Life is not random, there are patterns in numbers….
Jonathan Rauch has an amusing piece in Reason, The Coming American Matriarchy. To some extent it is not noteworthy, it’s the sort of thing you see in the mainstream press when journalists skim over data sets for some superficial insights. I know some D.C. libertarians do read this weblog, so they should point out the silliness of the column to Rauch. Consider:
The number 1.5 is, in this case, a ratio. According to projections by the National Center for Education Statistics, in 2017 half again as many women as men will earn bachelor’s degrees. In the early 1990s, six women graduated from college for every five men who did so; today, the ratio is about 4-to-3. A decade from now, it will be
3-to-2-and rising, on current trends.
…
A college degree used to be a rarity: a mark of privileged or professional status. As recently as 1950, fewer than half of Americans even finished high school, let alone went on to college.
…
In other words, today’s young people already live in a world where, among their peers, women are better educated than men. As the grandparents die off, every year the country’s college-educated population will become more feminized. In a couple of decades, America’s educational elite will be as disproportionately female as it once was male.
Here’s the problem here: having a college degree once meant that you were part of the educational elite because a college degree was rare. Rauch admits that it is no longer rare, and likely at some point in the future the majority of young adults will be expected to have a college degree of some sort as a minimal qualification for a non-manual job. If the majority have a particular credential, it is no longer a good elite signaler. Additionally, it is a relatively well known fact across many domains of achievement males are disproportionately found at the higher ranks even if there is numerical parity. About the same number of medical school graduates are now male or female, but the latter tend to go into “low status” tracks relative to the former (e.g., surgery vs. family practice). Here is Helena Cronin:
Similarly, consider the most intellectually gifted of the USA population, an elite 1%. The difference between their bottom and top quartiles is so wide that it encompasses one-third of the entire ability range in the American population, from IQs above 137 to IQs beyond 200. And who’s overwhelmingly in the top quartile? Males. Look, for instance, at the boy:girl ratios among adolescents for scores in mathematical-reasoning tests: scores of at least 500, 2:1; scores of at least 600, 4:1; scores of at least 700, 13.1.
These patterns are banal and well known to regular readers of this weblog, to the point where I don’t post on these topics much. But Jonathan Rauch seems like a smart enough fellow, and Reason is heterodox enough to publish someone like Ron Bailey. There are real issues here of possible interest. For example, as the proportion of female lawyers increases I wonder if firm culture may change enough so that the billable hour system becomes a thing of the past. Such a transformation might have have the outcome of diminishing the handicap that women face in making partner (because women are, on average, burdened with more expectations in family life than men). I also don’t think that intelligence or its distribution are the only characteristics to consider; personality seems to be a major area of difference between the sexes that might shape their life outcomes. Finally, there are studies which suggest women tend to be much more critical of female co-workers, a powerful united sisterhood might not be a good model for the shape of future XX dominated professions. Numbers like this can stimulate some interesting projections…but imagining a ‘matriarchy’ really is a waste of column space.
Addendum: Terms like ‘patriarchy’ or ‘matriarchy’ make it seems like men or women in the plural dominate the other sex. This of course elides over intrasexual dynamics. For example, extreme patriarchies such as the Saudi kingdom, do not benefit all men at the expense of all women. Rather, usually these extremely sex differentiated systems as a matter of course crystallize and reinforce the dominance of a particular oligarchic clique (e.g., the House of Saud and their clients). Marginalized males may also be quite oppressed by the patriarchy. My own opinion is that the relative weakness of sisterhoods as opposed to brotherhoods is the main reason that patriarchy has become so common over the last 10,000 years.
Labels: Behavior Genetics
The future is going to be more prim.
fuck that!
Nice breakdown of some stupid conclusions. Man it makes you want to thrash the guy.
In a way it’s funny that the Rauch missed the obvious conclusion that having a degree is no longer “elite.” Maybe it’s hard to accept that what got us up the pecking order doesn’t rate anymore.
Man it makes you want to thrash the guy.
i’m not an expert punditologist, but
1) he used numbers and data, instead of referring to anecdotes and conventional wisdom (e.g., starting from the premise that poverty causes terrorism, and what not), so that’s good.
2) what little of his work i’ve seen suggests that he makes an effort to do some real analysis instead of just phoning it in. so i have faith and hope that perhaps a little bitch-slap will make non-tard journalists think twice before producing this sort of stuff.
also, there are two issues here
1) the reliance upon central tendencies to infer something about the apex of the power pyramids.
2) the lack of support from the extant social and anthropological literature. after all, a plausible projection of the future is a modest number of super-males dominating a society supported by a mass of mid-level females, with dependent class and menial males at the bottom. an analogy to typical mammalian imbalances in reproductive skew & trivers-willard effect would be appropriate, women are more of a sure thing while men are gambles….
Another point not mentioned in the article: men who don’t attend college can still earn good livings in the skilled trades. Women who don’t attend college have fewer opportunities.
having a degree is no longer “elite.” Maybe it’s hard to accept that what got us up the pecking order doesn’t rate anymore
But that doesn’t mean it becomes irrelevant, necessarily. Having all your teeth and graduating high school aren’t elite (thought they were good markers a century ago), but that doesn’t mean you can easily forgo these things if you want status. Getting a college degree may end up being a different matter for various reasons, but it also seems possible that college is the new high school (it may even ultimately become true in terms of the material covered).
Those surplus females are likely below +1 SD in IQ, and attend the University of New Podunk, to major in communications.
Men dominate the elite levels even in fields where women form a majority, like fashion design:
http://akinokure.blogspot.com/2006/01/politically-incorrect-fashion-ii-sex.html
Some Male : Female ratios from the above post:
1 : 13 — fashion design students at Parsons (elite design school, where Project Runway is held)
1.5 : 1 — designers showcased in encyclopedias, Vogue website, membership in professional orgs
3.6 : 1 — winners of “emerging talent” award from Council of Fashion Designers of America
Razib -
Believe it or not, I had lunch with Rauch just this past Saturday and we didn’t discuss this much beyond my mentioning male performance/achievement on either side of the bell curve.
But the point he makes is that in college campuses AND in professional degree programs – females now dominate. That isn’t going to change much in the future. So, yeah, males may outperform females, but males aren’t enrolled in those degree programs.
My own experience illustrates his point all too well. In October I visited the University of Illinois Vet school (where my dad got his DVM in 1955). They have a whole wall of graduation photos of every graduating class from the 1890s. It’s an amazing panorama. All male in every class photo – not a female in sight. Until around 1962 when there are suddenly a few females. By the early 1970s, about 1/3 of the classes are female. By late 1970s 1/2 are female. By late 1990s they’re 90% female. In the 21st century classes they are almost completely female with only about 4-5 token male students. As the profession has become ‘feminized’ it’s also lost earning power. Veterinary salaries have eroded in real terms since the 1980s. Is this the result of society valuing women less than men? Or the result of women willing to work part-time and as ‘staff’ in larger animal hospitals and clinics? I dunno. I do know that my local large animal vet who comes to my farm says that he can’t hire anybody to work with cattle or other livestock (the only exception being horses) as no recently minted female vet wants to do the physical labor involved in restraining large and dangerous animals. Yet there are no male graduates to do this work either – Veterinary medicine has become a ‘female’ occupation that high ability males avoid (due to declining earning power and prestige), and low ability males cannot perform cause they don’t have the smarts to get the degree.
alan, don’t you think your analysis is a bit more interesting than what rauch implied about ‘matriarchy’ then? yes, i’ve been around college campuses and i can admit that the trend exists. if i was a smart young man with prospects this would make me happy. no one wants to be in in the middle of a schlong-fest…though rauch might disagree there ;-)
p.s. for various social reasons women dominate higher education in mongolia. i don’t think can call it a matriarch (male/female parity only exists in, you guessed it, mathematically oriented sciences).
Razib said:
alan, don’t you think your analysis is a bit more interesting than what rauch implied about ‘matriarch’ then?
Well, I dunno. Don’t you think it kinda confirms his (somewhat tongue in cheek) assessment that:
Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed. (The election of a female president is a question of when, not whether.)
Look for that gap to widen. A generation from now, the female lawyer with her male assistant will be the cliché. Look for women to outnumber men in many elite professions, and potentially in the political system that the professions feed. (The election of a female president is a question of when, not whether.)
no, the basic literacy and conscientiousness required in administrative assistant positions isn’t something that many uneducated men can muster up. rather, pink-collar will remain women’s work, but perhaps those with associates degrees. the professions that feed politics don’t do so in a representative manner. look at the number of harvard grads among legislatures. so the key is is the type of lawyer who becomes a politician a typical lawyer? i don’t think so (though many lawyers aspire toward public service, i think there’s a selection process in terms of the various up and downsides) in other words, the structure of power will be more complex in the future than a simple inversion of 1950s america.
let me use an analogy, in many african nations women are primary economic producers. by that, i mean that they are expected to be breadwinners for their children, while males have a less consistent expectation. that doesn’t mean that these societies are matriarchies. public intellectuals need to expand their templates of social configurations out from the 1950s and the caricatures that critics of the 1950s produce as utopian counterfactuals.
oh, speaking of analogies, black americans work too. they are matrilineal, but not matriarchal. and black men with professional degrees live large, and black politicians still tend to be male.
Razib -
Your African model is a good analogy,and the one where I think Rauch was heading.
I think the US is evolving to something much like in the former Soviet Union – where medical care providers (from nursing staff on up to elite doctors) were overwhelmingly female. Only elite surgeons were male.
My real question is why, in human social groupings (college classes, professions, teams, clubs, genetics blogs, etc), males much prefer their own company? I like to think of myself as enlighted and socially progressive, but I am guilty of the same behavior. I’ve no science to back this up, but in my experience any such group that has a few females will generally find those females patronized or perhaps ostracized or discounted. The greater the female participation in the group however, the less males feel its value. And the tipping point seems to be not a female majority, but roughly 1/3 female participation. At 50% female participation or more, most males start to bail entirely and the group, in male eyes, is less interesting/less valid/less prestigious. Any studies you’re aware of to confirm or deny my casual observation?
hm. not specifically, but it seems that the males and females differ in what is valued, on average. i suspect gene-environment correlation is at work here, typical males and females, seek out diff. reinforcing inputs and so their norms diverge over time. you can see this with gays vs. straights too, plenty of homosexuals have said that being around ‘people like them’ is kind of relaxing.
also, judith rich harris has reported on data to show that male cliques are more stable over time. my own hypothesis is that since males are more likely to be social retards we rely on formal rules and extremely simple rules of reciprocity than females. these rules-of-thumb scale much better in ‘modern’ societies. and that is why ‘we’ rule.
p.s. as for the former soviet union, i thought part of the issue was that they had relatively low pay for physicians. physicists were the creme of the professional chain of being.
I’ve worked in both male-dominated and female-dominated settings; I would choose being the lone woman among the men hands down over being in a mostly-female environment. And I’m a woman! It’s a lot harder politically to be around a lot of women; there are complex and subtle rules at play, and people require delicate handling. Women really can be extraordinarily bitchy to each other. There are confusing and shifting alliances, lots of personality clashes, and jockeying for the alpha-female position.
Likewise, I much prefer working for a man than for a women, as women bosses (at least the ones I’ve worked for) tended to the insane-control-freak end of the spectrum. I guess that’s why I don’t often warm up to women politicians, despite being a woman myself; they sort of merge in my mind with a few of my former bosses and put a bad taste in my mouth, so to speak.
Being a bit of a social retard myself, I found being around men a lot easier to handle as “the rules” were simpler and made more sense, and there was not such a feeling of having my every statement scrutinized for what I “really” meant vs. what I actually said. I imagine that most men would feel the same (my husband, who is blessed with a wife and three daughters, spends an inordinate amount of time tinkering with his bike in the garage rather then plunge into the seething maelstrom of female moods in our house!).
I suppose that a woman who was more adept than I in the queen-bee/wannabe world would find female-only groups to be easier to deal with than groups of uncouth, tactless men.
Any speculations or insights into how the this female professional-yet-not-elite class will impact mate selection dynamics? With less concern over having a reliable bread-winner by their side will there be a greater premium placed on men’s looks, sex appeal, i.e. more cad less dad?
With less concern over having a reliable bread-winner by their side will there be a greater premium placed on men’s looks, sex appeal, i.e. more cad less dad?
the black model would predict that to some extent i suppose. i think frankly that GNXP-type readers, nerds, will do well too though. women will prefer non-tard mates to tards all things being equal.
Iran has a female majority among university students yet that certainly hasn’t done much for the status of women in their society. Though things might change … women currently rank just below goats in Iran’s status hirearchy, given enough time they may catch up with cattle.
Now he’s making weak arguments for his brand of “libertarian transhumanist.”
What’s wrong with libertarian transhumanism? It happens to come closest, of any philosophy I’ve heard, to my own view of technology. I don’t think you have to discount the reality of global warming to believe in humans’ right to enhance their bodies’ functioning with technology.