Education is the frontier of denger-equality - kind of
TESSA VANDERHART STAFF
I learned third-wave feminism on the playground, and, like any early-felt and deeply adopted belief, I practised it with gusto. I went through my entire life kicking boys in the groin, idolizing Gwen Stefani, boycotting the Bible, attending an all-girls’ high school and generally shouting “girl power!” to every challenge, and never questioning whether girls were smarter than boys.
But despite the girl power practised by my contemporaries — or perhaps because of it — the myth of women’s minority status endures.
The reality is that women aren’t a minority in Canada. No, statistically, women constitute 51.4 per cent of Winnipeg’s population.
Part of the reason for the perceived difference between the sexes is historical. Another is educational: the much-vaunted complaint against the Taliban was that they didn’t permit girls to go to school, among other things.
Maybe that’s where society starts — on the playground, or, rather, in the early-years classroom. Boy-centric education advocates seem to believe so, anyway.
Boys and girls
As B.C. teacher Nick Smith wrote for the Tyee, current common knowledge (and Barry MacDonald’s book Boy Smarts) says boys aren’t getting enough out of primary education — not enough grappling with scenarios, building stuff, getting out of their desks, and laughing.
But, wrote Smith, “I can’t see why we would want to deny girls their opportunity to grapple with scenarios, build stuff, get out of their desks and have a bit of a laugh now and again.
“I begin to wonder if the crisis and its solutions are a red herring distracting us from the real issue: education has become institutionalized and politicized to the point where we are cheating all students. The girls are just better at putting up with it.”
I can see the head of my fancy-pants all-girls’ school’s head exploding with that statement, but despite the different-needs-for-different-sexes push, it may be true: more women are graduating from high school, university, and graduate school, and those increasing numbers of women are doing increasingly well in the workforce.
Chicks and dudes
In 1981, 10 per cent of male high school grads in Manitoba enrolled at the U of M, compared to 8 per cent of female grads, according to the university’s statistics. Since 1988, more women have enrolled. In 2004, this was 17 per cent of females and 12.5 per cent of males. And keep in mind that U of M’s enrolment policy is strictly merit-based — unlike U.S. Ivy League schools, the only way you can be denied admission to the U of M is if your grades are too low.
In 2005, women got more law and pharmacy degrees than men (37 women/17 men and 49/40, respectively) and nearly equivalent numbers were awarded MDs: 40/41.
Of course there are the traditional faculties: education (423/152), human ecology (95/8) and nursing (359/35); computer science (14/106), engineering (46/198), and science PhDs (1/14). But the one science PhD received by a woman was in math!
The last important vestige of male population-domination, graduate school, is even beginning to even out: according to Statistics Canada, in 2004-05 men accounted for 54 per cent of PhD enrolment, compared with 61 per cent in 1994-95.
And females made up 71 per cent of aboriginal students registered at the U of M in 2005.
In total, women at the U of M got 1,000 more degrees than men in 2005 (2,818/1,884).
Across Canada the number of degrees granted to both sexes has increased approximately 120 per cent (in Manitoba, 118 per cent for women and 108 per cent for men) since 2000.
Statistics Canada’s “The Role of University Characteristics in Determining Post-graduation Outcomes” study explains that even the last vestiges of gender-based career choices may be changing.
“Factors encouraging women to enroll in more highly paying majors include an increase in the professor/student ratio, a drop in overall enrollment, an increase in the share of graduate students in the overall student body, and an increase in fees.”
Yes, that’s right — factors commonly associated with a better quality of education are also the prime factors associated with a better quality of education for women. Who would have thought?
Even more strangely, the study also found that these same factors lead graduates of universities with more professors per student, lower enrolment, and higher fees to make more money. Of course this is a specious assessment of quality — probably more linked to overcrowding in the career world and choice of major, which is again influenced by the labour market — but it is, undoubtedly, the most statistic-friendly way of assessing education. And the stats say that what’s good for the goose is good for the gander, or probably they say something less offensive than that.
Now the only question is: why? Why do women do better in school, and why do so many women claim that they feel marginalized even in the merit-based halls of academe?
She-chimps and he-chimps
Well, the answer to the first question — why women do better in school — may be explained by new research that shows that females may have the evolutionary edge when it comes to learning. The first known example of a non-human animal using tools is female chimpanzees, which sharpen spears with their teeth to brutally murder and eat bush babies, as reported in the Washington Post last week. Only chimps in the exceptionally harsh climate of the Savannah do this — and two-thirds of the chimps that do it are female.
“Females ‘are efficient and innovative, they are problem solvers, they are curious,’” [UC-Santa Cruz anthropology professor Andrea] Zihlman said. And that makes sense, she added.
“‘They are pregnant or lactating or carrying a kid for most of their life,” she said. “And they’re supposed to be running around in the trees chasing prey?’”
While I don’t see many female MBAs running around in the trees chasing prey these days, this evolutionary tidbit is the crux of both the empowerment and disempowerment afforded females by academia.
Men and women
Historically, it’s true, education has benefited men more than women. While women aged 15-24 with a university degree are more likely to employed than their male peers, older university-educated women are much less likely to be employed than men.
Women earn only 63.5 per cent of what men do (80 cents on the dollar), and that number hasn’t changed since 1995, when the first female-majority cohorts began graduating. This is because women are staggeringly more likely to work part-time, and women without a university education are much more likely to be single mothers and/or to work in low-paying “women’s jobs.”
But, university education has financially benefited women more than men since 1977, and women now earn $2.73 for every dollar earned by women with a high-school education, as compared to $2.13 for men — meaning that the average wage for university graduates of both sexes is nearly the same.
Plus, many places of business — the U of M included — have affirmative-action hiring policies, maternity (and paternity!) policies, and work-life balance policies in place to ensure that it’s not women getting the short end of the stick.
This, of course, leads to the all-too-common reprieve that soon it will be men who are in need of affirmative action. Professors at Northern Arizona University successfully sued for back pay in 2004 after pay-equity raises were given to women and visible minorities, as reported in the National Post. The same article, “It’s his turn now,” reported that nearly equivalent numbers of male and female business students at an unnamed Ontario college complained of sex-based discrimination.
A better education — and society — for everyone
The problem is that the perception that women need help is simply uneducated. It’s patronizing to a generation of women who frequently don’t need it, and instead creates a barrier to men who might.
And while the cull of feminism, single-sex education, and affirmative action is attractive, it is ultimately a deterrent to the meritocracy that is at the heart of universities.
Even the commonly cited reason why women tend to earn less, that women spend less time at work, is absolutely true — and a good thing. Feminism worked: our generation is keen on education for education’s sake and spending time with family and friends, and this has tipped the scales in favour of women.
And education is where this cultural shift has occurred, led by my generation of well-educated, egalitarian women and men — well-educated, egalitarian people. There is no doubt in my mind that the increasing increases of sexual equality in universities will play out in society at large. Similarly, I don’t doubt that education is the route to further equality, in all aspects of society.
One last, last statistic: there are a total of 155 male full-time teaching staff aged 60-64 at the U of M, and only 32 females of the same demographic.
But under the age of 34, that ratio becomes 52/49.
If the ideal is equality, it doesn’t get much better than that. So shut up about it already.
