a growing majority on campus. So what are men up to-and who's losing out?
BY BRENDAN I. KOERNER
...This year, women are expected to earn just over 57 percent of all bachelor's degrees, compared with 43 percent in 1970 and under 24 percent in 1950. The U.S. Department of Education now projects that by 2008 women will outnumber men in undergraduate and graduate programs by 9.2 million to 6.9 million. The trend is moving quickly; if it continues at this pace, "the graduation line in the year 2068 will be all females," says Tom Mortenson, a higher-education policy analyst.
Armed with better grades, better résumés, and a clearer sense of future goals, many females reach the senior year of high school primed for the college admissions game. Males, meanwhile, are tempted by fast cash in a boom-time economy, preferring $30,000 starting salaries in such fields as air-conditioner maintenance and Web design to four years of Beowulf and student loans.
The growing split in post-secondary paths might do more to foster gender equality than any constitutional amendment or court decision. With an edge in education, women could close the salary gap and increasingly move into positions of power-as heads of corporations, presidents of universities, and political leaders.
But that's assuming higher education remains the key to upward mobility-a big "if," warn some, who foresee a time not too distant when degrees are not so prized, and skipping college might be a wiser career choice.
Past parity. Since women stepped into the majority on campuses in
1979, the college gender gap has widened at virtually every type of
school: large and small, public and private, two-year and four-year.
>From the 23,617-student, state-run University of New Mexico (57
percent female) to 2,032-student, Catholic-affiliated Edgewood
College in Wisconsin (73 percent female) to the mammoth University of
California system (seven of the eight campuses have female
majorities), women are flooding colleges and universities.
...Though girls do slightly worse than boys on standardized tests-in 1998, their mean score on the SAT was 7 points lower on the verbal section and 35 points lower on math-admissions officials say grades, class rank, and activities are given far more weight. Slightly outnumbered in the overall population of 15-to-19-year-olds, girls graduate from high school at a higher rate than boys; in 1996, 51.2 percent of high school graduates were female. Girls accounted for 53.5 percent of SAT takers that year, and 69.7 percent of female graduates enrolled in college within a year of graduating, compared with only 60.1 percent of boys.
Clearly, part of the trend in college enrollment stems from advances in society that have given women more choices: They are no longer expected to take the homemaker route or to matriculate solely for the purpose of earning their "M.R.S. degree": that is, a husband. "When I was a high school counselor 20 years ago, I had many parents say, 'I want my daughter to take home economics because she's just going to get married,' " says Nancy Perry, executive director of the American School Counselor Association. "Women believe they can achieve now, and they go for it."
This also brings a large number of older women to campus, especially to state universities that cater to "nontraditional" students. "A lot [of women] put off finishing college to follow a husband or because of families," says Michael O'Connor, director of enrollment services at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Va., which is 56 percent female. "Now they're re-entering the work force, and they need to be retrained."
...A particularly large gender gap among African-Americans, who make up about 11 percent of the nation's undergraduate population, also contributes to the skew. Nearly 63 percent of African-American undergraduates are women, and of the nation's 117 historically black colleges and universities, only one-all-male Morehouse College in Atlanta-has a majority of men. High dropout and incarceration rates are to blame for the discrepancy: In 1994, there were more African-American males in jail or prison than enrolled in college. "You've got fewer and fewer black males who are eligible for college," says Anthony Jones, director of admissions at Fisk University in Nashville, which is 71 percent female. "Then you have to find ones who meet Fisk's criteria, and it's a bit selective. We end up having to recruit from a very small pool."
...Male preference? Schools say they stop short of offering "affirmative action for men," but some confide that giving male applicants a slight break is becoming a standard, albeit unspoken, practice. "Colleges and universities are dipping down deeper into their male pool than their female pool," says AAHE president Miller. "It's definitely out there," agrees Joan Mudge, director of college counseling at the all-girls Garrison Forest School in Owings Mills, Md. "They don't come right out and say they're discriminating against our girls, but they are." When calling schools to inquire why highly qualified female applicants were rejected, Mudge says admissions directors will "hedge and hedge before saying, 'Our female applicant pool was just incredible this year.'"
Such griping must seem ironic to many women who remember when higher education, especially at four-year schools, was a privilege reserved mostly for their brothers. Indeed, the gender flip-flop could be viewed as an amazing success story. But some observers who study the gender patterns of the work force warn that the picture is not as rosy as it might appear. Among the population of full-time workers, women with bachelor's degrees still make only $4,708 more on average than men holding nothing more than a high school diploma; that's close to $20,000 less than the college-degree premium enjoyed by men. And there are concerns that most areas of study preferred by women-English over engineering, psychology over computer science-are reinforcing their secondary position in the economy. "Every sort of job that's associated with females is also associated with declining status," says Barbara Miller, an anthropologist and former director of women's studies at George Washington. "They're less economically promising in terms of lifetime earnings."
"We still find that women are more likely to be concentrated in female fields, which have lower pay, fewer opportunities for advancement, and less prestige," says Judith Sturnick, director of the American Council on Education's Office of Women in Higher Education....
But Sturnick cites the current rise of corporate-sponsored schools-such as the Cisco computer-networking program-which train mostly men for high-paying, often technology-related jobs, as women slog along at traditional colleges. "Will we set up a separate track for education which will primarily benefit men, which will allow them to enter the job market with higher pay at a higher salary," Sturnick asks, "while women continue on the baccalaureate track, end up debt laden, and then wind up three or four years behind in a profession?" She says higher education could become devalued because of its increasing feminization-the same phenomenon that has occurred with elementary school teachers-and that earning a bachelor's degree will someday be considered a foolhardy economic decision. "When there begins to be a predominance of female members in any area, the value of that area goes down," she says. "Is it possible we are devaluing higher education? There's a potential for that as more and more women dominate in degree achievement."
The still-small number of women majoring in math and the sciences also has some education watchers troubled. Though many traditionally "male" majors-like business-have moved toward parity or are now female dominated, women are still vastly outnumbered on campuses with strong engineering and physical-sciences programs. The student body at the California Institute of Technology, for example, is still 73 percent male. "What we're seeing now is that there is a tremendous gap in computer science," says Sandy Bernard, president of the American Association of University Women. "That one will be really significant." She worries that women's lack of those types of degrees will sentence them to also-ran status in the high-tech workplace, where the big money will be.... *****
At the doctorate level, the gender picture reverses, and women's share was still 39 percent of the doctorates awarded, and the proportion of total science and engineering doctoral degrees that were awarded to women 31 percent, in 1995 (at http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/nsf99338/access/c4/c4s2.htm#c4s2l2b). And I suspect that, but for foreign-born & -educated women who earn U.S. doctorates in science & engineering, gender imbalance for U.S.-born & -educated women might be even more striking (at OSU, I meet lots of women grads in science & engineering from China, India, & the ex-Eastern bloc nations).
So, American women have made great advances, but somehow women's advancement in education has not brought a proportionate advance in financial rewards, not only because of gender discrimination in pay & promotion & career interruptions due to reproduction, but also because women are still socialized to specialize in less profitable fields of endeavor (and once women begin to dominate a field, the field's prestige and earning potential drop as well).
Yoshie