By Professor
Doom
I accept that having a Y chromosome puts
a hard cap on my career. I went into this with wide open eyes, as I was told in
the 80’s that such would be the case. It was perhaps 1989 where it was made
clear to me just how the system was working: the hiring committee had to
justify in writing why any female (or minority) candidate was not chosen, but
could reject any white male candidate without explanation. I promise the gentle
reader: I’ve seen nothing since that time to indicate the rules have changed.
Just because I don’t lament my own knowing
choice, doesn’t mean I don’t find the claims by our “leaders” in higher ed that
they’re tirelessly working to “fight sexism” anything but infuriatingly
insulting. Listening to them say this even as we all know most college students
are females nowadays is just adding insult to the insult.
The bulk of our population goes to college
now, so I suppose it’s only natural for the behavior of higher education to be
reflected in society. I still think the following detail should be more public:
Hey, it’s tough to get a job fresh out of
college—employers are catching on that a degree doesn’t mean what it used to,
and so they want experience…experience that a graduate won’t have because he’s
just spent the last 6 or so years sitting in classrooms, learning (bear with
me) things that most employers just don’t find useful.
Now, government unemployment numbers are
as much a fiction as anything coming out of the mouth of a higher education
“leader,” so you have to read them carefully in order to get any information. A
helpful chart puts things in perspective:
There are only so many jobs out there, and
looking at the above, it’s reasonable to conjecture that higher ed isn’t the
only place where “first hire females, and then if anything is left over, let a
male have it” seems to be the guideline.
Looking at the age categories, however, it
seems this is a newer phenomenon in the workforce. We should be worried, and we
should wonder. Most graduates from STEM fields are male, so you’d think they’d
be over-represented in hires. We’re told all the time how STEM fields lead to
jobs but…there are only a finite number of jobs, and it’s well known that
females with STEM degrees are even more preferred (heck, engineering
firms which only solicit female employees can even brag of the fact…any firm which boasted of restricting to males would be utterly
destroyed in the press). If your
business is female owned, it gets a distinct advantage when seeking business with the most generous customer in the country,
our government.
It’s not just STEM where the males are
getting ignored, and realize this is even more devastating than
it looks because more college graduates are female now. Even with a “shortage” (to use the phrasing our leaders often use to
describe a situation with females) of male college graduates, the above chart
suggests an over 2:1 ratio of unemployment for college graduate males over
college graduate females. I know, this could be viewed as a victory for
feminism or whatever, but when one looks at the previous generations
represented on that chart, it’s clear our society is engaging in a new
experiment for how it should run.
This, gentle reader, is a dangerous
experiment. Societies which have a great number of unemployed, unemployable
males with no prospects, no hope for a future are particularly vulnerable to
upheaval by a sub-population which has nothing to lose. Ok, perhaps I worry
overmuch here, but the fact remains this disparity would be intolerable if any
other “protected class” in our country were subjected to such obvious
discrimination.
My apologies if I’m quick to see sexism
here…but I know that’s how this startling result would be represented if the
female graduates were being unfairly targeted for unemployment. The article
tries to say something else is at work:
But what if there’s a
deeper, more encompassing problem underlying these circumstances? Is it
possible that today’s young men are suffering from a malaise…
Ok, sure, a
malaise. Could that malaise be the simple fact that college indoctrination
typically involves the males being told about their “toxic” masculinity? How is
this not considered sexist, either?
… created by current
societal norms?
Honest, the
societal norm here is that males are second class citizens. I grant this is not
the case throughout society, but it’s a common enough norm on our campuses, and
the gentle reader needs to understand: our females graduate from these campuses,
too, and get the same reinforcement, get the same message that males only
should get something after all the females get something.
Now toss in the
scramble in corporate America to have “female leaders,” who absolutely can get
into positions to strongly influence the hiring (again, I note every time I
read of a company boasting of only hiring females, it’s a female making the
boast, because that’s where the company initiative comes from…).
The article I’m
quoting from doesn’t allow comments, so there’s nobody to take the author to
task for both ignoring the very real possibility of sexism, or for her (of
course) shamefully blaming the victims here, the males, for having a “malaise”
which is keeping them from getting hired (seriously?!).
While I can’t pin
this trend precisely on the student loan scam, bottom line is our student loans
are huge factor in the skyrocketing tuition, a tuition justified because a
college degree is supposed to be helpful for getting a job. I know it’s too
much to ask for the universities to return the money they collected under false
pretenses, but perhaps we could cancel the loans made to the males for degrees
of no value to them?
Just imagining
the crying in the media about how sexist that would be inflames the part of my
heart which warms when it considers hypocrisy.
No comments:
Post a Comment