Since North Carolina State University has, for the first time, admitted a freshman (excuse me, first-year) class with an almost 50-50 ratio of those “who identify as” men and women.
For the Technician’s Noah Jabusch, this is a milestone — a “promising development” on the path to gender equality given NC State has been historically male-dominated.
But this isn’t sufficient. Proportionate ratios are necessary across the board, Jabusch argues, in every field of study and profession … for real gender equality.
“In the College of Engineering, for instance, women make up just slightly more than a quarter of the population, whereas in the College of Education, men don’t even compose a fifth of the population,” Jabusch writes. “This huge discrepancy between the sexes is one of the key factors contributing to the gender pay gap.”
The good news here is the author actually grasps that the oft-cited (gender) pay gap is due to career and life choices. The bad news is he doesn’t seem to like the fact that men and women (and those who merely identify as such) make choices.
Programs such as WISE must continue to provide support for women in male-dominated fields. Male students in these disciplines should monitor the behavior of themselves and their peers to ensure they aren’t delegitimizing or excluding female students. We as a society must collectively fight the stereotypes of the straight, white, male engineer to prevent sending the wrong message to people of other identities who have talents in science and math.
On the flip side, we must also work to remove the stereotypes surrounding “pink-collar” jobs, such as primary school educators. We should encourage men to break from rigid norms of “maleness” and feel free to express personality traits traditionally attributed to women, like emotional sensitivity, that lend themselves to such work. Finally, society could stand to reconsider the value of pink-collar jobs to better account for their often central roles in modern life.
Of course, there’s the little fact that more women are attending college overall, and earn more college degrees — a trend that began forty years ago.
Encouraging men and women into non-traditional fields is fine. However, like the left’s push for equality of outcomes — which ignores differences among individuals — any social engineering which demands a compulsory percentage of whichever gender in whatever field is just plain silly.
Despite what modern the academy tells us, there are gender differences, biological and cultural … and woe unto the bean counters.
MORE: Gender ‘pay gap’ causes consternation at U. New Mexico
MORE: The REAL gender gap: Men lag in humanities, graduate fields of study
IMAGE: Daren Woodward/Shutterstock.com
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