Holy smarty pants, people! Women have earned 10 MILLION more college degrees than men since 1982! Oh yeah? In what?

October 2, 2013 By Janet Bloomfield (aka JudgyBitch) 72 Comments

According to The Department of Education, women are now earning the majority of college degrees in the US, with approximately 140 women graduating from college for every 100 men. I can’t provide a link for you because:

Dear Users,

Due to a lapse of appropriations and the partial shutdown of the Federal Government, the systems that host nces.ed.gov have been shut down. Services will be restored as soon as a continuing resolution to provide funding has been enacted.

IES – Institute of Education Sciences

http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_310.asp

…so you’ll have to take my word for it. There are two things that are interesting about this.

First up, where is the concern over the under-representation of men on campus? Why don’t we have a special government taskforce addressing the dearth of men on campus? Why aren’t there on campus Men’s Centers to provide the minority a safe space to reflect on their situations? Where the hell are the affirmative action programs for men.

Yeah, okay. It’s only a problem when women are underrepresented. Gotcha! Gotta love equality!

A few days ago, we looked at what would happen if men didn’t show up for work one day.

http://judgybitch.com/2013/09/17/what-would-happen-if-no-men-showed-up-for-work-today/

D-I-S-A-S-T-E-R

Because it turns out that the work that men do and the work that women do is profoundly different. Men basically run the whole show, and women add a bit of spit and polish. Hey, fair enough. Life is nice with a bit of polish. But what is this bullshit about women being so much more educated than men? Earning more college degrees doesn’t make anyone automatically more useful or productive or accomplished or capable?

What are the degrees in?

Today, let’s look at what an average college campus would look like if the men decided to play hooky for a day. What exactly are the men doing on campus?

I can’t trace back to the original Bureau of Labor Statistics or the Census databases, which are also off-line thanks to all those Republicans who hate birth control (snark), but I’ll make due with some secondary sources. The following numbers are from 2008.

Let’s hit the Faculty of Education first, shall we?

Looks like classes in Advanced Crayons and Gluing Popsicle Sticks will be carrying on just fine. Only 21.3% of that Faculty is made up of men. Ha! You won’t even be missed!

How about the Faculty of Nursing?

Oh, please. A measly 14.6% of that Faculty are men, although I suspect the really hard thinky classes in anesthesiology will be sitting empty, since most Registered Nurse Anesthesiologists are actually men.

http://judgybitch.com/2013/03/01/there-are-more-male-nurses-than-ever-highly-specialized-technically-qualified-male-nurses-who-get-paid-more-than-female-nurses-because-sexism/

Oh well. How about we peek in the Faculties of Social Sciences, Communications, Business and History?

Psychology classes are pretty much unaffected. Only 22.9% of psychology majors are men. Classes in Shakespeare and Early 14^th Century Poetry are still crammed with students. Only 21.3% of men in college are there to study English Language and Literature. Still Life Drawing and Advanced Modern Jazz classes? No worries. 38.6% of those classes have men. Communications is pretty much the same: 37.5% of the students are men.

History and sociology classes are looking pretty sparse, though. 50.7% of those students are male, and business class is pretty subdued today, too. 51% of all business majors are men.

http://www.forbes.com/2010/08/10/most-popular-college-degrees-for-women-forbes-woman-leadership-education-business.html

Arty-farty life continues unaffected, and we barely even notice that all the boys cut class today. Ha!

Okay, let’s see what’s going on in the Faculty of Engineering!

Oh dear. Well, the numbers for 2002 don’t look good, and given that the percentage of women in engineering has remained more or less stable for the past 25 years, it’s probably safe to assume the same basic numbers are true today.

Electrical and Mechanical lecture halls are empty. In a class of 100, 13 students showed up in mechanical and 14 were there for electrical. All the rest are playing video games at home. 18 students show up in Aerospace and 25 students in Civil.

Chemical classes are a bit better. 35 students who are not men are there. 33 students are in Industrial, and 31 students in Materials.

Overall, the classes in the Faculty of Engineering are pretty empty. By 2010, over 80% of all engineering degrees are going to men.

http://www.aps.org/programs/education/statistics/womenmajors.cfm

Faculty of Computer Science?

82.4% of the students are a no-show.

Faculty of Science? Using the chart above, it looks like this:

Biology classes are holding their own. 60% of the students are women. And Chemistry is not doing all that bad. Only half the class didn’t show up. In mathematics and statistics, just over 40% of the class is there, and the same goes for earth sciences.

Physics classes are not doing so great. Only 20% of the students show up.

Hey, why don’t we see how the Faculty of Graduate Studies is doing on this day that men skip out?

Nursing and other health sciences won’t even notice! Less than 20% of Masters in that field go to men. Communications, Biomedical Sciences, Education, English, Foreign Languages and Literature, Psychology, Public Administration and the Performing Arts are all going to be fine, too. Women are a solid majority of the advanced degree earners in those fields.

Computer Science, Engineering, Mathematics and Physical Sciences are not going to be so lucky. Most of their students will be gone, and the ones that do show up probably won’t have an instructor anyways, since most of the doctorates (AKA slave laborers) go to men, too.

So, basically all the classes in thinking, feeling, dancing, coloring, talking and reading will continue on as usual when men cut out for the day.

All the classes in counting, measuring, building, programming, discovering and analyzing will be devoid of students.

Well gosh. That sure came as a surprise, didn’t it?

I’ll take a moment here to give a shout out to nursing, which doesn’t involve a whole lot of book reports or poetry analytics. Nursing is science, and the women in that Faculty deserve due credit.

But the rest?

Bachelors of Bullshit. Barista of Arts. Summa cum latte

So, yay ladies! 10 MILLION more degrees than men.

Pardon me if I personally hold off cheering until you get those degrees in something useful.

Hint: NOT film theory.

Lots of love,

David

Hey Judgy, kinda slightly unrelated to this exact post but whatever.

Im a new reader, and it feels….very….unusual being called “Strong, Smart, Caring” on account of being male. Feels kinda off in a way as well. Like when you say “Women should make sandwiches as it is an expression of love” (Simplification). Shouldn’t I as a male be giving away my work and labor for free for a woman I love?

Also Im kinda in Art college (Doing animation for kids. Thats the stuff that secretly tells stories that the mainstream doesn’t allow). Got in there with 44K Tuition. So Kinda lucky that way.

Anyway…This just feels weird. Aren’t you kinda selling yourself (As a woman) short? It feels off receiving compliments on account of gender…..Im not sure why exactly.
- judgybitch
  
  It’s on account of being HUMAN, my dear.
  
  Does that make more sense?
  - David
    
    Errrrr. Sort of. I just can’t shake a nagging feeling that Im wrong for enjoying feeling this way.
    
    Also I don’t like women who go on maternity leave. Its bloody annoying! One of my two financial counselors just left for maternity leave leaving me with only 1 who is busy all the time. And we can’t get a new one that will be familiar with the whole school situation for a year.
    
    And what I said above also feels wrong.
    
    It feels wrong to say negative things about women on account of them being women…..It just feels wrong on the inside.
    
    Do you have something (Like a link to an article or such) to help me feel better? I just have this gnawing feeling inside me. So I don’t feel wrong for your compliments.
    - Alex
      
      could always ask around on avoiceformen.com if JB doesn’t have anything. a couple of the guys there are pretty good at that kind of stuff, if i remember right
    - Goober
      
      But that isn’t what is happening here. Understand that will go a long way to helping you not feel so bad about the way that you feel, because the way that you feel is perfectly natural.
      
      Women aren’t being criticized here, beyond the inability of some women to see that there are differences between males and females of the human species. These women look at things that aren’t the same between men and women and flip out because they see “inequality.” Their desire is for men and women to be exactly the same, when no such thing is possible. Women aren’t interested in the tough, difficult, often dangerous work that men do, because they are evolutionarily conditioned to eschew it.
      
      On a brutal, evolutionary level, men are more expendable then women are. One man can father hundreds of children. The average woman will birth 5-ish. So in a situation where species survival in on the line, and you’ve got to choose which one to send to war, to hunt the mammoth, or to walk the high steel, you choose men.
      
      As a result of this, men have evolved stronger bodies, higher tolerance to pain from injury (not from illness, interestingly enough, and I have theories there), and more analytical, calculating, emotionless, and risk-amenable mental processes. This was all handy when a man was called upon to kill a mammoth using only pointy sticks, or go to war with a neighboring tribe when the fighting would be up close, bloody, and brutal.
      
      It also comes in handy when a man is called upon to complete complex engineering calculations and design a building that will fall down and kill people if he screws up.
      
      Women are evolutionarily driven to be more risk-intolerant, more emotional in their thinking, and less analytical, calculating, and cold. Their bodies are also not as strong, and their pain tolerance due to injury is not as great (but to sickness is much greater).
      
      In modern life, this drives women to the humanities, and men to STEM studies. It also has men being the drivers of innovation and the ones who really keep the major technical and structural needs of society fulfilled, while it drives women to caring, nurturing, and occupations where thinking on a more emotional, colorful level is more helpful, as well.
      
      These are not criticisms, friend. These are hard truths, and the major focus of this forum is to point out the stupidity of playing the “HA HA, men/women are better!!!” game, because we are each completely necessary and each of our strengths are needed.
      
      Men and women are equals, but are not the same. We are a team. Each of us brings our respective strengths to the table, and as a result, we make good partners to successfully perpetuate the species. Feminism, on its face, wants men and women to be the same, not just equals, and this is destructive, as well as leading to a situation where men and women are forced into roles that they do not desire and will make them miserable.
      
      Telling truth should not make you feel poorly. The truth is the truth.
  - donkey rock
    
    On an unrelated note to this comment, you can use google cache to view some pages that aren’t immediately available: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d12/tables/dt12_310.asp
  - patbona
    
    Greetings from france.
    
    you will like this 🙂
    
    http://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/dont-waste-time-and-money-on-useless-degrees-students-told-8757512.html
    
    http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2026858/Bosses-condemn-useless-degrees-leave-graduates-lacking-basic-skills.html
    
    The problem many women have is that they tend to chose degrees that represent stereotypically “female” activities. They limit their chances to get degrees that will get them a job.
    
    Also the worst thing to do for female & male students alike is to chose a degree without having thought of a career plan 1st. They will go nowhere.
Carbon14

JudgyBitch, you show us what’s right under our noses but we’re not allowed to see.
Bob Wallace

I graduated from a large university that was the largest producers of teachers in a large state. All the teaching majors I met were women (except for one man I was friends with) and they were dumb. If there was a smart woman in that bunch I never met her.

Since that time I decided teaching degrees are worthless.
- Anon
  
  That’s because in certain States you can be a teacher without degrees in anything.
  
  You pay your teachers shit, your administration robs the educators and students blind with their bloated unearned salaries and the unions protect the worthless ones. That’s why Americas educational system is shot.
  
  Look at the countries with much better PISA scores. Teachers are better paid, they require degrees in what they actually teach, which should be obvious, and the standards are more rigorous.
- Goober
  
  I, too, have a general prejudice against education majors, because a huge portion of them that I met through my college years were pretty dim bulbs.
  
  They didn’t question, they just took what they were told and passed it on. There wasn’t any brightness there, any drive to learn and understand, and I see this as being very problematic because to me, a teachers job is to instill a drive to learn, not to teach kids facts and figures. A kid instilled with a drive to learn won’t really need a teacher to spew facts at them in the interest of rote memorization to pass a test, because they’ll learn on their own, in their own way, because learning is fucking awesome. Other than reproduction, I’m of the opinion that learning is the most important thing that we are here to do.
  
  These teachers teach to the curriculum, without ever realizing that the curriculum is a minimum requirement – the amount of things that the lowest common denominator class needs to know in order to move on. These teachers actually discipline children for learning too fast, because the curriculum says they should only know “X” and knowing more than “X” means that they aren’t meeting the curriculum (and before you take me to task for this, I was disciplined MULTIPLE times through my primary education for daring to go above and beyond the assigned work). They never push beyond any minimum requirement. They teach to the test, so the kids can move on and leave them alone, and it never even occurs to them that they are doing it wrong.
  
  But there are also people like my mother, who is highly intelligent, with a masters degree in education and who has a drive to learn and know and teach and instill everything that she can to her 5th graders. She just retired after 20 some years of teaching (she stayed at home with my brother and I until I was 8). Her kids were lucky to have her.
  
  This is why I think the current paradigm of “one teacher, one class” through most of primary education is fatally flawed. My mother worked alongside another 5th grade teacher that was the aforementioned dim bulb. The students in my mom’s school got a 50/50 chance of getting a minimum requirements education, or an exceptional education based on a random scramble in a computer at the beginning of the year.
  
  It shouldn’t be that way. These kids should be exposed to more than one teaching style, more than one teacher, and more than one attitude in any given year, if for no other reason than to diffuse the impact that these dim bulbs have on kids.
  - Goober
    
    Another point I meant to make but forgot was to point out that we also need to make a concerted effort to bring more men into the teaching realm. The best education that I got was from my male teachers. Not because the female teachers were inferior, but because I am a male, and I learn like a male learns. Male teachers teach like a male. Hence, I got a better education from them.
    
    Also, male teachers bring a different perspective to teaching that all kids, male and female, need. Male teachers tend to be more unforgiving, less nurturing, have higher expectations and make the punishment for not meeting those expectations stick more soundly. It drives the kids under their tutelage to be better, more responsible people, and lose the idea that if they just bat their eyes and ask nice, that they’ll get an exception or an indulgence from teacher. It is good for them.
    
    Consider this example.
    
    Two swim instructors, two different classes of the same aged kids from the same school. One instructor male, the other female.
    
    The male taught the kids to swim by essentially tossing them into the deep end and making them learn. The female started by making them feel comfortable with water in the faces by having them splash water in their faces out of a nearby drinking fountain. And so it went for the reaminder of the day. By the end of the first week, the kids in the female’s class were dunking their heads under water and holding their breath in the shallow end, looking like they were doing some sort of interpretive dance or something. The boys in the class were bored out of their minds, and any time the instructor stopped looking, they’d start horseplaying around, splashing and jumping about.
    
    By the end of the same week, the kids in the male instructors class were practicing the 100 individual medley, which involves swimming the entire length of an Olympic sized swimming pool 4 times, each time using a different swim stroke (breast, back, butterfly, and freestyle).
    
    The kids in the female’s class were nurtured into a feeling of comfort in the water. The kids in the male instructor’s class were told that they had nothing to fear of the water, and had that proven to them by jumping into it and starting to SWIM.
    
    Both classes eventually learned to swim. Neither class had an advantage over the other at the end of the course. But class 1 could have completed the entire curriculum in a week, while class 2 needed the entire month, and class 2 involved massive amounts of boredom and inattention on the part of a good part of the class.
Pingback: Janet Bloomfield: ‘American women have earned 10 million more degrees than American men since 1982… but in what subjects?’ |()
Southern Man

My ex, a former music major, earned her education degree after we married and became (much to her amazement) a pretty good math teacher. She described the 33-hour education core as “the same three-credit class, eleven times.”
Marlo Rocci

They’re constructing a new building near where I work. It’s cold and has been raining heavily. The work involves welding steel and walking on girders. Cranes are moving heavy steel girders that have to be manually guided to their final position by hand. There are about a hundred different ways being stupid on this site will get you killed.

Yep, all dudes.
- Goober
  
  In 12 years now of running major ($10 plus million dollar) commercial and institutional construction work, I’ve had a grand total of 3 women work for me in roles other than traffic flagging. One was an equipment operator, one was an apprentice carpenter, and one is (currently working for me) an earthwork laborer.
  
  The equipment operator left my employment when she took a different job, paying less money, but which didn’t involve running large equipment around other men all day long. She confided in me that she was really stressed about hurting someone, and that’s why she left. I paid her $36 an hour while she worked for me, the same as the men on my crew doing the same job.
  
  The apprentice carpenter washed out of the apprenticeship program after three months. She couldn’t hack it because she didn’t have the physical capabilities necessary to haul around concrete formwork, drive nails, and work in the heat and cold and wet and nasty conditions. She made $24 an hour as an apprentice, the same as the male apprentices on my project.
  
  The earthwork laborer doesn’t work for me directly, she works for a subcontractor that I’ve hired. She is the sister of the guy who runs the business. She seems to be a pretty good worker, and gets her job done well and efficiently. I understand that she’s worked for him for about 5 years now. She is truly a unicorn in that sense.
  
  In 12 years.
  
  Men built the building that you are sitting in now. This “rah! Rah! The wimmins is just as good or better than the mens!” BS coming out of the feminist quarter totally ignores the fact that women need men just as much as men need women. Women don’t want to do these jobs. Men do them gladly.
  
  We’re a team. We need each other, BECAUSE of our differences, not in spite of them.
LostSailor

There’s also the problem of “credentialism”. Women (and many–too many–men) are of the firm belief that degree automatically equal intelligence. So, the more degrees and the more advanced degrees you have, the smarter and more intelligent you must be. She doesn’t have to have any actual accomplishments to her credit, as long as a woman has the degrees.

Of course, the type of degrees being pursued and awarded by each sex is interesting, though hardly surprising, but more interesting is the fact that between 1995 and 2001 (updates to the study I found are, alas, in “shutdown”) the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded to men has kept pretty steady at around 525,000-530,000 while the number of bachelor’s degrees (and how long will be continue to call the degree a “bachelor’s? Want to start a pool?) awarded to women since then has increased from 559,000 in 1990 to 634,000 in 1995 and 712,000 in 2000. A trend which I’m sure has continued.

It’s not that women are more industrious or smarter, it’s that they’re attending college in increasing numbers and waltzing through easy courses in soft disciplines.

Combine that with rampant credentialism and we’re doomed. Doomed, I tell you…
- Bob Wallace
  
  “rampant credentialism”
  
  I have seen young men who were great at the job but couldn’t do the coursework kicked out of required classes. So they lost their jobs.
- St Swithunus
  
  Doomed?
  
  Is that you Private Fraser? Don’t panic!
- Goober
  
  Credentialism is absolutely a huge problem.
  
  Some of the smartest, best guys I ever worked with had zero degrees after high school. One of the smartest, most successful businessmen I ever knew didn’t even have a high school diploma.
  
  SKILL is what is important, not credential. That’s why if I look at credentials at all (assuming they aren’t prerequisite to the job) I look at certificates, not diplomas. If a guy went to welding school, he may or may not be able to weld. If he is a certified welder, you know – absolutely positively KNOW – that he can weld. A guy with an engineering degree may not even know which side of a set of plans goes face up, but a guy with an engineering stamp (Professional Engineer certification) knows how to build a building from the ground up and have it last 100 years, and you know that without ever even talking to him.
  
  It reminds me of the “ring-tapper” problem in the military. You’ve got NCOs in the military that’ve been in combat for 10 continuous years now, and seen it all, being commanded by kids that just graduated from West Point last may, and have never been in combat.
  
  I know which one of those two I’d listen to if I was there.
Ray

“It’s only a problem when women are underrepresented. Gotcha! Gotta love equality!”

I totally agree with your point. Here in Britain there is a big push to get more women on boards of commercial enterprises but no move to get them more equally represented among the ranks of refuse collectors and grave diggers. I wonder why.
Tytalus

JB I work for a university and I can tell you the biggest problem we have is that by and large, it’s not our fault we have skewed male/female ratios. The problem starts in elementary school, and by high school the majority of girls are prepared for university, and the majority of boys are not.

And this is not just a USA problem, it exists in pretty much the entire anglo-sphere. (I work in Canada.)
- judgybitch
  
  Prepared to do what, exactly?
  
  That is the real problem.
  - Tytalus
    
    Don’t get me wrong, most of prep for university and the university degrees themselves don’t exactly translate into useful life skills and a good income.
    
    You may be interested to see a Canadian Dept. of Finance paper on the effect of major on income.
    
    http://www.fin.gc.ca/pub/pdfs/wp2007-03e.pdf
  - Marlo Rocci
    
    Marry a college graduate. Then divorce him.
    - judgybitch
      
      Ouch
Wallace Black

Here’s the thing, whenever women aren’t represented in a particular place, whether it’s tech or engineering or computers, feminists cry foul and go ‘THERE MUST BE SOME EVIL MISOGYNISTS AT WORK HERE, WHERE ARE TEH WYMMYNS?’ when the explanation is simply “they aren’t interested”. That’s never a good enough explanation, they have to vilify the dudes in the group and try to weasel out some blame. If there aren’t any women, it’s our fault. The dudes. The patriarchy. Whatever. Then they’ll cite anecdotes.

I’ve heard some women go “we don’t want to be around awkward nerd guys” as a reason for not wanting to join engineering courses. There’s also “societal perception and pressure”. Well the lot of us awkward nerd guys didn’t give a shit about perception or societal pressure and just did what we loved, which is tech. Why can’t ladies if they loved it as much as we do?
- Ter
  
  I agree… and why aren’t we hearing about the sexism that’s “preventing” men from entering fields such as nursing and childcare, and start talking about quotas to smash the lace curtain?
- XXY
  
  Yup. Did maths at 2nd and 3rd year university level and man it was hard ! Was one of only 3 girls in a class of 15 – 12 guys. And the guys all just did their thing – only interested in what they love and getting ahead – no white knights there to help damsels in distress who can’t cope with the coursework. Maybe that’s why women grumble that it is not “female friendly”. Women also hate STEM because they can’t bullshit their way out of a fail. It either works or it doesn’t. It either adds up or it doesn’t. Women love ambuigity because it allows them a lot of wriggle room or some might say, room for their hamster to grow.
  
  Actually I think the maths component of my economic course was the most valuable to me even though I stuggled with it most because it required damn hard work, self reliance and incredible discipline. It forced me to compete men’s terms and this has served me really well in my future working life. Many women can’t hack it and want to be given stuff on a platter – like if they were wife or girlfriend of the univesity.
- alcockell
  
  And yet they love their iPads and other kit… but who does the R&D…?
Dire Badger

actually ‘degrees’ only show one thing: that you are successful at navigating the politically loaded education system.

If you want real measures of ability in particular fields, you have to look at the rates of certification. Certification is based upon knowledge and actual ability. Not entirely (of course) since accomplishment is not a certification metric, but it goes a long way towards determining who is actually qualified and capable.

Most certification demographics are very specifically NOT divided up by sexual metrics, because actual analysis of certification among companies such as comptiia, who specialise in verifiable certification for employable documentation, would show a rather remarked increase in non-collegiate certification that is almost overwhelmingly male.

Unfortunately, research into this particular process by sexual demographics would uphold a most un-pc fact about the sexual distribution of saleable skills.

And attributing this to a ‘glass ceiling’ would be utterly unsupportable, as these certification methods have NO personality input whatsoever. They are affordable by even the most impoverished demographic (A+ certification costs 79 dollars, and is one of many stepping stones to the insanely profitable CCNA and CCNE certifications) and the testing and scoring methodology are as sexually-neutral as it is possible to be, with computerized scoring to ensure that at no time do administrators have any input into the certification process.

Exactly how many female CCNE’s have you met? In my entire time among network engineers, I have never actually met even one female CCNE. I am sure that there must be one out there, but it is a lot like looking for the metaphorical needle in a haystack…. in a program that has absolutely NO sexual barriers whatsoever, with literally the highest potential earnings among the non-executive set by an order of magnitude, (Many CCNE’s make considerably more, for far less actual labor, than your mid-sized corporate CEO) NO college degree and minimal cash outlay (all told, you will spend approximately 12K for the testing process) NO study material costs (all study resources are publicly available for free, as are listings of what areas of expertise will be required) NO ‘club’ or social contacts required, NO ‘dirty hands’ jobs at all, why is it that there is absolutely NO female presence whatsoever?

I mean, yes, it is HARD, but come on… Men and women are equal, right? simply because it requires intelligence in the upper ten percentile and an enormous amount of self-motivated study and research, is no actual barrier to women, right? It’s not about upper body strength, or endurance, there is nothing physical about it at all (although it will require interacting intelligently with geeks).

CCNE- cisco-certified network Engineer. essentially an advisory and engineering certification allowing you to design large computer networks for corporate and industrial applications.

Frankly, the whole concept of equality sickens me. ‘interdependent’, absolutely, but saying men and women are even remotely equal is like saying bees and flowers are equal.
- Tytalus
  
  Badger, how would you leverage a M.Sc in Statistics with a CCNE certification?
  - Dire Badger
    
    I have no idea, I don’t have one myself 🙂 I have interacted with them frequently, but I have chosen to avoid ‘working for the man’ and run my own business. I was in position to acquire one at a substantial savings for a while (If I could pass the test) but decided that working in corporate America, even at the top of a heap of drones, was too high a price to pay for success. Not to mention my autism makes placement a lot more problematic, since I do not ‘interview well’.
Zorro

“Bachelors of Bullshit. Barista of Arts. Summa cum latte.”

I have gobs of respect for Dr Helen, GirlWritesWhat and other women who are critical of the fembots. But you, dear, are the Bill Burr of women who hate feminists. You are atomically fucking hilarious, and you need to write a book and let me know when you do.
- princesspixiepointless
  
  yes. let’s get going on that book shall we JB? My slack ass needs to get going.
  - Zorro
    
    I’M, NOT KIDDING. YOU NEED TO WRITE A BOOK!!!!!!!!!!
    
    F*CKING SERIOUSLY!
    
    Hilariously.
    
    This is 2013 and the Internet is what it is, and Google is what it is, and CreateSpace is what it is, and Kindle is what it is, and the freakin’ sky is what it is.
    
    And your epic awesomeness is what it is………….
    
    GET IT?!
    
    PS: There are people on the web who suck hot, hairy donkey balls. Girl, you do not not belong to that tribe. You are epicness.
    
    You aint God, but you are epicness.
RedPillOverdose

Well at least that does make some sense as to where all these educated idiot feminists come from…….
Spaniard

In Spain, in Valencia, there is a Prostitution Academy to become a high standing hooker.
I think it has a lot of students.
ch

It’s worse that this, JB.
Your degree and certification/registration are just entry criteria. I was explaining to a young woman today that to get to the next level — to succeed, make partnership, start that business or practice you have to put in well over 70 hours a week consistently for a decade or so.

Then you can slow down to around 50 h a week. Many women just don’t want that, and prefer to be at home with the kids (As a solo Dad, I don’t blame them) and the men, who are still putting in the hours… make partner, get tenure, start the business.

Now, women, when the kids have gone and they wanna succeed have to put in the same decade of fracking long hours.

There is no shortcut. The alternative is supporting a spouse who has done those hours, or accepting that you will live more modestly and in a more human condition.

But it ain’t sexism. It is the price of competence, which is not a degree.
- feeriker
  
  Your degree and certification/registration are just entry criteria.
  
  Exactly, and in many cases they’re not even particularly valuable entry criteria. I find it both hilarious and horrifying that in the industry in which I work (IT/IT security), degrees and certifications are seen to confer upon the holder an almost god-like status of omnipotent professional invincibility. The funny thing is, I know (and endure as “managers”) far too people with advanced degrees and technical certifications who can’t blow their own noses without someone reading them step-by-step instructions on how to do it, but I’ve also interviewed (and eventually persuaded the aforementioned “managers” to hire) people without degrees or certifications who are absolute masters at advanced technical skills.
  
  In my own case, my bachelor’s degree is in a discipline (business administration) that has very little to do with my current field (IT security). Yet over the course of a decade and a half, I’ve gained enough real-world experience in my field (plus a certification that can only be obtained after at least five years of practice in the field) that has convinced my customers, peers, and superiors that I’m the best at what I do.
  
  I think my own example (and it’s FAR from unique, IME) serves as an excellent argument for why degrees should be separated from jobs in many fields. There is simply no real, meaningful correlation between the two.
  
  Oh, and I also get a laugh out of the whiny shrieks of “but a college degree is your ticket to success!” coming from people who’ve wasted many years and many hundreds of thousands of dollars, especially on post-graduate degrees, only to realize that it was indeed wasted time, money, and effort that got them essentially nowhere in the working world. They’re in “misery loves company” mode when they say this.
Adam

Do not knock humanities. Example, with Women’s Studies you end up having

– Strong critical thinking skills
– The ability to think creatively to solve problems
– The capacity to discuss controversial topics intelligently
– Proficiency in analytical reasoning
– Practical use of digital technologies for various applications (writing, researching, graphic presentation)

And much more.

See
http://www.humanities.uci.edu/womensstudies/undergraduate/ws_degree.php

It’s all there in black and white.
- judgybitch
  
  lol!
  
  You’re kidding, right?!
- John
  
  Fascinating how neither woman pictured looks particularly “womanly” and both have strong masculine features (look at the jawline on the one with unwashed hair on the right). Fascinating, but not uncommon I suppose.
  - C30HP
    
    “Fascinating.” Another word that comes to mind is “irrelevant.” But that trite line of thought is not uncommon for people like you, I suppose.
    - John
      
      Haha, not uncommon for people like me, or even me for that matter. I like your comment, but I don’t understand what you’re trying to say.
- Exfernal
  
  Isn’t it great that a Women’s Studies degree also bestows on the recipient “wide ranging curiosity”?
  
  Seriously?
  - Adam
    
    My one and half year old nephew has that (ranged curiosity) and it came without a degree. Perhaps he should do humanities but for shame he seems to be interested in breaking things apart and cars. Really loves cars. Total 100% boy.
- Jim
  
  I hope this is a joke.
stitchinvixen

JB,

First off, I love your blog and I’ve been an avid reader for months. I say this with the upmost respect, and I hope that you can bear with me through this rant.

I’ve had a tough week lately trying to defend my major choice to people, seeing as it is the pinnacle of all Barista of Fine Arts degrees and therefore arguably the most female populated and the most “useless”: dance. And get this: it’s from a women’s college too! I seem to pretty much represent the exact sort of woman who, in your eyes, is earning a completely useless degree and contributing to the rising gap in college degrees given to men vs. women, all while shouting, “Girl Power! Look at me! I’m educated!”

I’m only a sophomore and haven’t officially declared my major yet, but from the reactions that people give me when I tell them I’m a dance major, I’m starting to consider switching to a subject I’m awful at and something I can’t stand because it will make everyone feel better, and I’ll stop getting asked if I realize that I can’t make any money in dance or that I won’t be an actual functional member of society if I choose to be a choreographer instead of a doctor or an engineer. I’m sad to say this blog hit a little too close to home, and while I can usually laugh at and agree with what you write, today I’m forced to feel like I’m wasting my life. It was difficult for mr to pay attention to the point of your post this morning since in the back of my mind I felt insulted the whole time (not that I’m gonna whine about being offended, I know you’re called judgy bitch for a reason).

What I’m trying to get at is, I completely agree that the under-representation of men in colleges and universities is a major problem, and one that we should not keep ignoring. But you also seem to have the perspective that women earning degrees in the Arts and Humanities shouldn’t even be there, as their chosen majors are “useless”. I’d truly like to know, in your honest opinion, what is your aversion to someone who has chosen to do what they love, even if it is in *gulp* the fine arts? Especially women, who make up the majority of those arts majors?

All the best!
- judgybitch
  
  Stitchinvixen
  
  I’m not really making an argument that the arts and humanities are worthless subjects to pursue. I write in a deliberately polemical style to highlight what always gets left out of the conversation about how women earn so many more college degrees than men: what are they earning them in?
  
  Being a dance major is fine, although I do hope you have given a lot of consideration as to just what you hope to DO with that. I’m a film major myself, and I gave very little thought to what that provide me with in terms of job market skills, but part of that is because I loved my experience on campus so much, I knew I wasn’t going to leave. A PhD was always in my plans, although reality helped me shift my focus to business and innovation, away from being an expert in the symbolic meanings of Johnny Depp films.
  
  The issue I’m trying to highlight is that dancing may be the very thing that expresses just who you are and what you want to contribute to the world, but what it won’t contribute is any of the practical needs we need addressed. Dancing won’t help build better bridges or invent new medical techniques or get us out there mining asteroids for precious metals. It’s nice. But not necessary.
  
  Thinking about adding an accounting course or two to your schedule. That way, when you open your own dance studio, you will have some clue as to how to manage your finances and you won’t forget that you need to pay taxes!
  
  And most of all, keep your “education” in perspective. You may have more credentials than the local roofing crew, but when bad weather rips all the shingles off your studio, all the jazz hands in the world won’t help you fix that.
  
  I’m trying to encourage a little humility. Sure women have lots and lots of degrees under their belts. But they’re mostly in the esoteric. The real work is done by men.
  
  Acknowledge that. Perhaps with an interpretive dance?
  
  😀
  - princesspixiepointless
    
    Interpretive dance, you mean like my KFC /madonna dance that gets me kicked out of the bar? Sober? Awesome!!!!
- John
  
  I take the point of these types of posts as more of a “so what” women earn more degrees than “women should be ashamed of their degrees.” It seems to me that someone passionate about dance would have good reason to pursue dance in college. It doesn’t seem reasonable that a person with a dance degree would feel that said degree gives her more “worth” than a plumber.
  
  Related rambling tangent
  I was a finance major, and in college I only dropped one class – drawing. I enjoy drawing so took “intro to drawing” (not Drawing I) hoping that I would be able to develop some basic skills (shading, dimension, etc). The professor(?) told us the first day of class that the grading would be based on how good we were as artists, and not account for our effort or improvement. Then he gave us our first assignment – “find a Renaissance painting and replicate it in pencil.” After assignment two – find a photographic portrait in a magazine and replicate – I said screw this.
  
  In retrospect, outcome based grading seemed fair in finance and statistics courses where I always had the highest grade in the class, but damn did objective quality of art seem unfair in intro to drawing (especially since I had to take non-finance electives). Maybe because I remembered 5th grade where pre-algebra was grade based and painting was effort scored (1-5).Or maybe it seemed ridiculous that my perfect finance grades would be afflicted by a bad drawing grade. I mean, what if I applied to a financial planning firm and they saw my gpa; that number wouldn’t convey “outstanding finance student, crappy face drawing skills.”
  
  I wound up taking a class afterwards called finite math, which was a course for arts students incapable of pre-algebra. (“We don’t get many Senior finance majors in here”) The most challenging problem I encountered there was one of probability – if you have 10 marbles, and 5 are red, what is the probability of randomly choosing 1 red marble if you remove one of the non-red ones first? (They also taught us how to determine if a picture can be traced without lifting the pencil and retracing a segment by counting the number of intersections).
  
  Those arts majors have college degrees now, and those degrees probably helped many of them achieve their goals. You’ve got to follow YOUR goals. Someone may say “what worth is a dance degree when you can’t count.” Someone else might say “why do I need to know math when I want to be a professional dancer.”
- James
  
  It used to being a scholar was a profession in and of itself. The pursuit of knowledge for knowledge’s sake was a career choice. Collegiate humanity’s departments are still operating under those assumptions, that you are here solely to learn. Speaking from the point of view of a (too) practical man, modern college is about getting a degree in something that improves your job opportunities. Most men go into college with that idea in mind.
  
  If you understand that dance isn’t going to increase your job market value and still want to do it, then go ahead. (I don’t think anyone, including Mrs. Judgy, would be care if you did.) But don’t fall under the assumption that you went to college for 4-6 years and got a degree therefore are qualified to do work that your degree didn’t qualify you for.
  
  Other than that, do what you want.
  - Goober
    
    As long as you don’t bitch about it afterwards because you can’t get work, go get whatever degree your little heart desires.
    
    We need arts and humanities to a certain extent.
    
    Look at the impact of the Mona Lisa, or of Picasso, or Bach, Beethoven and Mozart. The world would be a more gray place without the arts.
    
    The problem is that very few people are actually going to make an impact in the arts. It is a field suffering from oversaturation – many more people want to be artists than actually have the skill to be one, and the good ones, I’m afraid, may be getting lost in the noise.
    
    We have to have arts and humanities, but right now there are way too many people going into that field, and very few of them will make any lasting impact on anything in the process, because so few of them will truly have the talent needed to do so.
Modern Drummer

School robbed me of eight hours every day that I could have used learning things.
Andy B

I live in Melbourne, Australia and completed an Engineering degree there. Whilst there I noted how the ratios are the same as you mention, if not worse. We don’t have quite as bad “rape culture” thing happening here because moving away to University really isn’t much of a thing, with a significant proportion of students living with parents all through University. This doesn’t help the image we have of children staying at home until they’re 30, but I digress.
In my final year, once I had the confidence to do so, I went up to the Information Desk at the University and here’s the conversation that took place:
Me: “Excuse me, could you tell me where the ‘Men’s Room’ is?”
Lady: “It’s right behind you”
Me: “No, that’s the men’s toilets, I was looking for the equivalent to the ‘Womyn’s Room'”
Lady: “We don’t have one of those”
Me: “Oh, ok, well can you please tell me where the ‘Straight Room’ is?”
Lady: “What do you mean?”
Me: “Well, you have a ‘Queer Room’ for gay people, what about one for straight people?”
Lady: “No, we don’t have one of those either”.
Me: “What about an ‘Atheists’ room’?”
Lady: “No, we don’t have one of those”
Me: “Well you’ve got an ‘International room’ for all the international people, what about an ‘Australian Room’?”
Lady: “No. Listen, all of those groups you’ve mentioned are minorities and need spaces of their own to ‘get away’ from the general masses, which may be against them for some reason”.
Me: “Well, as a straight, white, male, atheist I can assure you that I am well and truly in the minority here and my student fees go to paying for real estate for all of these other groups and I don’t get anything”.
Lady: “But you’re privileged, so you don’t need a room”.

So there you have it. Despite belonging to the minority gender on campus, I was still unworthy of a small space to get away from the masses.
- jabrwok
  
  Despite belonging to the minority gender on campus, I was still unworthy of a small space to get away from the masses.
  
  That place used to be called “home”, and you paid for it yourself. Apparently that’s not good enough for the approved victim groups.
Ed

It’s a bit late, but I just found this today:
http://chronicle.com/blogs/innovations/why-did-17-million-students-go-to-college/27634

“All told, some 17,000,000 Americans with college degrees are doing jobs that the BLS says require less than the skill levels associated with a bachelor’s degree.”
patriarchal landmine

how many women ever actually graduate with a degree in mathematics? forget about how many are sitting in the class.
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Michael Schweidleim

I studied in Electrical Engineering in TU Berlin and currently work in Schlumberger. When i was still in class, the number of females in my class even were worse. If your stats showed that “14 from 100 students in electrical engineering are women” , in my class there were only 5 women from “150” students. In Mechanical Engineering was even much worse, there was NO any female in there, lol
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parande

Great article
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P.J.

It’s easy when u basically get the degree for free for being a woman … just saying …

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