Went and dug a little deeper and it seems that for high-income nations, this trend of more women than men graduating in universities (as well as outperforming in school) has been going on for multiple decades now.
Apart of me wants to think its just right-wing hysteria because this was brought to my attention by some random podcast clip using this example as somehow proof that patriarchy doesn’t exist lol. Some articles I read did mention how other factors (particularly class and race) was a higher determinant of school/university success.
And I particularly do not like biological explanations anyways (too essentialist to my taste, but I can’t say for sure). I forgot which article in particular but it did argue it’s because men used to be able find jobs in more traditional blue-collar industries, leading to this present day discrepancy.
What do you all think?
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Yeah, this is basically it. Women are performing better in school but on average still get lower paying jobs after schooling because patriarchy instills a sense of doing work ‘for the sake of it’ in women. Men do school in order to be “better providers”, but if that traditional structure breaks down, they become lost and confused.
What we need is to take gender less seriously, for one. And two, we need more dignity in “less desirable” jobs. A fast food worker doesn’t work less hard than a lab tech. But rather than deflate the lab tech, the fast food worker should be raised up and equalized and given a career.
Yeah in the podcast clip, the dude mentioned how ‘mainstream media didn’t want you to know this’. But a quick google search and I found articles from The Guardian and The Atlantic detailing this problem since the late 2000s. If that isn’t mainstream media then I really don’t know what is.
Further reading and I found out that this ‘fact’ was used since the 1990s with some scientific articles calling it a ‘moral panic’ especially in a UK and North American context from the early 2000s and onwards.
But nonetheless it is really interesting and its sad that a genuine conversation (without right wing hysteria) can’t be had in our current societies.
Part of the problem with the mainstream narrative is that this info is almost always distorted, as you say, by the right wing. Often as an argument against affirmative action, or (if it’s different) extra support in school for black children, etc.