Where Are All the Men?
Physicist Lawrence Krauss notes that men are vanishing from the sciencesNoted physicist Lawrence Krauss wrote an article in Quillette noting how men are vanishing from science and academia. Despite the perception that STEM and related fields are male dominated, Krauss shows how, due to decades of affirmative action programming and cultural shift, that’s no longer the case. He writes,
As April Bleske-Rechek and Michael Bernstein have shown, while men still occupy three quarters of STEM positions (despite the fact that the percentage of women in STEM has more than doubled since 1980), the situation is precisely reversed in the fields of health, education, administration, and literacy. While massive efforts are underway to correct the imbalance between men and women in STEM, there have been no concomitant efforts to increase the numbers of men in female-dominated professions. People do not seem to perceive the latter imbalance as a problem. In a recent survey of over 800 recent college students, Bleske-Rechek and Bernstein found that the students were overwhelmingly more concerned about male overrepresentation in certain high status professional positions than about female overrepresentation in others.
-Lawrence Krauss, Academia’s Missing Men (quillette.com)
Krauss’s observations are in keeping with the data on male to female ratios on university campuses. According to the Pew Research Center, more women are enrolling in university than men. In addition, men aren’t opting for trade schools in place of college. More and more, they’re simply “checking out” and not participating as much in social and professional activities.