Girlifying the Academy

American universities are being transformed. More and more faculty, especially in humanities and social sciences, are of the female persuasion. Even in STEM subjects, we see more women and fewer men. The same applies to administrations.

Now, Cory Clark and Bo Winegard attempt to show what we can now expect from a more girlified academy. One notes that public school education, both primary and secondary, are female domains. And that they are all doing a rather bad job. Their essay appears on Quillette.

I will not rehearse all of the data-- and the authors report a great deal-- but I will note that males and females tend to have markedly different priorities. And they have markedly different ways of approaching problems, even in defining what the problems are.

So, the essay addresses the issue of whether sex differences are innate or are culturally imposed. It concludes that there are innate sex differences and that once an organization becomes more girlified, certain innate qualities will prevail.

One notes this to counter an argument proposed by one Richard Reeves. One has already commented on the Reeves argument, such as it is. As it happens people are taking the book far more seriously than it deserves, but that is neither here nor there.

As you may recall Reeves suggests that we now need to direct men into more caring professions, like healthcare and food preparation. Apparently, this will solve the problem of out-of-work men, the kind who have been left behind as manufacturing and industry departed our soil. 

Of course, the debate wallows in absurdity. America has a masculinity crisis;, male values are systematically debased and degraded. Now, Reeves thinks that we can solve the problem by having men become home health workers. The stupidity rankles. 

We can count a number of reasons why manufacturing and industry has departed our shores, but one thing we must note is that in an increasingly girlified educational system boys are not being taught the mental habits and skills needed to do these jobs. 

One is thrilled to read the pollyannaish visions of onshored manufacturing-- most recently argued cogently by the highly estimable Rana Foroohar-- but we must note that we simply do not have the human personnel available to do the job. And we will not have it unless the educational system, primary and secondary and university varieties, set about teaching boys to think like boys.

Anyway, Clark and Winegard are suggesting that recent developments in university education can be explained by the fact that the academy is becoming more womanized.

The differences are clear, if not extremely stark. Men care about facts. Men care about empirical verification. Men care about rational proofs. Women care about caring. Women care about how people feel. Women also care, nowadays, about social justice, equity and inclusion. Women promote ideology over science. Men do just the opposite.

One suspects that the interest in equity derives from the fact that many women academics suspect that they owe their careers to diversity quotas, so they feel obliged to support them.  

They argue:

The overall theme of these differences is that men are more committed than women to the pursuit of truth as the raison d’être of science, while women are more committed to various moral goals, such as equity, inclusion, and the protection of vulnerable groups. Consequently, men are more tolerant of controversial and potentially offensive scientific findings being pursued, disseminated, and discussed, and women are more willing to obstruct or suppress science perceived to be potentially harmful or offensive. Put more simply, men are relatively more interested in advancing what is empirically correct, and women are relatively more interested in advancing what is morally desirable.

As it happens, women are more likely to want to suppress ideas and theories and facts that dispute their beliefs. They are more for the dogma and less for the facts:

But in general, men appear to be less concerned about the potential moral consequences of empirical information than women. So, when a scholar forwards a potentially true but also potentially offensive claim or set of data, women will be more likely to strive to suppress it than men.

Again, ask who is more open minded and the answer will be men:

However, on average, women are more willing to suppress science for moral reasons, and men are more willing to allow offensive or even potentially harmful ideas to be shared. As the population of academia shifts from one dominated by men to one that is more balanced or disproportionately female, support for including moral and harm concerns into the scientific and publishing process is likely to increase, and support for academic freedom is likely to decline.

As for the general theories of sex differences, the authors report:

Women evolved, as Anne Campbell memorably put it, to survive so they could nurture their vulnerable offspring. Thus, women are more likely to experience self-protective emotions such as anxiety and fear, to be more harm- and risk-averse, and to have more empathy and desire to protect the vulnerable. Men, on the other hand, are more likely to take risks and to endorse hierarchy and support for conflict.

So, during the past quarter century women’s priorities have largely taken over the academy. 

Nevertheless, some of the most drastic developments over the past 25 years share a common theme: They reflect the priorities of women. 

These changes reflect rising prioritization of egalitarianism (potentially at the expense of merit-based evaluations of science) and a desire to minimize potential harms and psychological distress (potentially at the expense of academic freedom). Both priorities are consistent with women’s evolved psychological preferences for egalitarianism and harm avoidance and stated higher prioritization of social justice and emotional wellbeing. In other words, these recent cultural trends in higher education are precisely what one would expect as women’s representation in academia grows.

One notes that women are more inclined to see education as a form of therapy. Men see it as a way to train minds to do jobs in the real world.