Inside Higher Ed has reported that new studies show that the gender gap in university populations has stabilized. The enrollment numbers for men are staying constant and even rising for men graduating from college, the only exception to this is in the Latino male population. Colleges were going so far as to consider “affirmative action for men” in admissions, but the new report reassures that the success of women is not coming at the expense of men. (And what if it were?)
As a former university Lecturer in the sociology of gender, I find it telling that the disparity in percentages of males and females in higher education, with males declining, has created such an outcry. How many decades (actually centuries) did it take for women to draw attention to the disparity when it favored males? Women still do not receive equal pay for equal work, parenting is not equal as women continue to do most of the work, and there is no amendment in the constitution granting women equal rights. I have actually told male students that there are colleges where the gap is wide enough that being male would actually help them in the admissions process under the label diversity. But do I think males need “affirmative action”? No. Women represent only 2% of CEOs in the Fortune 500 companies. In 2008 women made up nearly 50% of the labor force in the USA but only 15.2% percent of Fortune 500 board seats were held by women.
Many studies still indicate that women do the majority of household work and child work within households. Women’s pay is still less than .80 to the 1.00 earned by men. So affirmative action for men, in my view, would be inappropriate given the inequality that still exists in favor of men. Perhaps we should applaud the fact that so many females are succeeding academically?
