Women Are Worse Decision Makers
Half Sigma points to a story from The New York Times on the gender imbalance at universities. He writes
The overall gender balance among all colleges is predominately at community colleges and open admissions state schools, with a lot of the surplus women being older women, either married or divorced. I’m fairly certain that the overall male/female ratio among traditional college-aged students attending schools you wouldn’t be embarrassed to put on your resume is pretty close to even.
He seems to be right. Harvard is 50% male, Yale 50%, Columbia 51%. As far as elite postgraduate programs, the 2008 Harvard Medical School entering class was 51% male and the MBA program is 64%. Here are the statistics for the top fourteen law schools, once again working with that field because it’s the easiest to gather data on.
| School | Percentage Male |
| Yale | 51.4 |
| Harvard | 53.3 |
| Stanford | 53.4 |
| Columbia | 55.3 |
| NYU | 53.8 |
| Chicago | 55.5 |
| Berkeley | 45.2 |
| Michigan | 57.3 |
| Pennsylvania | 53.4 |
| Duke | 57.7 |
| Northwestern | 55.6 |
| Virginia | 58.8 |
| Cornell | 49.2 |
| Georgetown | 55.6 |
Twelve of fourteen are majority male. The outlier is Berkeley which relies more on GPA and less on the LSAT so it can practice affirmative action. About as many women as men take the LSAT though males score about .2 SD higher.
Considering that the students who shouldn’t be in college are in state schools or community college and women make up the vast majority there it follows that women are simply worse decision makers than men. They’re also more conformist and keep going for more “education” past the point where it’s worth it, just as society tells us to do. When it comes to what to study instead of where, Mangan has shown that the highest paying college majors are practically all male fields. The second, third and fourth most popular subjects overall are worthless girl stuff like social sciences/history, education and psychology.
Also, all the old people (35+) I remember seeing as undergrads have been women. I’m sure it’s more humiliating for a male to be a college kid at that age as status is more about what you’ve done, rather than with women where it’s what you look like.
Women probably think that Obama’s got a great idea in wanting to forgive student debts so those who studied real subjects at real schools (men) pick up the tuition.
6 Comments
Feb 8, 2010 6:28 am |
Berkeley. Boalt Hall is the law school there.
Feb 11, 2010 8:37 am |
Interesting that Harvard Law is only a bit over 50% male.
When I went to Oxford it was around 2/3 male, and my
group of Law students was nearly 3/4 male. Oxford
did not use affirmative admission and far fewer
women could meet the entrance criteria. I wonder
if Harvard uses gender norming?
Feb 12, 2010 9:06 am |
Neither you nor Mangan provides any data on the sex ratio of engineering students. When I was an engineering student in the late 1970s, my fellows were overwhelmingly white and male. However, I seem to recall an effort by engineering faculties to recruit more women in the 1980s. IEEE Spectrum published an article about new, non-racist, non-sexist mnemonics for the resistor color code, so as not to offend all the young women flocking to the electrical engineering schools. (I’ve never been able to remember any of the PC mnemonics for the resistor color code.) You really should provide a source to support your assertion that engineering is still dominated by males.
Feb 12, 2010 9:28 am |
As of 2007 less than a fifth of engineering students were female.
Feb 12, 2010 11:55 am |
Thanks. There has been a huge increase in female enrollment. As I recall, of about 200 EE students at the University of Florida in the late 1970s, there were never more than three females. Got any figures on the sex ratio of engineering graduates? I’d give 100 to 1 odds that females receive a much lower fraction of baccalaureate degrees in engineering, but perhaps you can save me the trouble of searching.
Feb 12, 2010 1:49 pm |
According to the NSF, women received 14,101 out of 75,823 batchelor’s degrees in 2007, or about 18.6%. This surprises me. I would have expected the percentage of female graduates to be much less than the percentage of female students, owing to a high dropout rate. Apparently, the women’s dropout rate is no greater than the men’s. Of course, affirmative action might apply to grading nowadays.
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