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Are male students from Mars and female students from Venus?

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Does it matter that men and women are making different choices about what to study at university asks insideMAN’s news editor, Glen Poole.

The current generation of teenagers is probably the most gender equal our country has ever known.

A university education is becoming progressively more accessible to larger numbers of boys and girls; the full time gender pay gap for men and women under forty is around zero and the introduction of shared parental leave will make it easier than ever before for mums and dads to balance work and family life more equally.

So why, when they go to university, are young men and women making such stereotypically gendered choices?

According to the latest figures from UCAS, women are still dominating courses like teaching, nursing and social work while men dominate engineering, building and computer sciences.

Have none of these students read the Guardian recently?

Don’t the girls know that “pink stinks” and “girls do science too”? Haven’t the boys heard that they can wear dresses and play with dolls now?

It seems that no matter how many women’s studies graduates or neuro-feminists universities produce to tell us that gender is all about nurture not nature, the sector is still incapable of creating an education system that nurtures more boys into nursing and more girls into engineering.

This isn’t a uniquely British phenomenon.

Even in Scandanavian countries where gender equality is a national obsession, there are key career paths which remain stubbornly dominated by either men or women. As the groundbreaking Norwegian documentary, Brainwashed, revealed in 2010, even in the most gender equal countries, there are certain sections of the labour market, like nursing and engineering, than remain “men’s work” and “women’s work”.

The standard feminist take on gender segregation in the world of careers, is that it’s all down to the way we’re conditioned. If only boys were allowed to play with dolls and Lego wasn’t so sexist, there would be equal numbers of 18 year olds signing up for nursing and engineering courses.

Spot the difference 

As things stand, 90.9% of nursing students are female and 84.7% of young people studying engineering are male. Other courses dominated by women include education (88% female); social work (87.6%); animal science (84.3%) and Psychology (80.6%). Men, meanwhile, dominate building (84.7% male); computer science (84.3%) and technology (80.9%).

For those progressive liberals who believe that gender is created by social engineering, the persistent dominance of men in “proper” engineering is evidence of society’s deep-rooted sexism against women.

Ask these same people if the even greater dominance of women in nursing, teaching and social work is evidence of sexism against men and they’ll jump through hoops to claim these statistics as more evidence of sexism against women.

They’ll argue that the caring, nurturing professions are seen as “feminine” and therefore rejected by men, because men are misogynistic bastards who have been taught from birth that the worst thing you can be, is a big sissy girl.

Ask if this logic also means that women don’t go into engineering because of women’s sexism against men and you’ll end up back where you started. In the general worldview of left-leaning liberals, when women are under-represented it’s evidence of sexism against women and when men are under-represented, it’s even more evidence that the world is sexist against women.

At the other end of the nature versus nurture debate, you’ll find the types of social conservatives who dream of a less complicated world where 100% of nurses are women and 100% of engineers are men.

Somewhere inbetween these polarities, common sense seems to break out.

According to Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, author of The Essential Difference, the typical male brain is more systemising, while the typical female brain is more empathising and there are plenty of men and women along this spectrum who deviate from the norm.

Baron-Cohen’s work is often quoted by the traditionalist camp as proof that men are men and women are women and never the twain shall meet. This isn’t the professor’s view. He says:

“My own position is that biology and culture interact to create this sex difference. There are some people who would argue that its just biology or just culture but I think the moderate position is both are at work.”

Nature it seems, can help explain why most engineers are still from Mars and the majority of nurses are from Venus. And while we continue to waste time focusing on these polarities, we are ignoring the  middle ground where there has been a huge influx of women into academic fields, previously dominated by men. According to UCAS, while more men and women are going to university than ever before, the gender gap in favour of female entrants has doubled from around 29,000 to 58,000 since 2006.

Mind the gap

At the same time, women have overtaken men in areas of study that were previously male dominated including law (64.9% female students); dentistry (64.1%); and medicine (55.7%). Women are also closing the gap in areas like business studies (45.2% female students); management studies (44.2%) and accounting (43%).

What does this mean for gender equality? Nobody knows because nobody has really bothered to ask. The latest figures reveal the female students entering university in 2014, outnumber men in two thirds of university courses.

Despite this fact, there remains a huge focus on promoting greater gender equality for women in higher education, without an equal and opposite push for equality for men, who are now in the minority. Of course we can also do more to make life better for Venus, but when it comes to education, we really need more focus on improving life for Mars.

—Photo:flickr/Amanda

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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Women dominate as university gender gap doubles

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The gap between the number of men and women entering higher education in the UK has doubled in under a decade from around 29,000 to 58,000, according to the latest statistics from UCAS.

The latest figures for 2014 also show that two thirds of university courses are now dominated by women. On some courses, such as teaching, nursing and social work, nine out of ten students are female. Last year Dr Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of UCAS, raised concern about the growing university gender gap saying:

“There remains a stubborn gap between male and female applicants which, on current trends, could eclipse the gap between rich and poor within a decade. Young men are becoming a disadvantaged group in terms of going to university and this underperformance needs urgent focus across the education sector.”

Key Facts:

  • 512,370 students placed in higher education through UCAS in 2014
  • 44.4% male
  • 55.6% female
  • In 2006, 29,780 more women entered university than men
  • In 2014, 57,790 more women entered university than men
  • Women now 27.7% more likely to enter higher education
  • Women outnumber men in two thirds of university courses

Gender Divide By Subject Area:

  • Nursing 90.9% female students
  • Dance 90.1% female students
  • Education 88% female students
  • Social Work 87.6% female students
  • Engineering 84,7% male students
  • Building 84.7% male students
  • Animal Science 84.3% female students
  • Computer Science 82.3% male students
  • Technology 80.9% male students
  • Psychology 80.6% female students

—Photo: UNE Photos/flickr

Article by Glen Poole author of the book Equality For Men

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The problem with leaving boys out of the results day picture

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It’s not just the red tops: An image in the Guardian before results day

Yesterday saw the publication of this year’s A Level results and along with them the inevitable rash of Front Page Leaping Blondes ™.

The fact that newspaper photographers are so skilled at seeking out A Level and GCSE students who are also pretty, middle-class girls, is now such a cliché that articles like this one are published about it almost as often as the pictures themselves.

These articles tend to argue that FPLBs ™ are another example of our society’s objectification of women – girls prized for their looks not their brains.

There’s obviously some truth to this – where are all the less attractive girls? And for that matter, where are all the black and Asian girls? Don’t they do well in exams too?

Where have the boys gone?

But this is a selective analysis both of who’s missing from the front pages on results day and why it’s a problem. The primary omission isn’t unattractive girls, or girls from minority backgrounds. It’s boys.

And it’s also boys who really are missing out on educational achievement. In January this year UCAS reported that there were now a third more girls applying for university than boys, leading the head of the organisation to state that boys are becoming “a disadvantaged group”.

Now the year’s results are in, this gap has reportedly widened even further.

What does it say then, if “a disadvantaged group” is consistently left out of the images that show who is and can be successful? Results day pictures that only show pretty girls may objectify women, but they also tell boys academic success isn’t for them in the first place.

Photo: Duncan Hull

And this comes in context of other images of young men that are pervasive. A 2009 media analysis of news reports found depictions of teenage boys were overwhelmingly negative — with young men most likely to be portrayed in a positive light if they had died.

Meanwhile, recent high-profile anti-sexism campaigns now routinely portray the young men who do get into university as misogynists and sexual predators.

‘Gender Expectations and Stereotype Threat’

But all of this, including the pictures of FPLBs ™, may in fact be a manifestation of something boys have already been told from a very young age indeed.

A 2010 study of boys in primary schools – with the sinister title of ‘Gender Expectations and Stereotype Threat’ — suggested that under-performance among boys in most national exams could be linked to adult’s lower expectations of them.

Bonny Hartley, the study’s lead author, told the Daily Mail: “By seven or eight years old, children of both genders believe that boys are less focused, able, and successful than girls – and think that adults endorse this stereotype. There are signs that these expectations have the potential to become self-fulfilling in influencing children’s actual conduct and achievement.”

‘Reading not seen as masculine’

Her study found that girls as young as four think they are cleverer, try harder and are better behaved than equivalent boys. By the age of seven and eight, boys agreed with them.

The study was reflected in the findings of a 2012 report by the All Party Parliamentary Group on Literacy, which found reading was not seen as a “masculine thing” by boys – leaving them lagging behind girls from the age of four. It found boys are held back by a “number of gender stereotypes which seem to kick in early”.

None of this should come as much of a surprise. It is now widely accepted that if you consistently have low expectations of a certain group, those expectations tend to become a self-fulfilling prophecy. The puzzling thing is why this awareness is so rarely applied to underachievement among boys.

By all means be concerned about the objectification of female students in today’s newspapers. But you should also be just as concerned about the boys who aren’t there at all.

By Dan Bell

Do you think leaving boys out of images of academic success is a problem? What impact do you think negative portrayals of young men may have on their educational achievement? Or do you think we should be more concerned about the objectification of female students in these pictures? Tell us what you think in a tweet or a comment.

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