This isn’t surprising. It’s also not an indication that women are doing better than men writ large. Most degrees are not worth the investment. A few high performing ones hold the average up. Trades are desperate for workers and have above average pay. Men are much more likely to do those jobs. The risk is that women are going to be left with more debt and will be less employable in the long run.
But for a society that acts like everyone’s worth is wrapped up in whether or not you have a degree, we should be a lot more concerned about this than we are.
This would make sense if college degree requirements weren't rampant for tons of jobs that shouldn't require them.
It's a hard requirement a lot of the time in tech as well. Doesn't matter anymore whether you have 10+ years experience at a large company in <very fancy subfield that requires at least grad school level expertise in something very academic> like compilers or something. You'll be viewed as a neanderthal that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus.
In the past, that was less of an issue. A culture of self study (on prerequisite academic topics) was more prevalent. Now the base assumption is that you stumbled into your position and have been flying under the radar as a dimwit changing the color of buttons.
Theories as to why this is now the case:
- Increased competition and rise of CS enrollment and improved perception of CS degrees.
- Bootcamp grads giving recruiters and hiring managers a bad impression about everyone self taught.
- Overhiring in certain subfields and at certain large tech companies causing a reduction in the signaling value of experience.
- Age discrimination
So in other words, with the exception of physical trades, credential inflation is definitely a real thing and it definitely has an impact on how easily you can move positions and/or negotiate compensation.
And if you couldn't tell, yes I'm salty on account of having had to waste time and money going back to finish a degree that I was overqualified for just in order to not immediately get lumped in with bootcamp grads. The entire ordeal was academically worthless. Don't make my mistake kids...stay in school even if it feels like you aren't learning anything so that you don't have to go back and do it while also juggling adult responsibilities. I think this is a mistake that men are probably more likely to make than women as well, which could help explain some of the gender discrepancy in graduation rates. Call it overconfidence fueled by testosterone or something.
> You'll be viewed as a neanderthal that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus.
Funny you say this 1.5 months after I find out that the university where I got my master's dropped calculus classes (from the bachelor subjects, there never was much non-applied math in the master years). Logic (mathematical logic), discrete math, combinatorics and theoretical statistics have been dropped years past (more than a decade for logic). Applied statistics and "Math I + II" (essentially revision of high school calculus, practical only, no theory, e.g. no more treatment of the difference between Riemann and Newtonian integration) are all the math that's left.
Master degree holders starting 4 years from now will all be "neanderthals that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus". Or at least know little of the theoretical underpinnings of calculus.
Yep, this is credential inflation in a nutshell. Don't fall through the cracks in the future, if you do then maybe you'll wind up as a neanderthal that couldn't pass college algebra.
I think that you’re missing out on the fact that you’re an outlier. Most people in tech do not get there by hacking away at their computer as a teenager on up, or as a hobby (or work related self education). That’s why companies use a college degree as a filter, especially in jobs that are heavily theoretical and not “we’ll just grind on it with man hours until it’s finished”. It suck that you are an outlier but that doesn’t mean companies have to take a chance on you. Life isn’t fair very often, that’s why it’s extremely important to network, go to conventions or trade shows, or volunteer if a company wants someone on site at a 3rd party. I’m in your boat as well. All I have is an undergrad, but I work with PhD’s because I have niche knowledge and experience that a lot of them do not, and after being in the industry for a while I can hold my own, even though this job tends to require PhD as a degree filter.
> It's a hard requirement a lot of the time in tech as well
I've always seen "or equivalent experience". I'd assumed that including that alternative was mandatory-ish for the same reason that explicit intelligence tests are reportedly lawsuit magnets.
Absolutely, a lot of companies include that, but that isn't binding on how individuals evaluate resumes.
However, when I say it's often a hard requirement, I do mean that literally. The "or equivalent experience" bit isn't there a significant percentage of the time for the sorts of jobs I typically apply for (nothing that has actual regulatory reasons to require a license or degree). Then you wind up with the person that was trying to hire you having to petition up to the division executive for an exemption to company policy or something ridiculous like that. If you aren't really really good, that's often a dealbreaker. I suspect I lost out on many opportunities that way because I can only really evaluate the instances where they tell you about the petition and then tell you it went well (if it went poorly, might as well tell you "we decided to go with another candidate" or just not tell you about the policy).
Additionally, sometimes the lack of strict degree requirement doesn't mean a lack of paperwork that could be prohibitive. Or they'll say something like "every three years of professional experience will make up for one year less of education", which besides being a silly ratio, is essentially a prohibition on hiring people without a degree because I'm not about to accept a very underleveled offer due to how they arbitrarily weight years of education vs years of professional experience. I've been desperate before but never that desperate thank goodness.
As far as being a legal standard, I'm not aware of and have probably never lived in an area where an "or equivalent experience" statement was actually required, on account of it being missing for maybe ~50% or so of the jobs I've applied to or been hired for. If companies are being sued and losing over the lack of that statement, absent other evidence of discrimination based on applicant membership in a protected class, that would be news to me.
I am not an expert in this, but I think that the “trades pay above average” argument has become accepted as fact when the data isn’t so clear. BLS average wage in 2023 was $64,000 and change. Plumbers, carpenters, and electricians were $67k, $60k, and $67k, respectively. Solid money, but not easy or well above average. Tradespeople who work in high demand sectors, run their own businesses, or become masters can certainly be compensated well, but they are not the norm, and it takes a long time to get there.
I’m with you on the moral argument. My dad was a master carpenter and is one of the smartest people I know. And his work will be around long after mine has become obsolete.
BLS figures show tradeworkers make about the median salary in the US - it isn't above average. In the Occupational Outlook handbook, The mean annual wage for all occupations is $65,470. The trades:
Plumber - median $61,550 per year
HVAC tech - median $57,300 per year
Electrician - median $61,590 per year
Framer(Carpenter) - median $56,350 per year
Bricklayer(Mason) - median $53,010 per year
Job demand also seems to be about average compared to overall jobs.
I agree that investing heavily in many degrees is probably ill-advised.
Employee tradeworkers make good average money, self-employed trades people make a ton more money.
I think the silver-lining here is: be competent at your job and all aspects related to it, but do that while being your own boss.
Not much different from other areas but in this case, trades are in high demand and the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".
So you're prone to falling into survival bias, while also needing skills beyond just being good at your job in order to sell yourself so you can get customers to begin with.
>the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".
2-3 years of apprenticeship is "very little"? In addition to however much experience you need to be trusted as a business? And who's to say you will break even in a year or two?
> Seems plausible. If you click around you find the report explicitly excludes self-employed workers.
Probably because they are entirely different jobs. The “tradesmen” making the big bucks are actually business owners, who are hiring others to clean the toilets and wire circuit breakers. This makes them more like CEOs than individual plumbers. It would not make sense to lump their salaries with employed trade workers.
Union plumbers, electricians, pipefitters, and sheet metal workers all make more than $50/hr on the check and $100/hr with fringes in my metro area with a population of 3 million.
You can see what union trades make in a specific area by searching for “prevailing wage [city name]” and looking at the wage tables.
is that 50-100 as a 1099 contractor, where they have to pay their own payroll tax, plus unemployment insurance, and their own healthcare and retirement?
or are these full-timers.
I'm sure they're almost certainly the former, and that 77/hr doesn't look so amazing after taxes and other overheads. I'd bet that gets down closer to 40/hr actual spending money, and that's not as amazing around big cities like DC, NYC, or SF.
>You can see what union trades make in a specific area by searching for “prevailing wage [city name]” and looking at the wage tables.
From the linked BLS report:
>These estimates are calculated with data collected from employers in all industry sectors in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas in every state and the District of Columbia.
I'd take country wide figures from government agencies over haphazardly doing your own research for a few cities on google.
In the Bay Area and other places where tech workers congregate, trades people make far above these numbers. These numbers are kept low by the south, which might as well not count for the purposes of the average demographics of this website.
Most every job's wage is on average higher in the Bay Area than the South. The South also has some of the lowest cost of living vs the bay area some of the highest. Nobody specifically mentioned tech but it's perhaps not the regional relative-income trend you're expecting https://www.business.org/hr/benefits/highest-tech-salaries/
I don't know what its like it the states, but many household Plumbers and Electricians are actually running their own small company and work very hard to minimize their take home salary.
But regardless of career path, the real trick is to raise your children to aim higher than median. :)
You don't want to be a plumber, you want to run a plumbing empire!
We're just in a really bad "liquid" economy right now, so it's easy to feel that narrative of "college degrees are useless".
They aren't useless, but as tuition rises it is inevitably going to be a worse investment. Not to the point where trades are worth its equally annoying but different kind of annoyance, though. Pay depends on unions, and get into trade unions is anything but a meritocracy.
Well, there's a couple different things a degree can be used for.
If you actually use specific things you learned, it's useful in the way that training and certification is useful.
If you don't, it's mostly just an indicator of "this person is at least this smart". Which only really matters to the extent that employers use it to save time on interviews.
The fundamental challenge with the trades is that some of them are extremely hard on your body. I know roofers who've taken multi-story falls and gotten put back together with steel pins. Plumbers often have issues with their knees or back. If you're lucky or you pick a good specialty, you can make it to your 40s in OK shape. But I've seen a lot of people with chronic problems, and a few with serious disability.
One of ways that I've seen middle-aged people succeed in the trades is to hire a crew and turn it into a business. But by definition, not everyone can be the boss.
It can be a great career if you stay healthy! But I think we should be careful about answering every employment or education question by immediately saying "trades."
Younger women in urban/metro areas are doing significantly better than their male peers economically (higher employment rates and income). This gap is increasing.
Young women are doing worse than their male peers in rural areas economically. This gap is closing.
What implications this has for society at large I can only speculate.
In addition to not being surprising, it also isn't news. These trends appear to date back more than 30 years, so they were around when pretty much everyone in the workforce was college-aged. The people who haven't lived through this, if they exist, are on the verge of retiring.
As a non US citizen, can you tell me how much a computer science degree costs? I've heard students are left with hundreds of thousands in debt when they graduate.
Also, can you pay student loans with pre tax income?
I've worked with many talented engineers over the years who didn't have degrees and have had no trouble finding jobs and moving around. I imagine a degree might help you get a foot in the door, but once you can demonstrate you can do the job, seems to be easy to pick up more work.
I really wonder how damaging that debt would be for a young person who is also trying to save for a house and start a family.
You have to be pretty reckless to graduate with that much debt - most states have fairly affordable in-state tuition for their citizens. So pick a random state like Nebraska (https://admissions.unl.edu/cost/) and you can see that the premier public state university charges $10,400 per year for tuition and then they estimate housing and food at $14,000 more. So if you don't contribute at all in the mean time, you'll likely graduate with about $100k in debt. More commonly, students work summer jobs or on-campus jobs, receive scholarships to reduce the cost, and then many have parents who help with the cost which is reflected in the average student debt of about $35k for all college graduates (https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#nebrask...).
If you go to a private school, or a public school in a state you don't live in, you can easily double or triple those costs, but there are routes for bright students to study at excellent schools for pretty low cost.
man, graduating with 100k debt from a low CoL state like Nebraska is absolutely depressing :(. I remember my tuition being $6/year from 15 years ago, and was lucky military benefits covered that. Rent, textbooks and "other expenses" still had me end up with roughly 60k in debt, but that's not bad at all for California, even back then.
College costs in the US are similar to US healthcare costs in that they’re very dependent on both the school/program, whether it’s private or public, and individual circumstances.
For example, many top private schools have tuition+board costs upwards of $90k/yr, now— yet if you (or your parents) bring in less than $100k-$200k/yr (again, depends on the school), tuition is completely free, with a sliding scale on incomes based above that threshold. Stanford does not even publish their total cost for a degree any more so much as a matrix to provide a ballpark estimate.
State schools often provide massive discounts for their tax-paying residents to attend. In California, that could be the difference between $20k/yr versus $70k+/yr for UCLA or Berkeley. University of Texas just announced tuition will be free for all in-state families earning less than $100k/yr going forward.
Then of course, there’s the need-based and/or merit-based scholarships, which schools may give out to entice someone they particularly want to attend, or through blanket policies to incentivize their student body: e.g. University of Southern California (tuition with board around $90k/yr now) still gives out 50%-tuition scholarships based on an objective SAT score cutoff.
That’s not to say paying full sticker price for college never happens, but there’s many options before taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I believe the average amount of total debt per student is something like $40k, or ~10k/yr.
EDIT: most of these discounts usually only apply to US citizens; international students are often paying full sticker price, and ineligible for government-backed student loans. Some schools use this policy to have international students subsidize their domestic students, to the point that the UC system got in trouble for prioritizing international students over US ones because it was better for the balance sheet.
>I've heard students are left with hundreds of thousands in debt when they graduate.
That's very atypical. The average student loan size at graduation is around $33k to 41k. The only way you get "hundreds of thousands in debt" is if you go to an expensive private university and pay full price.
I think it's only looking at grad+. The chart right below the summary says total average loans are $60k. and that's nationwide. You need loans for more than tuiition, after all.
The answer is “it depends”. Could be zero dollars, could be $250K. Most people probably pay around $50K to get one, assuming it’s a public university and you pay the in-state tuition rate.
Men get paid higher than women because of sexism. Men hold more leadership positions because of sexism. Men basically invented the overwhelming majority of cities, science, mathematics, technology and modern civilization as we know it and the only reason why women didn’t really invent any of this is because of rampant oppression by the patriarchy.
So why aren’t we applying the same logic to this? Rampant suppression of male success in college by the matriarchy is the only logical reason why women outperform men because men and women are fundamentally equal.
All of this is delusional of course but it’s a touchy subject. The touchiness literally blinds everyone from some completely obvious differences in male and female psychology. Even your reasoning, though more legitimate than the feminists who blame everything on the patriarchy, is missing something rather obvious.
Men have basically invented modern civilization as we know it and this includes basically every technical field that women are outperforming men at in college and we know it is ludicrous to say that what’s happening is because of sexism.
But if men invented all of it, why are women outperforming men? That’s the nuance that needs to be answered here. It’s not solely just intelligence. Wokeism prevents you from reasoning from the dark side, to be able to see the fundamental fact that men are the creators of tech, science and civilization.
You have to be able to admit that women are outperforming men in college but you also have to admit that men invented civilization as we know it; and you have to admit that neither fact is because of some ludicrous oppression scheme by one sex onto the other. And once you see this then you can start talking about the nuances.
Case in point: if you look at engineering degrees you will see something different. That nuance is evidence inline with a reality that we aren’t ready to face.
>So why aren’t we applying the same logic to this?
because you're going up a whole waterfall to convince anyone we live in a matriarchy. Teachers are majority female because sexism as well, on both sides (nothing gets more of a sideeye from judgy peers than being a male and saying you work with kids). and loads of DEI programs have focused on helping female student succeed. So I'm not surprised that can tilt the scales in an environment that already benefitted feminine disposition (a quiet, orderly environment that you need to sit calmly at and listen for an hour or 2).
>But if men invented all of it, why are women outperforming men? That’s the nuance that needs to be answered here. It’s not solely just intelligence. Wokeism prevents you from reasoning from the dark side, to be able to see the fundamental fact that men are the creators of tech, science and civilization.
Well if you want an inconvenient truth: men in general care a lot less about men than women about women. That's part of why that whole "sigma male grindset" and divisions within men of "alphas and betas" was able to work so easily. Men see men as competition, and there's no easier way to get blind acceptance than to pick a target and tell them that they are the reason you are miserable.
All that happens and we suddenly wonder why men are undergoing a loneliness epidemic and why its not uncommon to not hear from friends for weeks, months on end and treat that as normalcy.
Professionally one trend I have noticed is an increasing number of women programmers particularly at my current company, and they are all extremely competent and hungry. It could be our target universities but articles like this suggest maybe it's simply a more general trend. I suspect the other new grads entering aren't batting an eye but to me it's an extreme and refreshing departure from when I started. Curious if others are noticing an increasing number of women programmers hired into their orgs?
I would argue this is mistaking cause for effect. Girls are outperforming boys in high school, and therefore entering college at higher rates and graduating college at higher rates.
It’s not that boys are making a decision in high school not to go to college and therefore letting their grades slip. Once your grades slip, pathways to college narrow dramatically.
To illustrate my point, we can compare earnings of men with no college to women with a bachelor’s degree. Men make $45k, women make $65k. To believe that men are choosing trades you have to believe that men would voluntarily choose to make 30% less.
> It’s not that boys are making a decision in high school not to go to college and therefore letting their grades slip.
I may be taking the surface level for grantes, but: based on the article, men were a lot more likely to in fact make my decision:
> A 2021 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans without a bachelor’s degree why they chose not to seek one – and found some gender differences in the responses. For example, men without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than women to say they just didn’t want to get one.
And women in another study suggest that they more or less need a degree due to less non-degree options:
>What these numbers reveal is that, indeed, getting more education is an important way to close the gender pay gap. College entry—whether it is to get an AS or a BS—helps women gain access to careers where they have a comparative advantage (e.g., office work). Men on the other hand have better access to lucrative careers that don’t require a college degree (e.g., construction work). This appears to be the most reasonable explanation for why women outnumber men in college.
Encouragement goes a long way, but of course kids aren't dumb either. I'm sure some boys simply seek to work these blue collar jobs and realize you don't need to go to more school (which yes, they do worse in) to star doing this stuff.
That is not true at all. There is competition to get in those schools as well, what makes you think everything outside the elite will “just take anyone”, which basically 95% of the people who graduate high school are well above a D. Only the lowest level community colleges don’t have some standard that they apply
Which state is that? Most students need at least a B average for admission to even the lowest rated schools in the California State University system, like CSU East Bay or CSU Dominguez Hills.
time could have changed, but a decade ago local high schools in my CSU were guaranteed entrance with a 2.0 and a 1200 SAT score... in the days where we still had the 2400 system. So I suppose that would be 800-900 in the 1600 point system.
But this is 12-14 years out of date. Maybe standards rose or they couldn't continue this guarantee.
Times have changed a bit. Some CSU campuses do guarantee admission based on GPA but only to students who graduate from high school in a limited set of local public school districts. Like CSU East Bay requires a 2.5 GPA from one of two school districts (SAT scores don't count). Other campuses like SJSU have no guaranteed admissions but do give preference to locals.
I don't think it's "more opportunities". I'm sure there's a statistics on how much women do not want to be electricians, plumbers, etc., which is fine, just saying it's individual choices not lack of opportunity.
Trade,Estimated Employment
Construction Laborers,1,019,090
First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers,777,420
Electricians,712,580
Carpenters,700,290
Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators,450,370
Bls2023
Where as there’s nearly 4 million acredited teachers and 3 million registered nurses
The IWPR link from above (with data from the US BLS) suggests that the 320K women in construction trades represent 4% of the total field, implying that there are about 8 million total construction trade jobs in the US. I'm not sure how many construction workers hold 4 year degrees, but it seems plausible this would explain a large portion of the gap.
No, it shows that all trades jobs put together make up about as many jobs as nurses OR teachers. This is some basic media literacy that needs to be used when media outlets like the Wall Street Journal publish articles suggesting that all unemployed Americans should just become electricians. (or whatever other trades job they trot out) These jobs can be lucrative for men without a college diploma but are a small fraction of jobs in the USA.
Extraneous administrative and bureaucratic roles will continue to swell, and be packed with women and diversity hires. There's literally no place to put all these over educated, under equipped, people. This has to stop; and one way or another it will. It's probably just wishful thinking that we'll find a sane and pragmatic way to course correct, before it collapses with a boom.
Your comment resonated with me, feels like it somehow ties in with Peter Turchin's concept of "Elite Overproduction" [0]
We're generating too many elites, and there isn't room for all of them in the power structure. Which could explain why bureaucracies have grown so much, finding some place to put these warm bodies. Of course orgs can only support so much bloat, leading to infighting for status, further leading to social instability and culture wars.
before the diversity hires, there were nepo hires. they didn't suddenly throw "merit" out the window to make way for diversity, it was already a lie to begin with
> didn't suddenly throw "merit" out the window to make way for diversity, it was already a lie to begin with
Deviations from an ideal (hire whoever will be most effective at doing whatever it is you're hiring them to do), whether intentional (nepotism, e.a., trading favors, etc) or accidental (for example trusting formal credentials a little to much), do not make that ideal a "lie".
Though changing the system during the French revolution led Napoleon to take over Europe. Nepo is sclerotic, it might not look very bad now but give it a few generations and you end up really way down there. A more efficient governance will then take you over.
I don’t know about that. For the first time in a long time I’m excited about the direction of the trend turning, since Trump seems serious about breaking up administrative and bureaucratic load.
The majority of people voting for such candidate now gives me hope that they’ll do it in the future if need ever arises. And of course it does — socialism will remain a popular and tempting ideology, since it has an illusion of “fairness” and “equality” about it.
>since Trump seems serious about breaking up administrative and bureaucratic load.
He sold that bridge, or rather: wall, 8 years ago. Do you know what the definition of insanity is?
Even ignoring everything else: "making jobs" is a bipartisan good move. No one is ever going to carry on the promise of "I will make less jobs" and survive long in office. And the last thing you want when you're pretending the economy is good when it isn't is to further raise the unemployment rate.
I feel bad for all of the boys out there who have the potential to specialize and get a degree but are surrounded by shitty, ignorant male role models. People who have no goals, no sort of ambition left, no desire to learn, they just sit around and pat themselves on the back for being unmotivated
Maybe it's time for some positive representation of masculinity in our culture? Something that celebrates men (and not for being feminine) and maleness? Of course many men don't have any goals or ambition when mainstream culture will do nothing but shit on them even if they achieve something.
The problem is that so much of maleness is stuff like the male libido, which is a bad, no good, horrible, terrible thing which one must be ashamed of and stigmatized for having. They call it “the male gaze” and try to root it out of the media.
Masculinity is porn, soldiers, guns, cars, savior fantasies, and suffering.
We will get a positive representation and celebration of masculinity at around the same time when a term like “toxic femininity” gets used as much as toxic masculinity does today.
I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Male sexuality is indeed surprised even moreso than female sexuality. There are opportunities to flaunt the latter, but the "ideal male body" is exactly part of how people get into the alt right pipeline.
It starts with objectively good advice like "work out and go to the gym to get a good body". Which is surprisingly on the downside in K-12 education. Then it drips in the narrative: "revenge training" to get fit not for your self-esteem but to make a bad breakup regret it, then into the "sigma male grindset", then if you do all this and you still aren't appealing it must be because of women. You worked hard, they don't get it or are too picky, or are looking for some famed gigachad with 8 packs and making 200k a year.
It's a slow drip into the pipeline.
----
tangent: but in media male sexuality is much more suppressed too. You can show quite a bit of nudity in R rated films, but absolutely not a boner in any way 99% of the time. I don't think that changes much in society, food for thought.
If you're doing the "sigma male grindset", wouldn't YOU be the one with an 8-pack and 200k a year? Both are absolutely attainable by a motivated male with average intelligence. Not trying to defend any right/left partisan nonsense here.
Both are theoretically attainable but far from practical. And that "possible but really hard" aspect is by design.
That sheer gap may make some work harder. It will likely discourage many who will then look for quick solutions, and that's where the next steps set in. Where they either sell you their fitness products or their pyramid scheme.
> in the real world it's the opposite, they get offended if you don't get them
That is just as sexist of them, they don't own male sexuality if he doesn't get it up for you then you should do better. That is what women say to men at least, do better don't blame the other sex.
I really don't think this is unique in terms of gender or generation. But it is a persistent narrative that leads a lot of wayward young men to idolize false "role model" e celebs.
I think they're the opposite of ignorant. They know boys are angry and purposefully taking advantadge of their need for acceptance to further their own goals, be it money, power, or clout.
We have a name for groups who target and isolate vulnerable individuals for personal gain...
I wasn't just talking about the GOP. Some of these people actually are ignorant, feel bad about it, and try to keep everyone else ignorant so that they feel less bad about themselves
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
Some, perhaps. There's plenty of splinters who got their advice up the chain.
But I don't think the root causes that started as millionaires already and only get richer are ignorant per se. You need a certain discipline, narrative, and overall feel on the mood to properly become that successful on a grift. I doubt many of them went from rags to riches on this.
A lot of these women will be creating PowerPoint slides and holding meetings for things that don't need a meeting to pay down a 6 figure debt incurred to obtain a worthless degree. Blind ambition to meet an arbitrary metric is stupid.
I don't know. Why are we told that representation is important and we must have diversity along every axis throughout media?
Well, if you think about it for five seconds, it's because people in general (but especially children) identify with and look up to people who look like them and share their culture. That's just human nature.
Then I guess it's a good thing men are still well (overly?) represented among world leaders, CEOs, etc. -- I'm not sure how anyone can claim there are no male role models in a world with 100% male US presidents (for instance).
It's not impossible, but boys with only female role models do not develop their masculinity, which is important for self-control considering males can be physically dangerous. I believe there is a link between criminal behavior (which is mostly men) and single mothers. It's really more than a correlation, and perhaps one of the leading causes of criminality.
you think malcomx had a male role
model around to provide masculinity? or about 765,432 other examples I can provide.
on one hand you are saying boys with female role models do not develop their masculinity and on the other you are saying there is a link between criminal behaviour and single mothers? this criminal behaviour is coming from their feminine side?
No, it's not a contradiction. The criminal behavior arises from males not being able to control themselves and using force to get what they want. Fathers put boys in their place and they learn to respect authority. Mothers are there to cuddle and pamper their children and this is horrible for boys and their development as dangerous grown males.
Poor results, I just wouldn't phrase it like who you responded to or as "putting men in their place", especially given the context was about boys and not men. Putting "men" in their place as an adult woman can sometimes be physically dangerous. And it's not clear to me how effective it would be at that point of their (the mans) development.
It's also not clear to me at all that the person you are responding to is correct about mothering being about pampering or whatever. You could easily ascribe a tendency like that to the higher likelihood for single mothers to also be more stressed or less well off and with less time to invest in doing much more than trying to placate the child in the quickest way possible. Plenty of mothers that don't pamper and fathers that do, so that claim needs a citation I would think.
You can, but ultimately there are male issues that are much easier to confide with males on. Especially about women. It's no different from why women need some female role models.
I've done a bunch of college tours this year with my daughter. Its kinda shocking to see so many homeless men on the streets, then the universities majority women. I'm kinda hoping she'll go to a school that is 50/50. Georgetown was at 62% female, I think Tulane is 64%.
this is the way it has always been. men make up the majority of both of the tails on the distribution of outcomes. people look at one tail and say, this is inequitable! but they don't say much about the other tail.
This is not the way it has always been. Males dominated colleges and universities until anti-male DEI programs were put in place. And now we see 60-75% female colleges/universities.
But now 40% of the population (in the US) attends college, up from 4% a century ago or 0.4% two centuries ago. College no longer represents the extreme right tail of the population, but essentially the above-average.
This includes men. Men don't care about men. Especially the men who say they do, care the least. What they actually care about is just themselves, not "men".
GP just put it in a cynical sense, but it's true. males connect a lot less than females. They are disportionately affected by factors like the fall of The Third Place or social media ruining face-to-face communication and plannings.
Feel free to ask for more sources, I've been readin a LOT about this topic in the last year.
That’d need a lot more substance to generate a productive debate, starting with how to reconcile “no one cares” with decades of people being endlessly very concerned about it. I’d also expect some comparison of their policies if you’re saying that’s a big reason why he won.
>Its kinda shocking to see so many homeless men on the streets, then the universities majority women
This is a strange juxtaposition. Are the women in universities making men homeless? Why are the two sides contrasted with each other when there's seemingly barely any relation between the two? How is this any different than something like "it's kinda shocking to see so many single moms barely making ends meet, then silicon valley filled with tech bro programmers"?
> How is this any different than something like "it's kinda shocking to see so many single moms, then silicon valley filled with tech bro programmers"?
Realism, to be frank. Even a single mom has better odds statistically to find a partner than 90% of males. That's why there's not anywhere near as many homeless males than females.
Women still have a cultural option to retreat to the role of a housepartner. Very few men have that option.
>Even a single mom has better odds statistically to find a partner than 90% of males.
This doesn't make sense. The ratio of men to women is roughly equal (there's slightly more men at younger ages, but they tend to die younger so after middle age there's slightly more women). The odds for either sex should be roughly similar, though it could differ more based on geography since sex distribution is not geographically equal (rural areas tend to have more men, as women tend to leave for the cities more).
in addition to the reply previously left, it also comes down to age demographics. Women are a lot more likely to "date up". Or perhaps men date down.
Either way, when you have some portion of the 18-24 women dating men in the 25-34 demographic, that skews the portions for 18-24 men. Men who obviously can't date down and are much less likely to date up.
As another bit of trivia (but not likely to change major statistics), women are slightly more likely to be gay than men.
If you only count those actively looking, like you do for unemployment, it can be extremely different. Lets say only half of women are looking while all men are, the half who looks quickly finds a partner, but you are still left with half of men who can't find any while the remaining women don't look, creating massively more men who can't find any than women.
I see, this does add another dimension. It seems the OP was assuming that women are more frequently opting out of the dating pool, but that's probably not a bad assumption based on what I've read in popular media lately.
Sure. I'm just explaining why more men are homeless than women:
>Sixty-seven percent of all people experiencing homelessness within the 2018 Point-in-Time (PiT) Count are individuals. There are 260,284 men compared to 106,119 women. Thus, men are the majority of individuals experiencing homelessness (70 percent) followed by women (29 percent).
From what I see, there is no state that skews so far that women are even close to a majority. The worst cases still almost have a supermajority of homeless men.
Oh, sure, I think the disparity is real. I just don’t think it’s because otherwise equal men and women are cohabiting at different rates - I’d look more at things like the disparate rates of imprisonment (itself a complex problem) or how things like substance abuse patterns or social behaviors affect someone’s ability to stay housed.
To be clear, I think those are all real problems, all hard to solve, and we should be doing a lot better at them. I just don’t think gender _explains_ homelessness as much as it correlates with some of the root causes.
It’s strange how far American women are ahead of men at educational achievement. Education really is a feminist utopia (not really, but more than the real world).
It also shows how out of touch education is that these gains don’t lead to better real world success.
When I was in college I got good grades. My professors told me my grades were so good, I’d almost certainly do better if I dropped out.
That’s how I learned higher Ed’s dirty secret: high performing drop outs do better than graduates.
You’d think that would lead to some soul-searching in academia. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.
>That’s how I learned higher Ed’s dirty secret: high performing drop outs do better than graduates.
Well it makes sense... IF you can afford to drop out. the media praises people like Gates and Jobs for never finishing college but making billionaire empires, but it's not like they didn't each burn millions on failed projects first before hitting the gold mine. How else are you supposed to stand out as someone "high performing" but with no certifications to show for it? You gotta be your own business.
If you don't have that business acumen (and a small loan of a million dollars), dropping out is horrible advice.
In my anecdote of one, college did help me discover topics that really mixed together my mix of talents and passion into one field. I just wish they told me earlier that the jobs tend to expect masters before my grades tanked. I made out okay and am taking a long cut, but you always wonder about what could have been.
It's sad that women are dominating in accrual of debt to purchase something where the actual value is drifting downward rapidly. Yes, there are places demanding the credential, but they're entering the region of danger where what they actually are selecting is people with poor cost/benefit analysis skills.
I absolutely hate making this comment but I’m obliged to because I feel some you all are pointing at irrelevant factors, because you don’t know any better. Look at the birth rate for a better signal and the decline of single income families. Lastly, straight men, I’ll give you a secret women choose to go to school because we are taught at a young age that if getting an education is the #1 way to not be dependent on anyone. A man can easily walk out on you so it’s a poor decision to not get or finish an education. Look at when the data starts going up- that’s the generation that saw the last wave of traditional stay at home house wives and single income families. Unless you absolutely are called to be a house wife/trad wife at 18 with your high school sweetheart… you go to school. It’s pretty obvious.
>Look at the birth rate for a better signal and the decline of single income families.
Those affect both genders, yes.
>Lastly, straight men, I’ll give you a secret women choose to go to school because we are taught at a young age that if getting an education is the #1 way to not be dependent on anyone.
Well I can give you a secret back: for better or worse, men know we have more options without a degree. Both my uncles weren't college material so my grad dad put them both in the army. another uncle went straight to trades. My cousin went to the peace corp and another cousin did go to school but on a sports scholarship.
These aren't male exclusive but very male skewed. It could be a chicken and egg but for a lot of "us" there is nowhere near as much pressure to go to college in order to get a job. So the stats aren't surprising.
Honestly, I think the bit about not depending on somebody is something that would help if we drilled it in to young boys as well.
Totally agree about how women should go to school of course. I'm not sure there was anybody in this chat or the article really questioning that, but you made a good case for it anyway.
>astly, straight men, I’ll give you a secret women choose to go to school because we are taught at a young age that if getting an education is the #1 way to not be dependent on anyone. A man can easily walk out on you so it’s a poor decision to not get or finish an education.
Nobody says you must be a tradwife. You should seek your dreams in life. If that means you want a degree and career, definitely go for it. That's your choice to make. If you give this choice to anyone else, you will be screwed.
Generic stereotypes of men shouldnt be a major factor in making decisions in your life. This is a you decision.
But there's consequences here that you dont seem to acknowledge and you're going to struggle greatly in the dating scene.
It's still shocking to me that women saw men working very hard jobs, coming home absolutely destroyed and worn out and women wanted this? lol?
There’s nothing wrong with single income families, as that has been the default setting for all of our history. I’m inclined to believe that is a solution for some problem that we don’t remember.
By the way, love how you addressed us as “straight men”, flushing down the toilet any interest we had in taking you seriously.
There's definitely nothing wrong with them. But we a matter of risk mitigation, it's obvious why people wish to put themselves in a situation where they don't wind up in the situation or being dependent on a single income (that is another person) when they have preplanned all that out already and chosen it
>There’s nothing wrong with single income families
Except the economies. When dual income becomes more common, housing starts to charge under that assumption.
Most people literally cannot afford to be single income. There are divorcees who stay together simply because either cannot afford to move out and go it alone for a while.
The narrative that women don't succeed in computer science and cybersecurity because of discrimination never aligned with my experience whatsoever.
Sure, when I was in high school and college, there were significantly less women. And sure, women experience discrimination in many forms, many in ways that men don't understand or have to deal with. I get it, I'm speaking from a "position of privilege" as a man.
But I had numerous female teachers and college professors in my programming and math classes. The female students in my classes were smart, capable, and dedicated. Never once did I see them denied anything or treated differently. Female friends told me about negative experiences facing sexism, and they always came from people outside the school, or at the very least outside the CS program.
And yet literally everyone I talked to at this overwhelmingly left-leaning school assured me that being a female CS student was a form of torture. They could never explain why. Forget about the female-only scholarships, the conferences, the special clubs and interest groups. These middle-class college students living in one of the world's richest cities are suffering in this field, and we should be doing anything and everything to help them, we will not be satisfied until we have an exact 50%-50% split.
I'm not saying it's all rainbows and sunshine. Obviously sexism is still a systemic problem in many parts of American life. I have sisters, they have told some awful shit. I'm simply posing the questions - at what point does a minority group stop being disadvantaged? When do they stop being considered a minority? Who gets to decide when and how that happens? Why are there so many scholarships, interest groups, and initiatives designed to help women in STEM who are struggling, but the very real problem of men and boys struggling in other fields is largely ignored? How large does the gap between male and female education have to get before it reaches public consciousness?
It seems like we (the US) should be doing more across the board to help students and provide them opportunities, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Constant culture war spats and identity politics aren't helping anyone. The vague impression from my social group is that Europeans have it figured out and we just don't, but I really don't know if that's true.
great comment. I think people tend to in general look at “now” and not “how we got here.” I have been in the industry for 3 decades now, many, many, many projects, many many teams and colleges. In the 90’s when I started there was simply no women working in our industry - like none. In the early 2000’s we started getting some resumes, 1 in say 20-ish were women. In the 2010’s that number went up a bit… and when I had the pleasure of having women on my team they were without exception invaluable members of the teams…
now you are policy maker and you say “what do we do to bridge this gap? what do we do to get more women to join the industry?” the answers are largely in your comment, scholarships, interest groups, outreach, summer camps…
now are we at the point now to say “ok we good, lets ‘tone this down’” - possibly. in my personal experience I would say women are still disproportionally underrepresented but maybe we’ve “done enough”…
A few years ago when this came up, we pulled up the stats for gender parity in all the different STEM fields. Physics, engineering, and CS were the only ones where there was clearly apparent pressure against female participation. Everyone who's ever been to both an academic cryptography conference and an academic CS conference has probably noticed this: there are way more women in cryptography than computer science in general, because cryptography pulls in mathematicians.
People have all sorts of just-so explanations for why this should be; boys are more interested in manipulating physical objects, or more interested in building things. But none of it holds up when you compare across all the fields; moreover, 40 years ago you could be making the same sorts of just-so stories up about law or medicine.
“Veterinary medicine has been predominantly female in the US since 2009. That trend is continuing, with 87.3% of current veterinary school applicants identifying as female, as well as 88% of veterinary technicians.”
(Source: aaha.org)
Given that the gender imbalance in physics/engineering/CS is always blamed on men pressuring women against participating, one wonders, what kind of monstrous women are gatekeeping the veterinary field, and what kind of harassment are they inflicting on men who try to participate?
40 years ago, the personal computer was marketed at boys. That's just a type of marketing we are still trying to correct over 2 generations later.
And that's how we should treat it. It's too later to get people interested in engineering in college. you need to start 5 years earlier minimum. Ideally 10 years earlier.
nobody marketed personal computer to me 25 years ago. but my interest in hacking it was so much bigger than my sisters I became a programmer. Changing that isn’t a matter of correction. You need to actively remove boys that are more interested which not yield the best results
>but my interest in hacking it was so much bigger than my sisters I became a programm
That's a whole generation off the ads of the 80's that was selling this as a toy for boys. The bulk of that marketing was already culturally set by the new millennium.
And you may have missed the 90's marketing too. If you watched Hackers (1995) or any other media featuring "nerds" with computers in that decade and weren't at least turned off, the marketing worked. Because you chose to go through and it likely portrayed hacking as an undesirable male hobby for women.
> Changing that isn’t a matter of correction. You need to actively remove boys that are more interested which not yield the best results
You underestimate the power of marketing. Going from barely any women in the 2000s to 20% in the next decade (half a generation) is herculean effort. That doesn't happen naturally.
> moreover, 40 years ago you could be making the same sorts of just-so stories up about law or medicine.
No you couldn't as women were barred from those fields pretty recently then. No women working today has been barred from physics or engineering, the situation is not the same.
I’ll give you a pretty easy example. I was looking at a design doc I was consulting on. The lead engineer said “oh sorry, this document was for real engineers”.
> It seems like we (the US) should be doing more across the board to help students and provide them opportunities, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Constant culture war spats and identity politics aren't helping anyone.
It's a nice sentiment, though a quick look at our history reveals that it's all about identity politics and culture wars. There is no way to move past it because the US is, and will remain, a divided, multicultural, individual-focused nation. It's one of my favorite aspects of the country, though it's caused no small amount of grief.
My partner has a PhD in maths and physics and she absolutely suffers from discrimination in both fields for being a woman. It’s a field full of men who aren’t very in tune in what it means to be appropriate and professional around women, she is constantly dismissed and ignored despite being a leading expert in the world for what she does, and has had men make non consensual advances on her including her having to duck away from men trying to kiss her unprompted.
She knows women who haven’t had this experience as strongly but it definitely happens to a lot of them in fields dominated by men who have very poor social conditioning when it comes to women.
Her experience was actually worse in Europe than the US, too. To the point that she refuses to ever work in a certain country again, which is a shame given it’s a great opportunity
This site has some data on college majors with major gender disparities (although it's a bit outdated). Women are heavily over represented in Fashion Design, Interior Design, and Elementary Education. Men are heavily over represented in Construction Management, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering.
Within this context i find it amusing that i still have seen scholarships that are only for women, none that are only for men. I'm still burdened by student loans that i never would have had in the first place if i were female.
>Not so long ago women were not allowed in academia; shouldn't the first reaction be "yay!"?
If your ideology is "any differences in outcomes must be caused by systemic discrimination, and we should engage in reverse discrimination to fight it", then this is bad news, because according to that ideology, you should be doing a 180 and discriminating against women. That conclusion upsets some people.
Maybe. I thought we were supposed to think of that as bad?
The second reaction should be to institute a bunch of scholarships for men only, tutoring programs for men only, and so on. Even the elementary school near me a few years ago had a "girls after-school math program" they advertised on a giant banner for the entire time I lived there.
(I don't actually think this, but this is what we collectively did when the "problem" was reversed.)
At what point in history has the message "People like yourself are falling behind in a very serious way" ever been met with "Yay!" ?
Also, many Americans are taught that statistical gaps between different demographics are usually a result of some terrible injustice. (It's certainly been true in the past.) Whether or not this is true always or even in this case, I can't really say, but I do understand why the mostly American audience of HN would have a negative reaction...
women have had ~100 years of equality. Everyone woman today has had equal opportunity and they still choose the same professions they always did.
Equality means women HAVE TO join men in the 'lowers your life expectancy' type jobs. But women have not, so now there's consequences for women.
Women really dont like the new consequences and its causing huge mental health problem. The "paradox of female unhappiness" is rapidly getting worse for women while men are increasingly happier.
The consequences will self-balance but the direction for the balance is in a direction women absolutely do not want to go.
This is likely the first you've heard about this. Which is curious because the media refuses to cover it. Reddit and some other social medias ban you from discussing the subject.
When you look it up, you will only find univeristies and scientific journalists discussing this. Here's one of the last articles on the subject in 2007.
So what about 'college completion' well guess what.. extensive systemic discrimination against men have put women into college, great no problem but you're neglecting the 'lowers your life expectancy' jobs greatly.
Women are trading their happiness to men. There's absolutely no incentive for men to help solve the problem and better yet the few men who have tried to point out that we need to fix this... oh ya they are misogynists with unacceptable views and need to be censored!
Better yet, these unhappy depressed women are blaming men for their woes. Attacking men and making the situation that much worse.
This is an underappreciated problem. What I observe is that no one does any real work anymore, except immigrants. ("Content creator" is not a real job. That's something you do for fun.)
Odd that these guys get beaten up on so much, considering that the entire rest of the society spends all their time ranting on social media and not doing actual work.
>"Content creator" is not a real job. That's something you do for fun.
This is dismissive. Some do it as a hobby or simply to expand their reach (even Tim Walz had a few gaming streams this year), but the people making real money easily put 40+ hours into analyzing trends, understanding their audience, preparing content, editing media, and overall being a business person. Those CCs very easily be the hardest workers in any sort of communications company, but that's not how the market works these days.
I suppose by that metric, most of HN just working on some website frontend or server backend are just typing away for easy money
>considering that the entire rest of the society spends all their time ranting on social media and not doing actual work.
well, no one wanted to give me a full time job this year. Gotta do something between the Workday applications draining my soul and the boring Leetcode practice.
The two comments ahead of us make sweeping generalizations but they're valid ones. They aren't comments made just to look busy at the shop.
You can argue that the kind of "progress" or "inequality" that's being discussed was pushed forward by a social justice grifter culture that came to form online in the last decade.
Producing "content" for a living is just the natural evolution of the social justice grift, where "$peaking truth to power" becomes just "$peaking", to anyone, on anything, in a way that yields societal or institutional development but of a kind that occurs indifferent to its effects on mankind.
Social media has virtually destroyed the image of the academic. By virtue of steadily being assumed by demographics who have a peculiar relationship with social media and technology in general (mid-to-late Gen X and Millennials), Academics are adopting personalities more like YouTube streamers and people who make "content".
Academics were at the forefront of the initial social justice grift that contributed to our nascent grift society and the institution will continue to evolve to accommodate this shift.
Young women (young black women in particular) took to the social justice grift hard. So it makes sense that they'll make their new home in academia and young men who were excluded from the social justice grift, will pursue other options and get their "grift fix" elsewhere.
>Producing "content" for a living is just the natural evolution of the social justice grift, where "$peaking truth to power" becomes just "$peaking", to anyone, on anything, in a way that yields societal or institutional development but of a kind that occurs indifferent to its effects on mankind.
You do know that "content" can be anything from a glorified marketer for some designer brands, to a tech blog talking about computer architecture, to an indie movie director trying to break into the industry, to Khan academy helping to fill gaps or offer alternative education right?
Throwing all "content" as some need to make a political statement on Twitter really shows the generational difference in how people use the word. It's way too general to make any sweeping generalization that I'll buy into. You need to specify to make a concrete point here on what "content" you don't respect.
The rest of what you talk about really has nothing to do with why I replied. I don't really care what "content" t you don't like. Life is about accepting that not all things Will appeal to you, nor want to appeal to you. I'd just rather you not conflate stuff like 3blue1brown with whatever feminist you have a bone to pick with. Both are "content creators".
Insane costs and high tuition fees are the root cause of this. Men from all backgrounds have generally been taught from the beginning to join college as a step for moving forward in life, but now more and more of them are discovering they are better off finding a trade instead of getting straddled in debt for a credential that doesn't even come close to being worth what it's charged.
Women who get into college, meanwhile, have the dynamics set up in such a way that they are less restricted by any urgency to get financially independent fast, since the set of women being able to get into college will automatically self-select for those who have plenty of safety nets.
Men can be more easily drawn to the trades for what seems like much easier money. When I was a poor student I had friends working in house building, driving trucks and even 1 working in a foundry. They all had nicer cars and more beer money than me until I graduated.
> They all had nicer cars and more beer money than me until I graduated.
It's not exactly surprising that someone working full time has a higher standard of living than a college student. The question is what happens after graduation.
Partially: that’s the perfectly rational position but … how many teenagers did you know who carefully planned the game-theoretical optimum for their life? The guy who got a scholarship to MIT is doing that but public policy has to think more about how the 50th percentile person is doing and I think that’s where what you see around you matters more: someone academically driven or who grew up comfortably with professional class parents has the cultural preparation to stick with it but someone who has non-stellar grades, needs to juggle work and school, is thinking regularly about how many years of their parents’ annual income their student debt translates into – that’s who’s likely to give up.
First day of Polytechnic school, one of my instructors asked how many of us had spouses or girlfriends; about half raised their hands. He said very plainly that they should withdraw from the course if they valued their loved one more than their academic performance.
Thing was he was being kind. The course load was targeted around 80 to 100 hours a week in year 1 and then eases off to 60 to 70 year 2 after proving you have the mental fortitude to sustain that kind of pace for more than a few weeks.
Post secondary is hard. It's supposed to hard. Only 9 out of an intake of 60 graduated. We were staking a lot of money on the line that would disappear if we didn't make it through. Is it really so unreasonable to think that some people would look at that and decide they don't want to make those sacrifices even if means higher pay check afterwards?
I guess it varies by K-12 rigor, but college was mostly easier for me... until the 4th year. that 80 hour workload was my high school, and I had no choice but to balance 5 classes + an elective every year. And ofc I pushed myself more by having an acedemic club and volunteer work. I was always so tired. My mom felt bad for being out of the house a lot, but truthfully I wasn't much different anyway and barely noticed.
College, I dropped a lot of that, and my class workload dropped to 3-4 classes a quarter. It was like a huge weight was off my shoulders. less time in classes, more time to myself to choose. classes were harder but I had more time to focus down on my majors instead of being distracted by 3 GE equivalents in high school. It just fit my way of working better.
----
But I think that is part of the point: the standard line of K-12 has been falling while the line for college wants to keep trying to go up. Those determined A/B students will meet that line, but not the people doing the bare minimum to pass. A "C" is not what used to be a "C". I don't know the solution to it, but the current "solution" of grade inflation is not a direction I agree with.
Is college really a useful signal? I think it matters which school, what degree, and whether a person would have got into that college due to affirmative action / DEI programs. Sure college is a useful signal for some subset. For the rest it is more a sign that you’re willing to take on debt for either the college experience itself or status or signaling.
going to college tells your future employer one important thing - you went somewhere, for four long years, and you stuck it out and got your papers. this trait alone tells a lot about an individual. I think that is really the crux of it.
technically if we have two people, went to same school, same degree same classes, same grades in every class all the way through. last semester one of the two took one different class and was 1 credit short of graduating and then left school and never got her/his paper. one of these two individuals is setup to have a prosperous career while the other is “unemployable” even though of course academically-speaking they are one and the same
I am seriously concerned about this same issue, but I think "psychological castration" is maybe being a bit hyperbolic w.r.t the long term effects of amphetamines at typically prescribed dosages.
> but I think "psychological castration" is maybe being a bit hyperbolic w.r.t the long term effects of amphetamines at typically prescribed dosages.
You see long term brain changes in kids who get prescribed Adderall, you don't see this for adults. Proponents tend to tout this as why we absolutely need to give this to kids, because they say this will permanently heal them, could just as well be permanently damaging them.
I can accept this. I just have a problem with the allusion to castration, which is a long term, irreversible, and immediately noticeable thing in the typical context that the word is used.
I'm concerned about potential long term changes to the brain as well. I wouldn't call that necessarily catastrophically consequential on the level that castration would be though, on account of many other drugs also causing long term and potentially negative changes to the brain.
I wouldn't compare underage drinking (known to potentially have long term consequences for the brain) to castration for instance, which is why I think doing the same for amphetamine use is hyperbolic.
you would certainly have thought somehow differently if your thinking apparatus was consistently influenced by unnatural neurotransmitter concentration during its formation
I mean, you act like the alternative would make you a genius somehow. It's a suppressor, not something that fundamentally changes your entire disposition. That's why "castration" is a exaggeration.
What's this utopic ideal you're being sealed from if you take something like adderall in your early years? Can't make it to the NBA/NFL?
This is a very weird topic to bring up, but just using your logic: Democrats "want men back" and we do so by banning circumcision. But already democratic states in the west are where they stopped.
I don't know. I'm circumcised and I feel fine and I'm not particularly resentful about it. It's definitely weird though if you think about it too long. I just don't think it's got anything to do with much of.anything politically or socially or sexually or whatever.
Nope, no connection to bodily autonomy issues at all. Not related to tail docking, cat declawing, "my body my choice", or anything libertarian at all! Nope!
There's ton of good male role models. But you don't get to the public sphere these days by being a good wholesome person with zero drama. How many of anyone do we really have like that? Maybe leBron James? Keaneu Reeves (for now?).
The public sphere gets its attention by appealing to base desires (rage, sadness, humor) and slowly slipping in the pitch for snake oil. If you're giving inconvinent truths, you're being "preachy", and "don't understand my struggle" and "are part of the problem".
Or they simply become famous in various means and in that power make skeletons to be revealed years later. It's hard to have a spotlight on you 24/7 and have your entire life be squeaky clean. That used to be the facade of politicians and even they don't care anymore.
Can't make the horse drink, even if they are dying of thirst because they keep being fed alcohol.
>I doubt that this is the actual reality you guys live in.
There's nuggets of truth, but the overall effect is nowhere near as dramatic, no. Kids (both genders) are subscibed to a lot more medicine than the previous generation. There are a lot more initiatives to promote women in education than men. But it's not like men are failing out in droves nor are being abused in school to not succeed.
There are a lot more holisitic issues with education to fix, like the decreeasing budget and teachers being paid less that starbucks baristas, before we need to worry about nuanced factors like the different ways boys learn vs. girls. But yes, girls tend to do better in K-12 becaue the environment is more suited for them compared to the energy of boys who run around and rough house and other "disorderly" conduct.
The whole "go to trades" argument people are making is already a big reason men are pulled away from college compared to women. They already are doing that, and very few women are.
That's a pretty accurate description of what's happening. DEI did this to men, because men were blamed by the media and by the feminists for
everything. Sexist anti-male programs were created, and now we see the results.
What, you thought that in one generation men magically became dumb?
Again, I'm not american but I'm well aware of the silly stuff you are being fed to by influencers selling male victimhood content. Stop listening to that crap. Your downvotes will not change anything.
As someone else said, the only problem is the lack of real positive role models (people who build, have ethic and do something useful with their lives), that have been replaced by pathetic characters like JP and other nobodies that only sell victimhood or get rick quick fantasies on the internet.
I'd say war-grade amphetamine, adults taking amphetamines maybe, US air force still give that in some circumstances, but giving amphetamines to an hyperactive kid to calm him down, is just mind-blowing.
Maybe I'm just already brain damaged in an irreparable way or am potentially a superhuman badass capable of doing all the drugs without consequences...
I think it's bad to give amphetamines to kids...full stop. But it isn't similar to castration or a lobotomy or even in the same order of magnitude in terms of long term irreparable effects.
Stimulant drugs of that nature tend to be more tolerable than opiates or benzos or a lot of other drugs often prescribed for common mental illnesses (and often to kids).
My issue with the whole discussion is not that we shouldn't take a hard look at our amphetamine prescribing tendency and try to resolve the underlying issues instead of putting on a drug band-aid...my issue is that it is implying some sort of long term catastrophic damage for kids or adults that may have undergone that sort of treatment in the past. And it's asking them to start adopting a blame mentality and potentially start using this great potential (imagined) future that was robbed of them as a coping mechanism.
They aren't mentally handicapped, and they shouldn't think of themselves as being the equivalent of somebody that's been castrated or lobotomized and therefore permanently mentally disabled in some way.
Yes, giving amphetamines on a regular basis to kids is mind blowing. It's also not the end of their lives.
Force-feeding adderall to developing brains will eventually be viewed the same way we view lobotomies - a crude and cruel method of control. These children absolutely are victims of a sick system.
It's crude and it's potentially a method of control, but it's massively massively less terrible in basically every way compared to a lobotomy.
The problem with the way you talk about this issue is that everything you say is comparing things that are off by about an order of magnitude in terms of their typical consequences.
But I don't think swearing was ever banned. I don't personally bother doing it just because of my own disposition but I've yet to read a comment here that made me go "wow, what a sailor's mouth". Just don't make it distract from the actual core points of curiosity and communication :)
The current model of "equity" as in Title IX is currently defined based on difference in outcome implying structural/systemic discrimination. There is now a difference in outcome going the other way. Thus, one must conclude systemic discrimination the other direction by the same rules.
This difference in outcome was the only hard evidence that justified creation of programs that give women an advantage, such as women-only mentorship programs, scholarships, and career counseling.
Corporate America, of course. the class/gender warfare was always a way to distract from the true goals of the elite to control the working class. History repeats.
Lower standards. Discourage competitiveness. Replace modernist absolutism with post-modern relativism. They will be very cozy finishing schools but they won't produce excellence.
You know, it was just 50 or so years ago that the only option a woman had was to attach herself to a man and hope he’s not a mean drunk. Now women actually have options in life and they are availing themselves. Good for them. Of course, now all these HNers suddenly saying college degrees aren’t worth anything because, you know, women.
Frankly I think most collage degree programs are used as a continuation of high school for those who are afraid or just not looking to grow up and go out into the market.
This isn’t surprising. It’s also not an indication that women are doing better than men writ large. Most degrees are not worth the investment. A few high performing ones hold the average up. Trades are desperate for workers and have above average pay. Men are much more likely to do those jobs. The risk is that women are going to be left with more debt and will be less employable in the long run.
But for a society that acts like everyone’s worth is wrapped up in whether or not you have a degree, we should be a lot more concerned about this than we are.
This would make sense if college degree requirements weren't rampant for tons of jobs that shouldn't require them.
It's a hard requirement a lot of the time in tech as well. Doesn't matter anymore whether you have 10+ years experience at a large company in <very fancy subfield that requires at least grad school level expertise in something very academic> like compilers or something. You'll be viewed as a neanderthal that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus.
In the past, that was less of an issue. A culture of self study (on prerequisite academic topics) was more prevalent. Now the base assumption is that you stumbled into your position and have been flying under the radar as a dimwit changing the color of buttons.
Theories as to why this is now the case:
- Increased competition and rise of CS enrollment and improved perception of CS degrees.
- Bootcamp grads giving recruiters and hiring managers a bad impression about everyone self taught.
- Overhiring in certain subfields and at certain large tech companies causing a reduction in the signaling value of experience.
- Age discrimination
So in other words, with the exception of physical trades, credential inflation is definitely a real thing and it definitely has an impact on how easily you can move positions and/or negotiate compensation.
And if you couldn't tell, yes I'm salty on account of having had to waste time and money going back to finish a degree that I was overqualified for just in order to not immediately get lumped in with bootcamp grads. The entire ordeal was academically worthless. Don't make my mistake kids...stay in school even if it feels like you aren't learning anything so that you don't have to go back and do it while also juggling adult responsibilities. I think this is a mistake that men are probably more likely to make than women as well, which could help explain some of the gender discrepancy in graduation rates. Call it overconfidence fueled by testosterone or something.
> You'll be viewed as a neanderthal that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus.
Funny you say this 1.5 months after I find out that the university where I got my master's dropped calculus classes (from the bachelor subjects, there never was much non-applied math in the master years). Logic (mathematical logic), discrete math, combinatorics and theoretical statistics have been dropped years past (more than a decade for logic). Applied statistics and "Math I + II" (essentially revision of high school calculus, practical only, no theory, e.g. no more treatment of the difference between Riemann and Newtonian integration) are all the math that's left.
Master degree holders starting 4 years from now will all be "neanderthals that probably can't or didn't pass Calculus". Or at least know little of the theoretical underpinnings of calculus.
Yep, this is credential inflation in a nutshell. Don't fall through the cracks in the future, if you do then maybe you'll wind up as a neanderthal that couldn't pass college algebra.
I think that you’re missing out on the fact that you’re an outlier. Most people in tech do not get there by hacking away at their computer as a teenager on up, or as a hobby (or work related self education). That’s why companies use a college degree as a filter, especially in jobs that are heavily theoretical and not “we’ll just grind on it with man hours until it’s finished”. It suck that you are an outlier but that doesn’t mean companies have to take a chance on you. Life isn’t fair very often, that’s why it’s extremely important to network, go to conventions or trade shows, or volunteer if a company wants someone on site at a 3rd party. I’m in your boat as well. All I have is an undergrad, but I work with PhD’s because I have niche knowledge and experience that a lot of them do not, and after being in the industry for a while I can hold my own, even though this job tends to require PhD as a degree filter.
> It's a hard requirement a lot of the time in tech as well
I've always seen "or equivalent experience". I'd assumed that including that alternative was mandatory-ish for the same reason that explicit intelligence tests are reportedly lawsuit magnets.
Absolutely, a lot of companies include that, but that isn't binding on how individuals evaluate resumes.
However, when I say it's often a hard requirement, I do mean that literally. The "or equivalent experience" bit isn't there a significant percentage of the time for the sorts of jobs I typically apply for (nothing that has actual regulatory reasons to require a license or degree). Then you wind up with the person that was trying to hire you having to petition up to the division executive for an exemption to company policy or something ridiculous like that. If you aren't really really good, that's often a dealbreaker. I suspect I lost out on many opportunities that way because I can only really evaluate the instances where they tell you about the petition and then tell you it went well (if it went poorly, might as well tell you "we decided to go with another candidate" or just not tell you about the policy).
Additionally, sometimes the lack of strict degree requirement doesn't mean a lack of paperwork that could be prohibitive. Or they'll say something like "every three years of professional experience will make up for one year less of education", which besides being a silly ratio, is essentially a prohibition on hiring people without a degree because I'm not about to accept a very underleveled offer due to how they arbitrarily weight years of education vs years of professional experience. I've been desperate before but never that desperate thank goodness.
As far as being a legal standard, I'm not aware of and have probably never lived in an area where an "or equivalent experience" statement was actually required, on account of it being missing for maybe ~50% or so of the jobs I've applied to or been hired for. If companies are being sued and losing over the lack of that statement, absent other evidence of discrimination based on applicant membership in a protected class, that would be news to me.
I am not an expert in this, but I think that the “trades pay above average” argument has become accepted as fact when the data isn’t so clear. BLS average wage in 2023 was $64,000 and change. Plumbers, carpenters, and electricians were $67k, $60k, and $67k, respectively. Solid money, but not easy or well above average. Tradespeople who work in high demand sectors, run their own businesses, or become masters can certainly be compensated well, but they are not the norm, and it takes a long time to get there.
I’m with you on the moral argument. My dad was a master carpenter and is one of the smartest people I know. And his work will be around long after mine has become obsolete.
Citations:
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472152.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472031.htm https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes472111.htm
BLS figures show tradeworkers make about the median salary in the US - it isn't above average. In the Occupational Outlook handbook, The mean annual wage for all occupations is $65,470. The trades:
Job demand also seems to be about average compared to overall jobs.I agree that investing heavily in many degrees is probably ill-advised.
It's a bit apples to oranges to compare mean to median? Or at least Honeycrisp to Gala...
True, but median full time wage is like $59k or something
Employee tradeworkers make good average money, self-employed trades people make a ton more money.
I think the silver-lining here is: be competent at your job and all aspects related to it, but do that while being your own boss.
Not much different from other areas but in this case, trades are in high demand and the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".
>but do that while being your own boss.
So you're prone to falling into survival bias, while also needing skills beyond just being good at your job in order to sell yourself so you can get customers to begin with.
>the initial investment in terms of capital is very little compared to "start a company and hope to break even in an year or two".
2-3 years of apprenticeship is "very little"? In addition to however much experience you need to be trusted as a business? And who's to say you will break even in a year or two?
>Employee tradeworkers make good average money, self-employed trades people make a ton more money.
Seems plausible. If you click around you find the report explicitly excludes self-employed workers.
>Self-employed persons are not included in the survey or estimates.
https://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_abo.htm
> Seems plausible. If you click around you find the report explicitly excludes self-employed workers.
Probably because they are entirely different jobs. The “tradesmen” making the big bucks are actually business owners, who are hiring others to clean the toilets and wire circuit breakers. This makes them more like CEOs than individual plumbers. It would not make sense to lump their salaries with employed trade workers.
Union plumbers, electricians, pipefitters, and sheet metal workers all make more than $50/hr on the check and $100/hr with fringes in my metro area with a population of 3 million.
You can see what union trades make in a specific area by searching for “prevailing wage [city name]” and looking at the wage tables.
is that 50-100 as a 1099 contractor, where they have to pay their own payroll tax, plus unemployment insurance, and their own healthcare and retirement?
or are these full-timers.
I'm sure they're almost certainly the former, and that 77/hr doesn't look so amazing after taxes and other overheads. I'd bet that gets down closer to 40/hr actual spending money, and that's not as amazing around big cities like DC, NYC, or SF.
>You can see what union trades make in a specific area by searching for “prevailing wage [city name]” and looking at the wage tables.
From the linked BLS report:
>These estimates are calculated with data collected from employers in all industry sectors in metropolitan and nonmetropolitan areas in every state and the District of Columbia.
I'd take country wide figures from government agencies over haphazardly doing your own research for a few cities on google.
In the Bay Area and other places where tech workers congregate, trades people make far above these numbers. These numbers are kept low by the south, which might as well not count for the purposes of the average demographics of this website.
Most every job's wage is on average higher in the Bay Area than the South. The South also has some of the lowest cost of living vs the bay area some of the highest. Nobody specifically mentioned tech but it's perhaps not the regional relative-income trend you're expecting https://www.business.org/hr/benefits/highest-tech-salaries/
I don't know what its like it the states, but many household Plumbers and Electricians are actually running their own small company and work very hard to minimize their take home salary.
But regardless of career path, the real trick is to raise your children to aim higher than median. :)
You don't want to be a plumber, you want to run a plumbing empire!
I just want to make art. Darn rent gets in the way, but if that was taken care of my goals are much simpler.
Pay for women is on the rise and exceeds men in many metropolitan areas already. I don't really buy the worthless college degree topic argument.
you should provide a source(s) for claims like this…
We're just in a really bad "liquid" economy right now, so it's easy to feel that narrative of "college degrees are useless".
They aren't useless, but as tuition rises it is inevitably going to be a worse investment. Not to the point where trades are worth its equally annoying but different kind of annoyance, though. Pay depends on unions, and get into trade unions is anything but a meritocracy.
Well, there's a couple different things a degree can be used for.
If you actually use specific things you learned, it's useful in the way that training and certification is useful.
If you don't, it's mostly just an indicator of "this person is at least this smart". Which only really matters to the extent that employers use it to save time on interviews.
The fundamental challenge with the trades is that some of them are extremely hard on your body. I know roofers who've taken multi-story falls and gotten put back together with steel pins. Plumbers often have issues with their knees or back. If you're lucky or you pick a good specialty, you can make it to your 40s in OK shape. But I've seen a lot of people with chronic problems, and a few with serious disability.
One of ways that I've seen middle-aged people succeed in the trades is to hire a crew and turn it into a business. But by definition, not everyone can be the boss.
It can be a great career if you stay healthy! But I think we should be careful about answering every employment or education question by immediately saying "trades."
Younger women in urban/metro areas are doing significantly better than their male peers economically (higher employment rates and income). This gap is increasing.
Young women are doing worse than their male peers in rural areas economically. This gap is closing.
What implications this has for society at large I can only speculate.
Source?
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/28/young-wom...
Just one here.
Google the others.
In addition to not being surprising, it also isn't news. These trends appear to date back more than 30 years, so they were around when pretty much everyone in the workforce was college-aged. The people who haven't lived through this, if they exist, are on the verge of retiring.
Maybe also worth noting that in computer science, a major which I think most would agree is worth the investment, men still greatly outnumber women.
As a non US citizen, can you tell me how much a computer science degree costs? I've heard students are left with hundreds of thousands in debt when they graduate.
Also, can you pay student loans with pre tax income?
I've worked with many talented engineers over the years who didn't have degrees and have had no trouble finding jobs and moving around. I imagine a degree might help you get a foot in the door, but once you can demonstrate you can do the job, seems to be easy to pick up more work.
I really wonder how damaging that debt would be for a young person who is also trying to save for a house and start a family.
You have to be pretty reckless to graduate with that much debt - most states have fairly affordable in-state tuition for their citizens. So pick a random state like Nebraska (https://admissions.unl.edu/cost/) and you can see that the premier public state university charges $10,400 per year for tuition and then they estimate housing and food at $14,000 more. So if you don't contribute at all in the mean time, you'll likely graduate with about $100k in debt. More commonly, students work summer jobs or on-campus jobs, receive scholarships to reduce the cost, and then many have parents who help with the cost which is reflected in the average student debt of about $35k for all college graduates (https://educationdata.org/student-loan-debt-by-state#nebrask...).
If you go to a private school, or a public school in a state you don't live in, you can easily double or triple those costs, but there are routes for bright students to study at excellent schools for pretty low cost.
man, graduating with 100k debt from a low CoL state like Nebraska is absolutely depressing :(. I remember my tuition being $6/year from 15 years ago, and was lucky military benefits covered that. Rent, textbooks and "other expenses" still had me end up with roughly 60k in debt, but that's not bad at all for California, even back then.
College costs in the US are similar to US healthcare costs in that they’re very dependent on both the school/program, whether it’s private or public, and individual circumstances.
For example, many top private schools have tuition+board costs upwards of $90k/yr, now— yet if you (or your parents) bring in less than $100k-$200k/yr (again, depends on the school), tuition is completely free, with a sliding scale on incomes based above that threshold. Stanford does not even publish their total cost for a degree any more so much as a matrix to provide a ballpark estimate.
State schools often provide massive discounts for their tax-paying residents to attend. In California, that could be the difference between $20k/yr versus $70k+/yr for UCLA or Berkeley. University of Texas just announced tuition will be free for all in-state families earning less than $100k/yr going forward.
Then of course, there’s the need-based and/or merit-based scholarships, which schools may give out to entice someone they particularly want to attend, or through blanket policies to incentivize their student body: e.g. University of Southern California (tuition with board around $90k/yr now) still gives out 50%-tuition scholarships based on an objective SAT score cutoff.
That’s not to say paying full sticker price for college never happens, but there’s many options before taking on hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt. I believe the average amount of total debt per student is something like $40k, or ~10k/yr.
EDIT: most of these discounts usually only apply to US citizens; international students are often paying full sticker price, and ineligible for government-backed student loans. Some schools use this policy to have international students subsidize their domestic students, to the point that the UC system got in trouble for prioritizing international students over US ones because it was better for the balance sheet.
>I've heard students are left with hundreds of thousands in debt when they graduate.
That's very atypical. The average student loan size at graduation is around $33k to 41k. The only way you get "hundreds of thousands in debt" is if you go to an expensive private university and pay full price.
https://educationdata.org/average-student-loan-debt
>The average private nonprofit university student borrows $33,910 to complete a bachelor’s degree.
>For-profit students borrow an average $40,970.
I think it's only looking at grad+. The chart right below the summary says total average loans are $60k. and that's nationwide. You need loans for more than tuiition, after all.
The answer is “it depends”. Could be zero dollars, could be $250K. Most people probably pay around $50K to get one, assuming it’s a public university and you pay the in-state tuition rate.
> Also, can you pay student loans with pre tax income?
You're asking if student loan debt repayment is tax deductible, and the answer is no.
> Most degrees are not worth the investment.
Is that accurate “most”, and is it only when compared to trades?
It is quite surprising.
Men get paid higher than women because of sexism. Men hold more leadership positions because of sexism. Men basically invented the overwhelming majority of cities, science, mathematics, technology and modern civilization as we know it and the only reason why women didn’t really invent any of this is because of rampant oppression by the patriarchy.
So why aren’t we applying the same logic to this? Rampant suppression of male success in college by the matriarchy is the only logical reason why women outperform men because men and women are fundamentally equal.
All of this is delusional of course but it’s a touchy subject. The touchiness literally blinds everyone from some completely obvious differences in male and female psychology. Even your reasoning, though more legitimate than the feminists who blame everything on the patriarchy, is missing something rather obvious.
Men have basically invented modern civilization as we know it and this includes basically every technical field that women are outperforming men at in college and we know it is ludicrous to say that what’s happening is because of sexism.
But if men invented all of it, why are women outperforming men? That’s the nuance that needs to be answered here. It’s not solely just intelligence. Wokeism prevents you from reasoning from the dark side, to be able to see the fundamental fact that men are the creators of tech, science and civilization.
You have to be able to admit that women are outperforming men in college but you also have to admit that men invented civilization as we know it; and you have to admit that neither fact is because of some ludicrous oppression scheme by one sex onto the other. And once you see this then you can start talking about the nuances.
Case in point: if you look at engineering degrees you will see something different. That nuance is evidence inline with a reality that we aren’t ready to face.
>So why aren’t we applying the same logic to this?
because you're going up a whole waterfall to convince anyone we live in a matriarchy. Teachers are majority female because sexism as well, on both sides (nothing gets more of a sideeye from judgy peers than being a male and saying you work with kids). and loads of DEI programs have focused on helping female student succeed. So I'm not surprised that can tilt the scales in an environment that already benefitted feminine disposition (a quiet, orderly environment that you need to sit calmly at and listen for an hour or 2).
>But if men invented all of it, why are women outperforming men? That’s the nuance that needs to be answered here. It’s not solely just intelligence. Wokeism prevents you from reasoning from the dark side, to be able to see the fundamental fact that men are the creators of tech, science and civilization.
Well if you want an inconvenient truth: men in general care a lot less about men than women about women. That's part of why that whole "sigma male grindset" and divisions within men of "alphas and betas" was able to work so easily. Men see men as competition, and there's no easier way to get blind acceptance than to pick a target and tell them that they are the reason you are miserable.
All that happens and we suddenly wonder why men are undergoing a loneliness epidemic and why its not uncommon to not hear from friends for weeks, months on end and treat that as normalcy.
Professionally one trend I have noticed is an increasing number of women programmers particularly at my current company, and they are all extremely competent and hungry. It could be our target universities but articles like this suggest maybe it's simply a more general trend. I suspect the other new grads entering aren't batting an eye but to me it's an extreme and refreshing departure from when I started. Curious if others are noticing an increasing number of women programmers hired into their orgs?
This makes intuitive sense---men have more opportunities to make a decent living in the trades without a college degree. See e.g. https://iwpr.org/numbers-matter-clarifying-the-data-on-women....
I would argue this is mistaking cause for effect. Girls are outperforming boys in high school, and therefore entering college at higher rates and graduating college at higher rates.
It’s not that boys are making a decision in high school not to go to college and therefore letting their grades slip. Once your grades slip, pathways to college narrow dramatically.
To illustrate my point, we can compare earnings of men with no college to women with a bachelor’s degree. Men make $45k, women make $65k. To believe that men are choosing trades you have to believe that men would voluntarily choose to make 30% less.
https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2024/05/23/labor-m...
> It’s not that boys are making a decision in high school not to go to college and therefore letting their grades slip.
I may be taking the surface level for grantes, but: based on the article, men were a lot more likely to in fact make my decision:
> A 2021 Pew Research Center survey asked Americans without a bachelor’s degree why they chose not to seek one – and found some gender differences in the responses. For example, men without a bachelor’s degree were more likely than women to say they just didn’t want to get one.
And women in another study suggest that they more or less need a degree due to less non-degree options:
https://www.stlouisfed.org/on-the-economy/2022/mar/why-women...
>What these numbers reveal is that, indeed, getting more education is an important way to close the gender pay gap. College entry—whether it is to get an AS or a BS—helps women gain access to careers where they have a comparative advantage (e.g., office work). Men on the other hand have better access to lucrative careers that don’t require a college degree (e.g., construction work). This appears to be the most reasonable explanation for why women outnumber men in college.
Encouragement goes a long way, but of course kids aren't dumb either. I'm sure some boys simply seek to work these blue collar jobs and realize you don't need to go to more school (which yes, they do worse in) to star doing this stuff.
State universities outside tier 1 cities don't care about grades except that they are passing (D or higher).
That is not true at all. There is competition to get in those schools as well, what makes you think everything outside the elite will “just take anyone”, which basically 95% of the people who graduate high school are well above a D. Only the lowest level community colleges don’t have some standard that they apply
Which state is that? Most students need at least a B average for admission to even the lowest rated schools in the California State University system, like CSU East Bay or CSU Dominguez Hills.
I don’t know what it is like today but that was not the case in the 1990s. I know people who got into San Jose State for STEM on a 2.xx GPA.
time could have changed, but a decade ago local high schools in my CSU were guaranteed entrance with a 2.0 and a 1200 SAT score... in the days where we still had the 2400 system. So I suppose that would be 800-900 in the 1600 point system.
But this is 12-14 years out of date. Maybe standards rose or they couldn't continue this guarantee.
Times have changed a bit. Some CSU campuses do guarantee admission based on GPA but only to students who graduate from high school in a limited set of local public school districts. Like CSU East Bay requires a 2.5 GPA from one of two school districts (SAT scores don't count). Other campuses like SJSU have no guaranteed admissions but do give preference to locals.
The CSUs are still more competitive than most state schools; and a B average is very low in our grade inflated world.
I don't think it's "more opportunities". I'm sure there's a statistics on how much women do not want to be electricians, plumbers, etc., which is fine, just saying it's individual choices not lack of opportunity.
True but the trades are incredibly small
Trade,Estimated Employment Construction Laborers,1,019,090 First-Line Supervisors of Construction Trades and Extraction Workers,777,420 Electricians,712,580 Carpenters,700,290 Operating Engineers and Other Construction Equipment Operators,450,370
Bls2023
Where as there’s nearly 4 million acredited teachers and 3 million registered nurses
The skilled trades in the BLS stats are[1]:
45-0000 Farming, Fishing, and Forestry Occupations 432,200
47-0000 Construction and Extraction Occupations 6,225,630
49-0000 Installation, Maintenance, and Repair Occupations 5,989,460
51-0000 Production Occupations 8,770,170
53-0000 Transportation and Material Moving Occupations 13,752,760
That adds up to 35 million total employed.
[1] https://blog.dol.gov/2023/03/21/data-spotlight-employment-of...
The IWPR link from above (with data from the US BLS) suggests that the 320K women in construction trades represent 4% of the total field, implying that there are about 8 million total construction trade jobs in the US. I'm not sure how many construction workers hold 4 year degrees, but it seems plausible this would explain a large portion of the gap.
What do you mean incredibly small? Don’t you numbers show trade jobs are on par with nurses and teachers?
No, it shows that all trades jobs put together make up about as many jobs as nurses OR teachers. This is some basic media literacy that needs to be used when media outlets like the Wall Street Journal publish articles suggesting that all unemployed Americans should just become electricians. (or whatever other trades job they trot out) These jobs can be lucrative for men without a college diploma but are a small fraction of jobs in the USA.
Extraneous administrative and bureaucratic roles will continue to swell, and be packed with women and diversity hires. There's literally no place to put all these over educated, under equipped, people. This has to stop; and one way or another it will. It's probably just wishful thinking that we'll find a sane and pragmatic way to course correct, before it collapses with a boom.
Your comment resonated with me, feels like it somehow ties in with Peter Turchin's concept of "Elite Overproduction" [0]
We're generating too many elites, and there isn't room for all of them in the power structure. Which could explain why bureaucracies have grown so much, finding some place to put these warm bodies. Of course orgs can only support so much bloat, leading to infighting for status, further leading to social instability and culture wars.
Anyhow, interesting food for thought.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elite_overproduction
> and diversity hires
before the diversity hires, there were nepo hires. they didn't suddenly throw "merit" out the window to make way for diversity, it was already a lie to begin with
> didn't suddenly throw "merit" out the window to make way for diversity, it was already a lie to begin with
Deviations from an ideal (hire whoever will be most effective at doing whatever it is you're hiring them to do), whether intentional (nepotism, e.a., trading favors, etc) or accidental (for example trusting formal credentials a little to much), do not make that ideal a "lie".
I'm not saying that merit in itself is a lie, I'm saying that when they retroactively use "merit" to justify decisions, it frequently is
> before the diversity hires, there were nepo hires
There still are nepo hires, you just added to the problem with diversity hires it didn't fix the nepo hire issue.
You're not wrong, you're just failing to appreciate the difference in scale.
Though changing the system during the French revolution led Napoleon to take over Europe. Nepo is sclerotic, it might not look very bad now but give it a few generations and you end up really way down there. A more efficient governance will then take you over.
People are just graduating and not finding jobs, so apparently not.
I don’t know about that. For the first time in a long time I’m excited about the direction of the trend turning, since Trump seems serious about breaking up administrative and bureaucratic load.
The majority of people voting for such candidate now gives me hope that they’ll do it in the future if need ever arises. And of course it does — socialism will remain a popular and tempting ideology, since it has an illusion of “fairness” and “equality” about it.
>since Trump seems serious about breaking up administrative and bureaucratic load.
He sold that bridge, or rather: wall, 8 years ago. Do you know what the definition of insanity is?
Even ignoring everything else: "making jobs" is a bipartisan good move. No one is ever going to carry on the promise of "I will make less jobs" and survive long in office. And the last thing you want when you're pretending the economy is good when it isn't is to further raise the unemployment rate.
This is a false promise.
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What does white supremacy have to do with this?
I feel bad for all of the boys out there who have the potential to specialize and get a degree but are surrounded by shitty, ignorant male role models. People who have no goals, no sort of ambition left, no desire to learn, they just sit around and pat themselves on the back for being unmotivated
Maybe it's time for some positive representation of masculinity in our culture? Something that celebrates men (and not for being feminine) and maleness? Of course many men don't have any goals or ambition when mainstream culture will do nothing but shit on them even if they achieve something.
The problem is that so much of maleness is stuff like the male libido, which is a bad, no good, horrible, terrible thing which one must be ashamed of and stigmatized for having. They call it “the male gaze” and try to root it out of the media.
Masculinity is porn, soldiers, guns, cars, savior fantasies, and suffering.
We will get a positive representation and celebration of masculinity at around the same time when a term like “toxic femininity” gets used as much as toxic masculinity does today.
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I think you're missing the forest for the trees. Male sexuality is indeed surprised even moreso than female sexuality. There are opportunities to flaunt the latter, but the "ideal male body" is exactly part of how people get into the alt right pipeline.
It starts with objectively good advice like "work out and go to the gym to get a good body". Which is surprisingly on the downside in K-12 education. Then it drips in the narrative: "revenge training" to get fit not for your self-esteem but to make a bad breakup regret it, then into the "sigma male grindset", then if you do all this and you still aren't appealing it must be because of women. You worked hard, they don't get it or are too picky, or are looking for some famed gigachad with 8 packs and making 200k a year.
It's a slow drip into the pipeline.
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tangent: but in media male sexuality is much more suppressed too. You can show quite a bit of nudity in R rated films, but absolutely not a boner in any way 99% of the time. I don't think that changes much in society, food for thought.
If you're doing the "sigma male grindset", wouldn't YOU be the one with an 8-pack and 200k a year? Both are absolutely attainable by a motivated male with average intelligence. Not trying to defend any right/left partisan nonsense here.
Both are theoretically attainable but far from practical. And that "possible but really hard" aspect is by design.
That sheer gap may make some work harder. It will likely discourage many who will then look for quick solutions, and that's where the next steps set in. Where they either sell you their fitness products or their pyramid scheme.
> in the real world it's the opposite, they get offended if you don't get them
That is just as sexist of them, they don't own male sexuality if he doesn't get it up for you then you should do better. That is what women say to men at least, do better don't blame the other sex.
I really don't think this is unique in terms of gender or generation. But it is a persistent narrative that leads a lot of wayward young men to idolize false "role model" e celebs.
I think they're the opposite of ignorant. They know boys are angry and purposefully taking advantadge of their need for acceptance to further their own goals, be it money, power, or clout.
We have a name for groups who target and isolate vulnerable individuals for personal gain...
I wasn't just talking about the GOP. Some of these people actually are ignorant, feel bad about it, and try to keep everyone else ignorant so that they feel less bad about themselves
Asimov said something about this:
> There is a cult of ignorance in the United States, and there has always been. The strain of anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that 'my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge'.
It's a global tendency, even if the effects are slightly different.
Some, perhaps. There's plenty of splinters who got their advice up the chain.
But I don't think the root causes that started as millionaires already and only get richer are ignorant per se. You need a certain discipline, narrative, and overall feel on the mood to properly become that successful on a grift. I doubt many of them went from rags to riches on this.
A lot of these women will be creating PowerPoint slides and holding meetings for things that don't need a meeting to pay down a 6 figure debt incurred to obtain a worthless degree. Blind ambition to meet an arbitrary metric is stupid.
Exactly, this is one of the actual problems.
Why can't the boys have female role models?
I don't know. Why are we told that representation is important and we must have diversity along every axis throughout media?
Well, if you think about it for five seconds, it's because people in general (but especially children) identify with and look up to people who look like them and share their culture. That's just human nature.
Not just "look like them" and "share their culture". They have deep biological similarities, not some superficial traits.
Then I guess it's a good thing men are still well (overly?) represented among world leaders, CEOs, etc. -- I'm not sure how anyone can claim there are no male role models in a world with 100% male US presidents (for instance).
"good" male role models. I wouldn't call elon musk, donald trump, nor Andrew tates good examples to follow.
It's not impossible, but boys with only female role models do not develop their masculinity, which is important for self-control considering males can be physically dangerous. I believe there is a link between criminal behavior (which is mostly men) and single mothers. It's really more than a correlation, and perhaps one of the leading causes of criminality.
you think malcomx had a male role model around to provide masculinity? or about 765,432 other examples I can provide.
on one hand you are saying boys with female role models do not develop their masculinity and on the other you are saying there is a link between criminal behaviour and single mothers? this criminal behaviour is coming from their feminine side?
No, it's not a contradiction. The criminal behavior arises from males not being able to control themselves and using force to get what they want. Fathers put boys in their place and they learn to respect authority. Mothers are there to cuddle and pamper their children and this is horrible for boys and their development as dangerous grown males.
what makes you think that women don't know how to put men in their place?
Poor results, I just wouldn't phrase it like who you responded to or as "putting men in their place", especially given the context was about boys and not men. Putting "men" in their place as an adult woman can sometimes be physically dangerous. And it's not clear to me how effective it would be at that point of their (the mans) development.
It's also not clear to me at all that the person you are responding to is correct about mothering being about pampering or whatever. You could easily ascribe a tendency like that to the higher likelihood for single mothers to also be more stressed or less well off and with less time to invest in doing much more than trying to placate the child in the quickest way possible. Plenty of mothers that don't pamper and fathers that do, so that claim needs a citation I would think.
They don't understand what it means to be physically dangerous.
Preferring a bear over a man?
This reads like a parody of 1950s child rearing.
Look up the stats on criminals and single mothers.
amazing, right??!
You can, but ultimately there are male issues that are much easier to confide with males on. Especially about women. It's no different from why women need some female role models.
Good question... I did. But maybe I'm just lucky
Who was your female role model? can you expand?
I've done a bunch of college tours this year with my daughter. Its kinda shocking to see so many homeless men on the streets, then the universities majority women. I'm kinda hoping she'll go to a school that is 50/50. Georgetown was at 62% female, I think Tulane is 64%.
I don't think theres a coed university that is anywhere close to 50/50 right now.
It's only around 6000 students, but Missouri S&T (a mostly engineering and mining school) is still like 75% male.
this is the way it has always been. men make up the majority of both of the tails on the distribution of outcomes. people look at one tail and say, this is inequitable! but they don't say much about the other tail.
This is not the way it has always been. Males dominated colleges and universities until anti-male DEI programs were put in place. And now we see 60-75% female colleges/universities.
But now 40% of the population (in the US) attends college, up from 4% a century ago or 0.4% two centuries ago. College no longer represents the extreme right tail of the population, but essentially the above-average.
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This includes men. Men don't care about men. Especially the men who say they do, care the least. What they actually care about is just themselves, not "men".
this meme is popular but wrong. nice debate trick tho.
This isn't a meme, it's a well studied phenomenon since "Bowling Alone" in 1995:
https://melindawmoyer.substack.com/p/the-epidemic-of-male-lo...
GP just put it in a cynical sense, but it's true. males connect a lot less than females. They are disportionately affected by factors like the fall of The Third Place or social media ruining face-to-face communication and plannings.
Feel free to ask for more sources, I've been readin a LOT about this topic in the last year.
Feel free to elaborate on how it's wrong.
trump cares about this as much as I care about synchronized swimming
That’d need a lot more substance to generate a productive debate, starting with how to reconcile “no one cares” with decades of people being endlessly very concerned about it. I’d also expect some comparison of their policies if you’re saying that’s a big reason why he won.
>Its kinda shocking to see so many homeless men on the streets, then the universities majority women
This is a strange juxtaposition. Are the women in universities making men homeless? Why are the two sides contrasted with each other when there's seemingly barely any relation between the two? How is this any different than something like "it's kinda shocking to see so many single moms barely making ends meet, then silicon valley filled with tech bro programmers"?
It's merely noting that the majority of homeless are men and the majority of college students are women.
It doesn't imply any causality or relationship.
>It doesn't imply any causality or relationship.
So you'd be fine with the above statement about single moms and tech bros?
> How is this any different than something like "it's kinda shocking to see so many single moms, then silicon valley filled with tech bro programmers"?
Realism, to be frank. Even a single mom has better odds statistically to find a partner than 90% of males. That's why there's not anywhere near as many homeless males than females.
Women still have a cultural option to retreat to the role of a housepartner. Very few men have that option.
>Even a single mom has better odds statistically to find a partner than 90% of males.
This doesn't make sense. The ratio of men to women is roughly equal (there's slightly more men at younger ages, but they tend to die younger so after middle age there's slightly more women). The odds for either sex should be roughly similar, though it could differ more based on geography since sex distribution is not geographically equal (rural areas tend to have more men, as women tend to leave for the cities more).
in addition to the reply previously left, it also comes down to age demographics. Women are a lot more likely to "date up". Or perhaps men date down.
Either way, when you have some portion of the 18-24 women dating men in the 25-34 demographic, that skews the portions for 18-24 men. Men who obviously can't date down and are much less likely to date up.
As another bit of trivia (but not likely to change major statistics), women are slightly more likely to be gay than men.
If you only count those actively looking, like you do for unemployment, it can be extremely different. Lets say only half of women are looking while all men are, the half who looks quickly finds a partner, but you are still left with half of men who can't find any while the remaining women don't look, creating massively more men who can't find any than women.
I see, this does add another dimension. It seems the OP was assuming that women are more frequently opting out of the dating pool, but that's probably not a bad assumption based on what I've read in popular media lately.
Long term homelessness comes down to mental health, substance abuse, or both – not what many men are looking for in a domestic partner.
Sure. I'm just explaining why more men are homeless than women:
>Sixty-seven percent of all people experiencing homelessness within the 2018 Point-in-Time (PiT) Count are individuals. There are 260,284 men compared to 106,119 women. Thus, men are the majority of individuals experiencing homelessness (70 percent) followed by women (29 percent).
https://endhomelessness.org/demographic-data-project-gender-...
From what I see, there is no state that skews so far that women are even close to a majority. The worst cases still almost have a supermajority of homeless men.
Oh, sure, I think the disparity is real. I just don’t think it’s because otherwise equal men and women are cohabiting at different rates - I’d look more at things like the disparate rates of imprisonment (itself a complex problem) or how things like substance abuse patterns or social behaviors affect someone’s ability to stay housed.
To be clear, I think those are all real problems, all hard to solve, and we should be doing a lot better at them. I just don’t think gender _explains_ homelessness as much as it correlates with some of the root causes.
It’s strange how far American women are ahead of men at educational achievement. Education really is a feminist utopia (not really, but more than the real world).
It also shows how out of touch education is that these gains don’t lead to better real world success.
When I was in college I got good grades. My professors told me my grades were so good, I’d almost certainly do better if I dropped out.
That’s how I learned higher Ed’s dirty secret: high performing drop outs do better than graduates.
You’d think that would lead to some soul-searching in academia. But that doesn’t seem to be happening.
>That’s how I learned higher Ed’s dirty secret: high performing drop outs do better than graduates.
Well it makes sense... IF you can afford to drop out. the media praises people like Gates and Jobs for never finishing college but making billionaire empires, but it's not like they didn't each burn millions on failed projects first before hitting the gold mine. How else are you supposed to stand out as someone "high performing" but with no certifications to show for it? You gotta be your own business.
If you don't have that business acumen (and a small loan of a million dollars), dropping out is horrible advice.
In my anecdote of one, college did help me discover topics that really mixed together my mix of talents and passion into one field. I just wish they told me earlier that the jobs tend to expect masters before my grades tanked. I made out okay and am taking a long cut, but you always wonder about what could have been.
It's sad that women are dominating in accrual of debt to purchase something where the actual value is drifting downward rapidly. Yes, there are places demanding the credential, but they're entering the region of danger where what they actually are selecting is people with poor cost/benefit analysis skills.
I absolutely hate making this comment but I’m obliged to because I feel some you all are pointing at irrelevant factors, because you don’t know any better. Look at the birth rate for a better signal and the decline of single income families. Lastly, straight men, I’ll give you a secret women choose to go to school because we are taught at a young age that if getting an education is the #1 way to not be dependent on anyone. A man can easily walk out on you so it’s a poor decision to not get or finish an education. Look at when the data starts going up- that’s the generation that saw the last wave of traditional stay at home house wives and single income families. Unless you absolutely are called to be a house wife/trad wife at 18 with your high school sweetheart… you go to school. It’s pretty obvious.
>Look at the birth rate for a better signal and the decline of single income families.
Those affect both genders, yes.
>Lastly, straight men, I’ll give you a secret women choose to go to school because we are taught at a young age that if getting an education is the #1 way to not be dependent on anyone.
Well I can give you a secret back: for better or worse, men know we have more options without a degree. Both my uncles weren't college material so my grad dad put them both in the army. another uncle went straight to trades. My cousin went to the peace corp and another cousin did go to school but on a sports scholarship.
These aren't male exclusive but very male skewed. It could be a chicken and egg but for a lot of "us" there is nowhere near as much pressure to go to college in order to get a job. So the stats aren't surprising.
Honestly, I think the bit about not depending on somebody is something that would help if we drilled it in to young boys as well.
Totally agree about how women should go to school of course. I'm not sure there was anybody in this chat or the article really questioning that, but you made a good case for it anyway.
>astly, straight men, I’ll give you a secret women choose to go to school because we are taught at a young age that if getting an education is the #1 way to not be dependent on anyone. A man can easily walk out on you so it’s a poor decision to not get or finish an education.
Nobody says you must be a tradwife. You should seek your dreams in life. If that means you want a degree and career, definitely go for it. That's your choice to make. If you give this choice to anyone else, you will be screwed.
Generic stereotypes of men shouldnt be a major factor in making decisions in your life. This is a you decision.
But there's consequences here that you dont seem to acknowledge and you're going to struggle greatly in the dating scene.
It's still shocking to me that women saw men working very hard jobs, coming home absolutely destroyed and worn out and women wanted this? lol?
There’s nothing wrong with single income families, as that has been the default setting for all of our history. I’m inclined to believe that is a solution for some problem that we don’t remember.
By the way, love how you addressed us as “straight men”, flushing down the toilet any interest we had in taking you seriously.
There's definitely nothing wrong with them. But we a matter of risk mitigation, it's obvious why people wish to put themselves in a situation where they don't wind up in the situation or being dependent on a single income (that is another person) when they have preplanned all that out already and chosen it
>There’s nothing wrong with single income families
Except the economies. When dual income becomes more common, housing starts to charge under that assumption.
Most people literally cannot afford to be single income. There are divorcees who stay together simply because either cannot afford to move out and go it alone for a while.
No bank anywhere in the western world will lend you money for a house on a single income. Double income is the norm, so it's reflected in the price.
In 2023, single women made up 17% of home buyers, and single men accounted for 9% of buyers.
https://www.rocketmoney.com/learn/homeownership/womens-housi...
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This has been clear from the data for a long time.
I wonder when the rhetoric and scholarships will catch up to the reality.
Not a surprise. Men don’t go where they’re not wanted.
Should be true and obvious for everyone.
The narrative that women don't succeed in computer science and cybersecurity because of discrimination never aligned with my experience whatsoever.
Sure, when I was in high school and college, there were significantly less women. And sure, women experience discrimination in many forms, many in ways that men don't understand or have to deal with. I get it, I'm speaking from a "position of privilege" as a man.
But I had numerous female teachers and college professors in my programming and math classes. The female students in my classes were smart, capable, and dedicated. Never once did I see them denied anything or treated differently. Female friends told me about negative experiences facing sexism, and they always came from people outside the school, or at the very least outside the CS program.
And yet literally everyone I talked to at this overwhelmingly left-leaning school assured me that being a female CS student was a form of torture. They could never explain why. Forget about the female-only scholarships, the conferences, the special clubs and interest groups. These middle-class college students living in one of the world's richest cities are suffering in this field, and we should be doing anything and everything to help them, we will not be satisfied until we have an exact 50%-50% split.
I'm not saying it's all rainbows and sunshine. Obviously sexism is still a systemic problem in many parts of American life. I have sisters, they have told some awful shit. I'm simply posing the questions - at what point does a minority group stop being disadvantaged? When do they stop being considered a minority? Who gets to decide when and how that happens? Why are there so many scholarships, interest groups, and initiatives designed to help women in STEM who are struggling, but the very real problem of men and boys struggling in other fields is largely ignored? How large does the gap between male and female education have to get before it reaches public consciousness?
It seems like we (the US) should be doing more across the board to help students and provide them opportunities, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Constant culture war spats and identity politics aren't helping anyone. The vague impression from my social group is that Europeans have it figured out and we just don't, but I really don't know if that's true.
great comment. I think people tend to in general look at “now” and not “how we got here.” I have been in the industry for 3 decades now, many, many, many projects, many many teams and colleges. In the 90’s when I started there was simply no women working in our industry - like none. In the early 2000’s we started getting some resumes, 1 in say 20-ish were women. In the 2010’s that number went up a bit… and when I had the pleasure of having women on my team they were without exception invaluable members of the teams…
now you are policy maker and you say “what do we do to bridge this gap? what do we do to get more women to join the industry?” the answers are largely in your comment, scholarships, interest groups, outreach, summer camps…
now are we at the point now to say “ok we good, lets ‘tone this down’” - possibly. in my personal experience I would say women are still disproportionally underrepresented but maybe we’ve “done enough”…
A few years ago when this came up, we pulled up the stats for gender parity in all the different STEM fields. Physics, engineering, and CS were the only ones where there was clearly apparent pressure against female participation. Everyone who's ever been to both an academic cryptography conference and an academic CS conference has probably noticed this: there are way more women in cryptography than computer science in general, because cryptography pulls in mathematicians.
People have all sorts of just-so explanations for why this should be; boys are more interested in manipulating physical objects, or more interested in building things. But none of it holds up when you compare across all the fields; moreover, 40 years ago you could be making the same sorts of just-so stories up about law or medicine.
“Veterinary medicine has been predominantly female in the US since 2009. That trend is continuing, with 87.3% of current veterinary school applicants identifying as female, as well as 88% of veterinary technicians.”
(Source: aaha.org)
Given that the gender imbalance in physics/engineering/CS is always blamed on men pressuring women against participating, one wonders, what kind of monstrous women are gatekeeping the veterinary field, and what kind of harassment are they inflicting on men who try to participate?
40 years ago, the personal computer was marketed at boys. That's just a type of marketing we are still trying to correct over 2 generations later.
And that's how we should treat it. It's too later to get people interested in engineering in college. you need to start 5 years earlier minimum. Ideally 10 years earlier.
nobody marketed personal computer to me 25 years ago. but my interest in hacking it was so much bigger than my sisters I became a programmer. Changing that isn’t a matter of correction. You need to actively remove boys that are more interested which not yield the best results
>but my interest in hacking it was so much bigger than my sisters I became a programm
That's a whole generation off the ads of the 80's that was selling this as a toy for boys. The bulk of that marketing was already culturally set by the new millennium.
And you may have missed the 90's marketing too. If you watched Hackers (1995) or any other media featuring "nerds" with computers in that decade and weren't at least turned off, the marketing worked. Because you chose to go through and it likely portrayed hacking as an undesirable male hobby for women.
> Changing that isn’t a matter of correction. You need to actively remove boys that are more interested which not yield the best results
You underestimate the power of marketing. Going from barely any women in the 2000s to 20% in the next decade (half a generation) is herculean effort. That doesn't happen naturally.
> moreover, 40 years ago you could be making the same sorts of just-so stories up about law or medicine.
No you couldn't as women were barred from those fields pretty recently then. No women working today has been barred from physics or engineering, the situation is not the same.
I’ll give you a pretty easy example. I was looking at a design doc I was consulting on. The lead engineer said “oh sorry, this document was for real engineers”.
> It seems like we (the US) should be doing more across the board to help students and provide them opportunities, regardless of gender, race, sexuality, etc. Constant culture war spats and identity politics aren't helping anyone.
It's a nice sentiment, though a quick look at our history reveals that it's all about identity politics and culture wars. There is no way to move past it because the US is, and will remain, a divided, multicultural, individual-focused nation. It's one of my favorite aspects of the country, though it's caused no small amount of grief.
My partner has a PhD in maths and physics and she absolutely suffers from discrimination in both fields for being a woman. It’s a field full of men who aren’t very in tune in what it means to be appropriate and professional around women, she is constantly dismissed and ignored despite being a leading expert in the world for what she does, and has had men make non consensual advances on her including her having to duck away from men trying to kiss her unprompted.
She knows women who haven’t had this experience as strongly but it definitely happens to a lot of them in fields dominated by men who have very poor social conditioning when it comes to women.
Her experience was actually worse in Europe than the US, too. To the point that she refuses to ever work in a certain country again, which is a shame given it’s a great opportunity
So should we recruit more men to college or more women to trades?
Why not both? I don't think more skilled workers would be a bad thing?
I wonder how the split is for different academic disciplines
I am curious about further details too, does the discipline change anything?
Yes.
Curious to see how they perform in math
This site has some data on college majors with major gender disparities (although it's a bit outdated). Women are heavily over represented in Fashion Design, Interior Design, and Elementary Education. Men are heavily over represented in Construction Management, Mechanical Engineering, and Electrical Engineering.
https://www.payscale.com/career-advice/do-men-or-women-choos...
Within this context i find it amusing that i still have seen scholarships that are only for women, none that are only for men. I'm still burdened by student loans that i never would have had in the first place if i were female.
It's amusing how nearly all comments so far are a bit defensive.
Not so long ago women were not allowed in academia; shouldn't the first reaction be "yay!"?
>Not so long ago women were not allowed in academia; shouldn't the first reaction be "yay!"?
If your ideology is "any differences in outcomes must be caused by systemic discrimination, and we should engage in reverse discrimination to fight it", then this is bad news, because according to that ideology, you should be doing a 180 and discriminating against women. That conclusion upsets some people.
Why should we celebrate a growing gap in any direction?
Women surpassed men in degrees earned over 40 years ago. How long is the celebration supposed to last?
the celebration will last until morale improves
Maybe. I thought we were supposed to think of that as bad?
The second reaction should be to institute a bunch of scholarships for men only, tutoring programs for men only, and so on. Even the elementary school near me a few years ago had a "girls after-school math program" they advertised on a giant banner for the entire time I lived there.
(I don't actually think this, but this is what we collectively did when the "problem" was reversed.)
At what point in history has the message "People like yourself are falling behind in a very serious way" ever been met with "Yay!" ?
Also, many Americans are taught that statistical gaps between different demographics are usually a result of some terrible injustice. (It's certainly been true in the past.) Whether or not this is true always or even in this case, I can't really say, but I do understand why the mostly American audience of HN would have a negative reaction...
My reaction was "so not much changed in 20 years, or maybe got more extreme"
The reasons, causes, issues, etc. are too numerous to analyze in a comment. But this wasn't particularly new data for me.
women have had ~100 years of equality. Everyone woman today has had equal opportunity and they still choose the same professions they always did.
Equality means women HAVE TO join men in the 'lowers your life expectancy' type jobs. But women have not, so now there's consequences for women.
Women really dont like the new consequences and its causing huge mental health problem. The "paradox of female unhappiness" is rapidly getting worse for women while men are increasingly happier.
The consequences will self-balance but the direction for the balance is in a direction women absolutely do not want to go.
This is likely the first you've heard about this. Which is curious because the media refuses to cover it. Reddit and some other social medias ban you from discussing the subject.
When you look it up, you will only find univeristies and scientific journalists discussing this. Here's one of the last articles on the subject in 2007.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/men-are-ge...
here's more recent, in the context of covid pandemic: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s00148-024-009...
So what about 'college completion' well guess what.. extensive systemic discrimination against men have put women into college, great no problem but you're neglecting the 'lowers your life expectancy' jobs greatly.
Women are trading their happiness to men. There's absolutely no incentive for men to help solve the problem and better yet the few men who have tried to point out that we need to fix this... oh ya they are misogynists with unacceptable views and need to be censored!
Better yet, these unhappy depressed women are blaming men for their woes. Attacking men and making the situation that much worse.
We are no longer in a knowledge economy. This is a grifter and entertainer/jester economy now.
This is an underappreciated problem. What I observe is that no one does any real work anymore, except immigrants. ("Content creator" is not a real job. That's something you do for fun.)
Odd that these guys get beaten up on so much, considering that the entire rest of the society spends all their time ranting on social media and not doing actual work.
>"Content creator" is not a real job. That's something you do for fun.
This is dismissive. Some do it as a hobby or simply to expand their reach (even Tim Walz had a few gaming streams this year), but the people making real money easily put 40+ hours into analyzing trends, understanding their audience, preparing content, editing media, and overall being a business person. Those CCs very easily be the hardest workers in any sort of communications company, but that's not how the market works these days.
I suppose by that metric, most of HN just working on some website frontend or server backend are just typing away for easy money
>considering that the entire rest of the society spends all their time ranting on social media and not doing actual work.
well, no one wanted to give me a full time job this year. Gotta do something between the Workday applications draining my soul and the boring Leetcode practice.
The two comments ahead of us make sweeping generalizations but they're valid ones. They aren't comments made just to look busy at the shop.
You can argue that the kind of "progress" or "inequality" that's being discussed was pushed forward by a social justice grifter culture that came to form online in the last decade.
Producing "content" for a living is just the natural evolution of the social justice grift, where "$peaking truth to power" becomes just "$peaking", to anyone, on anything, in a way that yields societal or institutional development but of a kind that occurs indifferent to its effects on mankind.
Social media has virtually destroyed the image of the academic. By virtue of steadily being assumed by demographics who have a peculiar relationship with social media and technology in general (mid-to-late Gen X and Millennials), Academics are adopting personalities more like YouTube streamers and people who make "content".
Academics were at the forefront of the initial social justice grift that contributed to our nascent grift society and the institution will continue to evolve to accommodate this shift.
Young women (young black women in particular) took to the social justice grift hard. So it makes sense that they'll make their new home in academia and young men who were excluded from the social justice grift, will pursue other options and get their "grift fix" elsewhere.
>Producing "content" for a living is just the natural evolution of the social justice grift, where "$peaking truth to power" becomes just "$peaking", to anyone, on anything, in a way that yields societal or institutional development but of a kind that occurs indifferent to its effects on mankind.
You do know that "content" can be anything from a glorified marketer for some designer brands, to a tech blog talking about computer architecture, to an indie movie director trying to break into the industry, to Khan academy helping to fill gaps or offer alternative education right?
Throwing all "content" as some need to make a political statement on Twitter really shows the generational difference in how people use the word. It's way too general to make any sweeping generalization that I'll buy into. You need to specify to make a concrete point here on what "content" you don't respect.
The rest of what you talk about really has nothing to do with why I replied. I don't really care what "content" t you don't like. Life is about accepting that not all things Will appeal to you, nor want to appeal to you. I'd just rather you not conflate stuff like 3blue1brown with whatever feminist you have a bone to pick with. Both are "content creators".
This is why the men are beginning to form political identities in opposition to women.
Insane costs and high tuition fees are the root cause of this. Men from all backgrounds have generally been taught from the beginning to join college as a step for moving forward in life, but now more and more of them are discovering they are better off finding a trade instead of getting straddled in debt for a credential that doesn't even come close to being worth what it's charged.
Women who get into college, meanwhile, have the dynamics set up in such a way that they are less restricted by any urgency to get financially independent fast, since the set of women being able to get into college will automatically self-select for those who have plenty of safety nets.
Men can be more easily drawn to the trades for what seems like much easier money. When I was a poor student I had friends working in house building, driving trucks and even 1 working in a foundry. They all had nicer cars and more beer money than me until I graduated.
> They all had nicer cars and more beer money than me until I graduated.
It's not exactly surprising that someone working full time has a higher standard of living than a college student. The question is what happens after graduation.
Partially: that’s the perfectly rational position but … how many teenagers did you know who carefully planned the game-theoretical optimum for their life? The guy who got a scholarship to MIT is doing that but public policy has to think more about how the 50th percentile person is doing and I think that’s where what you see around you matters more: someone academically driven or who grew up comfortably with professional class parents has the cultural preparation to stick with it but someone who has non-stellar grades, needs to juggle work and school, is thinking regularly about how many years of their parents’ annual income their student debt translates into – that’s who’s likely to give up.
I mean it's not a wrong thing to think.
First day of Polytechnic school, one of my instructors asked how many of us had spouses or girlfriends; about half raised their hands. He said very plainly that they should withdraw from the course if they valued their loved one more than their academic performance.
Thing was he was being kind. The course load was targeted around 80 to 100 hours a week in year 1 and then eases off to 60 to 70 year 2 after proving you have the mental fortitude to sustain that kind of pace for more than a few weeks.
Post secondary is hard. It's supposed to hard. Only 9 out of an intake of 60 graduated. We were staking a lot of money on the line that would disappear if we didn't make it through. Is it really so unreasonable to think that some people would look at that and decide they don't want to make those sacrifices even if means higher pay check afterwards?
I guess it varies by K-12 rigor, but college was mostly easier for me... until the 4th year. that 80 hour workload was my high school, and I had no choice but to balance 5 classes + an elective every year. And ofc I pushed myself more by having an acedemic club and volunteer work. I was always so tired. My mom felt bad for being out of the house a lot, but truthfully I wasn't much different anyway and barely noticed.
College, I dropped a lot of that, and my class workload dropped to 3-4 classes a quarter. It was like a huge weight was off my shoulders. less time in classes, more time to myself to choose. classes were harder but I had more time to focus down on my majors instead of being distracted by 3 GE equivalents in high school. It just fit my way of working better.
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But I think that is part of the point: the standard line of K-12 has been falling while the line for college wants to keep trying to go up. Those determined A/B students will meet that line, but not the people doing the bare minimum to pass. A "C" is not what used to be a "C". I don't know the solution to it, but the current "solution" of grade inflation is not a direction I agree with.
> They all had nicer cars and more beer money than me until I graduated.
Well yes, they had jobs. Let's say 10 years after graduation, how are things holding up.
Is college really a useful signal? I think it matters which school, what degree, and whether a person would have got into that college due to affirmative action / DEI programs. Sure college is a useful signal for some subset. For the rest it is more a sign that you’re willing to take on debt for either the college experience itself or status or signaling.
I would say no, it's not a very useful signal, but I'm also biased and I'm also aware that bad signals are used all the time to make hiring decisions.
going to college tells your future employer one important thing - you went somewhere, for four long years, and you stuck it out and got your papers. this trait alone tells a lot about an individual. I think that is really the crux of it.
technically if we have two people, went to same school, same degree same classes, same grades in every class all the way through. last semester one of the two took one different class and was 1 credit short of graduating and then left school and never got her/his paper. one of these two individuals is setup to have a prosperous career while the other is “unemployable” even though of course academically-speaking they are one and the same
The value of a college degree is in the toilet
Why is this even measured? What do we actually achieve from this metric as a goal, one way or another?
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I am seriously concerned about this same issue, but I think "psychological castration" is maybe being a bit hyperbolic w.r.t the long term effects of amphetamines at typically prescribed dosages.
> but I think "psychological castration" is maybe being a bit hyperbolic w.r.t the long term effects of amphetamines at typically prescribed dosages.
You see long term brain changes in kids who get prescribed Adderall, you don't see this for adults. Proponents tend to tout this as why we absolutely need to give this to kids, because they say this will permanently heal them, could just as well be permanently damaging them.
I can accept this. I just have a problem with the allusion to castration, which is a long term, irreversible, and immediately noticeable thing in the typical context that the word is used.
I'm concerned about potential long term changes to the brain as well. I wouldn't call that necessarily catastrophically consequential on the level that castration would be though, on account of many other drugs also causing long term and potentially negative changes to the brain.
I wouldn't compare underage drinking (known to potentially have long term consequences for the brain) to castration for instance, which is why I think doing the same for amphetamine use is hyperbolic.
you would certainly have thought somehow differently if your thinking apparatus was consistently influenced by unnatural neurotransmitter concentration during its formation
I mean, you act like the alternative would make you a genius somehow. It's a suppressor, not something that fundamentally changes your entire disposition. That's why "castration" is a exaggeration.
What's this utopic ideal you're being sealed from if you take something like adderall in your early years? Can't make it to the NBA/NFL?
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This is a very weird topic to bring up, but just using your logic: Democrats "want men back" and we do so by banning circumcision. But already democratic states in the west are where they stopped.
So who's doing the circumcision again?
I don't know. I'm circumcised and I feel fine and I'm not particularly resentful about it. It's definitely weird though if you think about it too long. I just don't think it's got anything to do with much of.anything politically or socially or sexually or whatever.
Nope, no connection to bodily autonomy issues at all. Not related to tail docking, cat declawing, "my body my choice", or anything libertarian at all! Nope!
There is also a dearth of good male role models in the public sphere.
There's ton of good male role models. But you don't get to the public sphere these days by being a good wholesome person with zero drama. How many of anyone do we really have like that? Maybe leBron James? Keaneu Reeves (for now?).
The public sphere gets its attention by appealing to base desires (rage, sadness, humor) and slowly slipping in the pitch for snake oil. If you're giving inconvinent truths, you're being "preachy", and "don't understand my struggle" and "are part of the problem".
Or they simply become famous in various means and in that power make skeletons to be revealed years later. It's hard to have a spotlight on you 24/7 and have your entire life be squeaky clean. That used to be the facade of politicians and even they don't care anymore.
Can't make the horse drink, even if they are dying of thirst because they keep being fed alcohol.
You don't think Trump and Andrew Tate are good role models??? /s
which father would not want their daughter to marry one or both of them (in Utah…)???? :)
What did I just read. I'm not american but I doubt that this is the actual reality you guys live in.
Feels like you watch too many of the wrong youtube influencers.
>I doubt that this is the actual reality you guys live in.
There's nuggets of truth, but the overall effect is nowhere near as dramatic, no. Kids (both genders) are subscibed to a lot more medicine than the previous generation. There are a lot more initiatives to promote women in education than men. But it's not like men are failing out in droves nor are being abused in school to not succeed.
There are a lot more holisitic issues with education to fix, like the decreeasing budget and teachers being paid less that starbucks baristas, before we need to worry about nuanced factors like the different ways boys learn vs. girls. But yes, girls tend to do better in K-12 becaue the environment is more suited for them compared to the energy of boys who run around and rough house and other "disorderly" conduct.
The whole "go to trades" argument people are making is already a big reason men are pulled away from college compared to women. They already are doing that, and very few women are.
That's a pretty accurate description of what's happening. DEI did this to men, because men were blamed by the media and by the feminists for everything. Sexist anti-male programs were created, and now we see the results.
What, you thought that in one generation men magically became dumb?
Again, I'm not american but I'm well aware of the silly stuff you are being fed to by influencers selling male victimhood content. Stop listening to that crap. Your downvotes will not change anything.
As someone else said, the only problem is the lack of real positive role models (people who build, have ethic and do something useful with their lives), that have been replaced by pathetic characters like JP and other nobodies that only sell victimhood or get rick quick fantasies on the internet.
I'd say war-grade amphetamine, adults taking amphetamines maybe, US air force still give that in some circumstances, but giving amphetamines to an hyperactive kid to calm him down, is just mind-blowing.
Maybe I'm just already brain damaged in an irreparable way or am potentially a superhuman badass capable of doing all the drugs without consequences...
I think it's bad to give amphetamines to kids...full stop. But it isn't similar to castration or a lobotomy or even in the same order of magnitude in terms of long term irreparable effects.
Stimulant drugs of that nature tend to be more tolerable than opiates or benzos or a lot of other drugs often prescribed for common mental illnesses (and often to kids).
My issue with the whole discussion is not that we shouldn't take a hard look at our amphetamine prescribing tendency and try to resolve the underlying issues instead of putting on a drug band-aid...my issue is that it is implying some sort of long term catastrophic damage for kids or adults that may have undergone that sort of treatment in the past. And it's asking them to start adopting a blame mentality and potentially start using this great potential (imagined) future that was robbed of them as a coping mechanism.
They aren't mentally handicapped, and they shouldn't think of themselves as being the equivalent of somebody that's been castrated or lobotomized and therefore permanently mentally disabled in some way.
Yes, giving amphetamines on a regular basis to kids is mind blowing. It's also not the end of their lives.
psychological castration? what are you on about exactly?
Can we just discuss the problems men face without the totally unnecessary victimhood language.
Force-feeding adderall to developing brains will eventually be viewed the same way we view lobotomies - a crude and cruel method of control. These children absolutely are victims of a sick system.
It's crude and it's potentially a method of control, but it's massively massively less terrible in basically every way compared to a lobotomy.
The problem with the way you talk about this issue is that everything you say is comparing things that are off by about an order of magnitude in terms of their typical consequences.
can you stop tone-moderating people who are trying to share how they feel about something?
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"Schools treat boys like they're malfunctioning girls, and girls like they're malfunctioning boys"
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You can swear on HN you know, it's ok to say "shit," we can handle it :)
Fyuck yeah.
But I don't think swearing was ever banned. I don't personally bother doing it just because of my own disposition but I've yet to read a comment here that made me go "wow, what a sailor's mouth". Just don't make it distract from the actual core points of curiosity and communication :)
my parents might read it though and then I’d get in trouble…
> psychological castration
wow, I might have to try this in the bedroom sometime
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Are you suggesting that there is discrimination against men?
Or are you suggesting that Title IX is itself a factor in the college attainment gap between men and women?
I believe neither is the case. I think other factors are at play here, although I’m not an expert and willing to be persuaded.
The current model of "equity" as in Title IX is currently defined based on difference in outcome implying structural/systemic discrimination. There is now a difference in outcome going the other way. Thus, one must conclude systemic discrimination the other direction by the same rules.
This difference in outcome was the only hard evidence that justified creation of programs that give women an advantage, such as women-only mentorship programs, scholarships, and career counseling.
Even at Caltech?
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Voting-age women outnumber men in the US, and women both register and vote at a higher rate than men do.
See: https://www.census.gov/topics/public-sector/voting.html
See also: https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/2024/demo/p20-5...
The reality is that a significant minority of women overall, including majority of white women (53%), voted for Trump in the recent election.
See: https://apnews.com/hub/election-2024
Corporate America, of course. the class/gender warfare was always a way to distract from the true goals of the elite to control the working class. History repeats.
There's a large amount of women that vote the same way
If a man’s wife has to fly to another state to get an abortion how is that a win for the man?
If the couple is smart, they'll just move to such a state, or to another country even.
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Lower standards. Discourage competitiveness. Replace modernist absolutism with post-modern relativism. They will be very cozy finishing schools but they won't produce excellence.
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You know, it was just 50 or so years ago that the only option a woman had was to attach herself to a man and hope he’s not a mean drunk. Now women actually have options in life and they are availing themselves. Good for them. Of course, now all these HNers suddenly saying college degrees aren’t worth anything because, you know, women.
Frankly I think most collage degree programs are used as a continuation of high school for those who are afraid or just not looking to grow up and go out into the market.