'Academia is Women’s Work; Why male flight from the DIEvory tower is sending it into a death spiral'...very exceptional writing AGAIN by John Carter, "Back in the nineties, when guys still thought
lesbians were sexy and kids still thought campus was fun, there was a running joke you’d see in college movies. Some hapless dweeb would enrol in a women’s studies course, hoping to get laid
I appreciate John’s writing, content and style. Beautiful choice of words, verbs, adjectives etc. and the manner in which he cloaks it yet many times he hits the nail on the head…in this article, much of what he says in on point. He hits the nail on the head, a tour de force.
'“The desperate Casanova’s reasoning was that the overwhelmingly female student body would provide a target-rich environment in which he would face no competition.”
Some primer from John:
‘There’s a deeper reason that the strategy of entering into a woman’s world doesn’t usually work out romantically, however, one that most men – and most women – understand implicitly, without having to be told. It comes down to human sexual psychology, which differs profoundly between the two sexes.
Sexual psychology is just a ramification of sexual biology. Males of every species produce an unlimited number of mobile gametes; females produce a limited number of immobile gametes; which type of gamete is produced is basically the distinction between male and female. Male investment can be, and usually is, as perfunctory as a few millilitres of ejaculate, of which they have an effectively infinite supply; female investment involves an extended period of gestating the egg or eggs, an energetically expensive process in its own right, which depending on the species may be followed by an extensive period of feeding, nurturing, and protecting vulnerable offspring. Thus men, infamously, are not terribly choosy about their mating partners, at least when it comes to short-term hookups, whereas women are extremely picky. Men want to impregnate as many women as possible, whereas women want to get the highest-quality sperm that they can attract.
For men, attractiveness is defined more or less by youth and health: not too old, not too skinny, not too fat, and a pleasingly symmetrical face indicating a low level of mutational load. Female attraction strategies therefore involve emphasizing their youth and health, through such ploys as exercise, dieting, makeup, flattering fashions, and Instagram filters.
Women, by contrast, are attracted to a man’s social status, this being a proxy for his biological quality as compared to other men. This isn’t the only thing women will look at: appearance isn’t completely irrelevant, since after all the biological quality of a man can be externally evaluated just as easily as that of a woman’s. There are plenty of cases of women spurning a wealthy, but ugly and unpleasant creep, in favour of a handsome but relatively poor young man; then again, there are also many cases of the opposite. Whereas for men appearance is almost the only thing that matters, for women it tends to be just one factor entering into a more complex and holistic calculation – verbal wit, material success, confidence, ambition, and so on.
Just as women compete for male attention by appealing to the male gaze, men compete for female attention by trying to improve their relative standing vis a vis other men according to the metrics women value.’…
‘Academics fretting about male flight from the academy couch their concerns in worries over the consequences for the futures of young men – reduced opportunities, reduced lifetime incomes. It’s true that young men are doing pretty poorly right now. They’re depressed, withdrawn, suicidal, disenfranchised, bitter, and angry.
But they’ll be fine in the long run.
It’s the universities that should be worried.’
Academia is Women’s Work - by John Carter (substack.com)
Start John here, very well written and please support:
‘Back in the nineties, when guys still thoughts lesbians were sexy and kids still thought campus was fun, there was a running joke you’d see in college movies. Some hapless dweeb would enrol in a women’s studies course, hoping to get laid. The desperate Casanova’s reasoning was that the overwhelmingly female student body would provide a target-rich environment in which he would face no competition. The joke was that it never worked, because the girls gathering to gulp down the gospel of Dworkin were all feminists with hairy armpits and a giant misandrist chip on their mannish shoulders.
There’s a deeper reason that the strategy of entering into a woman’s world doesn’t usually work out romantically, however, one that most men – and most women – understand implicitly, without having to be told. It comes down to human sexual psychology, which differs profoundly between the two sexes.
Sexual psychology is just a ramification of sexual biology. Males of every species produce an unlimited number of mobile gametes; females produce a limited number of immobile gametes; which type of gamete is produced is basically the distinction between male and female. Male investment can be, and usually is, as perfunctory as a few millilitres of ejaculate, of which they have an effectively infinite supply; female investment involves an extended period of gestating the egg or eggs, an energetically expensive process in its own right, which depending on the species may be followed by an extensive period of feeding, nurturing, and protecting vulnerable offspring. Thus men, infamously, are not terribly choosy about their mating partners, at least when it comes to short-term hookups, whereas women are extremely picky. Men want to impregnate as many women as possible, whereas women want to get the highest-quality sperm that they can attract.
For men, attractiveness is defined more or less by youth and health: not too old, not too skinny, not too fat, and a pleasingly symmetrical face indicating a low level of mutational load. Female attraction strategies therefore involve emphasizing their youth and health, through such ploys as exercise, dieting, makeup, flattering fashions, and Instagram filters.
Women, by contrast, are attracted to a man’s social status, this being a proxy for his biological quality as compared to other men. This isn’t the only thing women will look at: appearance isn’t completely irrelevant, since after all the biological quality of a man can be externally evaluated just as easily as that of a woman’s. There are plenty of cases of women spurning a wealthy, but ugly and unpleasant creep, in favour of a handsome but relatively poor young man; then again, there are also many cases of the opposite. Whereas for men appearance is almost the only thing that matters, for women it tends to be just one factor entering into a more complex and holistic calculation – verbal wit, material success, confidence, ambition, and so on.
Just as women compete for male attention by appealing to the male gaze, men compete for female attention by trying to improve their relative standing vis a vis other men according to the metrics women value.
Men could care less about a woman’s accomplishments, save that they are leery of women whose accomplishments outstrip their own, this being a sure sign that she will lose interest and look elsewhere; women care a great deal about a man’s accomplishments, not for their own sake, but as a proxy for his reputation amongst other men.
Competition is really the key word as regards male reproductive strategies. Men have invented innumerable means of competing with one another: athletic competitions, economic competitions, literary competitions, artistic competitions, musical competitions, academic competitions. The goal of any given competitive arena is to determine the relative standing of the competitors according to a certain trait – physical, intellectual, creative, what have you – so that the competitors can be paired off with women whose desirability matches their own.
Men are well-adapted to competition. They have a much better ability to narrow their focus to the specific task at hand, applying themselves with obsessive devotion to mastery of their chosen field. Just because the Darwinian payoff is sexual access doesn’t mean that they’re thinking about sex all the time; cognitive resources spent visualizing tiddies aren’t available to focus on the problem that needs to be solved, whether that problem is a mastodon, an enemy soldier, or the Schrödinger wave equation.
If you want your society to produce transcendent excellence in a given field, the only way to do so is to attach a competitive male status hierarchy to it. With status on the line, men will throw themselves into the arena, immersing themselves completely, devoting their every waking moment to mastering a skill or subject, making it their life’s purpose to push a discipline beyond its limits. Competitive pressures between the best of the best then raises performance to its apogee. Iron sharpens iron.
Conversely, if you want reliable mediocrity, then you want women’s work. Women don’t have the same sexual incentive to compete with one another in performance, and so, by and large, don’t (they compete in other ways). Their instinct is to perform to a perfectly acceptable standard, but not, in general, to push themselves to exceed it.
For men, the play-by-play events of a competitive environment are high drama. Not so for women. Women, as the old saying goes, don’t care about the struggles of the competitors: they just wait at the finish line and fuck the winner. The drama women tend to care about focuses more on the heroine’s struggle to distinguish winners from posers, to decide which winner she wants, and/or to stand out from the other girls so she can catch the eye of the winner. “I’m so torn ... do I go with the musky barbarian warlord werewolf rapist, or the the aloof immortal billionaire vampire knight?” the heroine asks herself for three hundred pages. How he became an immortal billionaire vampire knight in the first place is of much less interest than whether or not he’s really interested in her.
Men are constantly on the lookout for arenas in which they can prove their worth, and thereby attract a mate or, more accurately, as many mates as possible. Across the myriad competitive arenas that men have invented, there is one common element shared by all of them, which both men and women are exquisitely sensitive to:
An arena cannot be dominated by women.
The reason for this is obvious. The purpose of the arena, from the male point of view, is to demonstrate his worth relative to other men. To enter an arena filled with women is to engage in a lose/lose proposition: if one does poorly, one has been beaten (up) by girls; if one does well, one has beaten (up) girls. Neither outcome is going to impress the girls. Or, for that matter, the guys.
For this reason, men who enter a social environment in which women predominate will tend to make a hasty exit. There is nothing for them there.
This is not a social construct which can be corrected with sufficient nagging. It is hardwired into human sexual psychology. There is nothing that can be done about it, short of redesigning human beings from their genes on up. At which point you’re not talking about humans anymore.
You might make people pretend that men do not prefer to compete in male-dominated arenas; you might, through sufficient emotional abuse, give them bad consciences about their natural instincts; you will not, not ever, not even once, change those natural instincts. If you ignore those instincts, you will only awaken the Gods of the Copybook Headings.
This explains two related phenomena, both much deplored by feminists, who are in the business of ignoring human instinct.
The first is male flight: the tendency of male involvement in a given profession, occupation, institution, or industry to drop precipitously once a certain threshold of female involvement is surpassed.
The second is the low value assigned to women’s work.
Occupations seen as a predominantly masculine are almost invariably perceived – by both men and women – as conferring a certain intrinsic status, whether high or low. Garbagemen, oil rig roughnecks, firemen, special forces operators, and private equity sharks are all male-dominated occupations, and each occupies a distinct plane of social status. Conversely, social status being a primary attribute of male sexual allure, a profession in which women predominate is unable to confer status, by definition. To say that female professions are ‘low status’ is a category error; they’re simply outside of the status hierarchy. A kindergarten teacher is not really of higher or lower status than a plumber or a stock broker, because neither the plumber nor the stock broker will care very much about what she does before asking her out on a date; the kindergarten teacher, however, will care a great deal about which man is a plumber, and which a stock broker.
The preceding paragraph implicitly assumed a female kindergarten teacher. There are, of course, a very small number of male kindergarten teachers, may Thor have mercy on their souls. Men who work in occupations perceived as predominantly female pay a steep sexual penalty. Their lifetime odds of marriage decline as compared to men who work in sexually neutral or male-dominated professions; a woman’s success in marriage is wholly unaffected by working in a male-dominant field. This is intuitively obvious, but I was able to dig up a study that apparently quantified this1.
The flood of women into the workforce over the last several generations has led to several professions switching from male-dominated to female-dominated – for example, high school teachers, nurses, and veterinarians were all, almost within living memory, masculine vocations. After becoming feminine occupations, in every single case, those professions immediately plummeted in status. Men who entered them came to be thought of us somehow defective; what else is one to conclude about a man who chooses to compete with women, rather than with his peers? This is certainly not always fair. There is nothing necessarily defective about being a male high school teacher. All of my favourite teachers in high school were men. I have friends who work as high school teachers, whom I respect greatly, not least because someone has to be there to set a good example for our lost and abandoned boys; on that note, if you have not yet read this excellent piece from the
, I implore you to do so, for it is thematically relevant to the topic at hand:
Nevertheless, human sexual psychology is supremely indifferent to concepts such as ‘fair’. It does not matter that male teachers do good and essential work2; teaching is coded as a feminine occupation, and they pay a price for that.
An occupation that flips from male to female dominance invariably suffers not only diminished prestige, but also a decline in wages ... which, once again, makes sense in the context of sexual psychology. A man’s income is one element (and a big element) of a woman’s attraction to him, but the reverse is not true; if women are paid less, this does not really hurt their value in the sexual marketplace at all, and so they will push back against it much less than men would. This is probably what lies behind the tendency of women to be less forceful when negotiating salaries.
To the point: ever since the 1970s, women have overtaken and gradually eclipsed men within higher education. There is a gap in enrolment, consistent across racial groups:
The enrolment gap has increased over time:
There is also a gap in graduation rates – men are much more likely to drop out – which compounds the effect of the enrolment gap.
The enrolment gap now extends all the way to the doctoral level: doctoral programs remained majority male much longer than the other degree levels, all the way until 2005, but have also seen the greatest decline, plummeting from 90% in 1970 to 44% as of 2021.
Across all programs, at all academic levels, American universities recently reached the threshold of 60% of the student body being female.
This will be a disaster for academia.
Indeed, it’s already a disaster. About a year ago, I analyzed a Gallup poll which revealed that the confidence of the American public in the trustworthiness and overall value of the academic sector had declined precipitously over the course of the 2010s.
DIEing Confidence in the Academy
·
July 14, 2023
In that article I examined several factors contributing to this DIEing confidence in the academy: the explosive growth in tuition fees, even as continuous relaxation of academic standards dilutes the actual value of a degree; the deplorable state of scholarship, with endless revelations of fraud, a seemingly irresolvable replication crisis, and the torrent of psychotic nonsense that passes for ‘research’; the increasingly frigid social environment enforced by the armies of overpaid, sour-faced administrators. Almost all of these, however, are related in some way or another to the feminization of academia.
And it is probably going to get much worse before it gets better.
As discussed in this recent article by
ofMatriarchal Blessing, research on male flight indicates that a 60% female composition represents the tipping point beyond which men perceive an environment as feminine, which then leads to a precipitous decline in male participation. Davis appears to be some sort of feminist3, but I want you to look past that and give her article a read; it is very thorough, well-researched, and thought-provoking (and also the direct inspiration for this article).
There’s some important nuance here. In some programs – the social sciences, psychology, healthcare, education – women dominate completely. There are still a few programs – mechanical engineering, computer programming, mathematics, physics – in which the boys still comfortably outnumber the girls. The same pattern of variance between the sexes is seen at the doctoral level, with engineering and the hard sciences continuing, for now, to be dominated by men (although that dominance is shrinking).
The variance in program choice is easily explained as a result of the divergent natural interests and innate abilities of the sexes: men being interested in things whereas women are interested in people; men excelling in spatial reasoning whereas women have an advantage in verbal aptitude.
At the level of individual programs, the trends don’t seem to be at all consistent with the 60% tipping point Davis bases her analysis on – which, to be fair, is from on an off-hand comment from economist and former university president Morty Schapiro, as quoted in the Freakonomics podcast Davis opens her article with. That number is probably an oversimplification. With the exception of computer science – an interesting exception to the rule because it is apparently the only discipline in which female participation rose and then declined – essentially every program shows a steep increase in female composition starting in about 1971. However, the increase in the female percentage doesn’t seem to evince an inflection point at a consistent 60% level. Some programs demonstrate a rapid rise in the female fraction from well below this threshold, for instance business which goes from below 10% to about 45% in a ten-year period, after which point it plateaus. By contrast, visual/performing arts is more or less flat at 60% throughout the entire period. Most of the disciplines follow a more or less similar pattern to business: increasing steadily and rapidly, and then plateauing. The point at which the increase begins, however, as well as the level of the plateau, vary considerably.
One possible explanation for the apparent discrepancy is that the notion of a tipping point threshold beyond which men abandon a given venue is entirely mistaken. However, this seems unlikely; plenty of programs show evidence for a tipping point. Another possibility is that certain disciplines, such as the performing arts, attract a larger fraction of gay men, who could care less about being in a girly field. A further possibility is that women are preferentially attracted to certain disciplines, such as psychology or health sciences, while it’s difficult to get them to show interest in engineering or the hard sciences, leading to relatively low plateaus. That would then lead to a reshuffling of student participation across the different majors, with male students who might otherwise have studied, say, psychology or biology, going instead into the physical sciences; this would help to accelerate the effect of girls entering softer programs, and ameliorate the effect of larger numbers of girls entering the STEM fields.
Curious, I looked deeper into the question of sexual tipping points, and found this interesting 2010 paper from Jessica Pan, an economist from Singapore: Gender Segregation in Occupations: The Role of Tipping and Social Interactions. As the title indicates, Pan was looking at the workplace, rather than lecture hall, but there’s no reason to expect the underlying patterns to be any different. Pan identified tipping points ranging from 30 to 60 percent female, beyond which male participation declined discontinuously, although the plateaus are (just as with the college data) at different levels.
Pan hypothesized that sexism was behind the variation in tipping points, i.e. that men in regions or eras characterized by greater sexual prejudice will have a lower tipping point, and claimed that her tests of this model by e.g. looking at different geographical areas more or less confirmed this. She also tested her data against the famous Schelling segregation model, an agent-based model which demonstrates that residential ethnic segregation can be explained as the result individual preferences to live next to in-group members, without having to invoke any xenophobic distaste for out-group members; her data apparently conformed to this model, too. In other words, occupational gender segregation can be explained by men’s natural desire to work in male-dominated environments.
Pan’s results seem consistent with the different tipping points observed within the different college majors looked at by the American Enterprise Institute. They’re also broadly consistent with Schapiro’s observation that recruiting men gets much more difficult when a college hits the 60% threshold. This is the upper limit found by Pan, and as academia is about the most liberal environment one can imagine, it makes sense that it would hug the upper threshold (assuming that she’s correct that the variation in threshold level is a function of the ambient sexism index).
Looking into the citations to Pan’s paper4 turned up an interesting study with results relevant to the general theme of this essay: Do They Stay or Do They Go? The Switching Decisions of Individuals Who Enter Gender Atypical College Majors (Catherine Riegle-Crumb, Barbara King & Chelsea Moore, 2016). The abstract reports that men who enter female-dominated majors are significantly more likely to switch majors as compared to their counterparts in male-dominated fields, whereas women who enter male-dominated programs are no more likely to switch majors than anyone else. The sneaky fucker who enrols in Feminist Theory 101 to resolve tfw no gf runs away with his tail between his legs and no gf when he realizes they all assume he must be gay; the tomboy who signs up for aerospace engineering is pleased as a peach to be the central focus of all those attentive males (some of whom do her homework, and others of whom she mates with). The study seems rather inconsistent with the narrative that misogyny in male-dominated spaces is a primary obstacle to female participation, but exactly consistent with the hypothesis that male flight is a major factor discouraging male participation in female-dominated spaces.
Universities are belatedly starting to notice that male enrolment is dropping fast, particularly among white men (I wonder why...), and are starting to make noises about maybe thinking about perhaps looking into ways of trying to recruit and retain more men (albeit, not specifically white men).
This seems unlikely to succeed.
Why won’t universities be successful in bringing back men? Why will male flight be catastrophic? You can probably guess, but I promise you there’s some good stuff on the other side of this very annoying interruption.
Look, it takes time to write these, okay? A lot of time. I’ve been sitting at the keyboard for checks phone about eight hours now. I haven’t eaten since breakfast. My back hurts, damnit. And that’s just today. I’ve been working on this piece for almost a week now. I’ve probably put about twenty hours into it, all told – researching it, reading up on relevant topics, pacing around muttering to myself as I think about this or that aspect of the subject, writing it, rewriting it, editing it, rewriting the edits, trying to hammer the goddawful mess into some sort of coherent narrative. But despite all that, I put this all before you, for free, charging nothing, a busker on the digital street, hoping to entertain and enlighten you, demanding nothing but your time ... though if you’d like to chip in and support, it is no more than the cost of a beer at a mid-level pub.
Upgrade to paid
If enough of you buy me a beer, I may one day win the coveted orange check, and achieve what passes for high status amongst writers.
Now, back to the show.
Even if universities are successful in setting up programs to increase male recruitment, they will be fighting an uphill battle against the sexual perception that has already set in. Once something is coded as being a feminine hobby, it is extremely difficult to change that code. While it’s very easy to list examples of professions that have switched from male to female dominance, off the top of my head I have a hard time coming up with examples of the reverse. This suggests that female dominance tends to be sticky. There’s no reason to expect this will be any different with academia, either within individual programs, or across the sector as a whole.
This is an entirely different problem from the one faced by female entryism. In the initial phases of female entry, the primary difficulty faced by women is that it is simply more difficult to compete with men – in the case of athletics, effectively impossible. Women must therefore either work extremely hard, or the work must be made easier for them. In practice, since the 1970s we’ve seen both of these, with ‘working twice as hard as the boys’ predominating in the early years, and assistance from special programs predominating later on.
By contrast, the central obstacle faced by anyone trying to attract men to a female-dominated environment is that men are deeply reluctant to enter. As a third of young men told Pew when asked why they didn’t attend or complete university: they just didn’t want to. It isn’t because they can’t compete with women. They can, usually with ease, but competition is pointless because it will gain them nothing. Special programs to assist men are beside the point; if anything, they work against you, because the implicit message with any special program for men is that they need help to compete with women ... thereby making competition even more pointless. “You beat a girl but you needed help to do it,” is going to impress the girls even less than beating a girl unaided.
, who has been paying close attention to the issue of plummeting male interest in climbing the ivory tower, has suggested that one way to solve the problem might be totry and recruit more men into HEAL(Health, Education, Administration, and Literacy) programs, which are currently overwhelmingly dominated by women. This is a bizarre recommendation and seems doomed to failure. Young men will take one look at a program with 85% female enrolment, and instinctively understand that going into that program is the social equivalent of entering the women’s bathroom.
Most of the other solutions I’ve seen are similarly implausible. The only thing Morty Schapiro could think of was to start a football team, which only works if you don’t already have one, and feels a bit desperate. The standard feminist response seems to be to challenge norms of traditional masculinity, encouraging men to be less focused on dominance and more quiet and collaborative; this is essentially suggesting that the best way to recruit men into a space everyone perceives as girly is to tell them that it will make them more girly. That seems like it will be counterproductive.
One thing that might succeed in staunching the flood of men out of the academy would be to flip Reeves’ suggestion on its head. The revealed preference of men in a co-ed university is to concentrate within departments in which they have a natural advantage due to disposition and cognitive capabilities: namely, the hard sciences, the applied sciences, and economics. I’ve known many men who shunned the social sciences and humanities in favour of the applied sciences, explicitly because they saw the latter as a refuge from the hersterical5 style in academic politics; I myself began my undergraduate career as a literature major, switching to physics after a couple of years because I found the English program annoyingly dogmatic in its Marxist political subtext and cloyingly effeminate in its discursive norms, whereas by contrast physics seemed pristinely Apollonian in its unsentimental objectivity and blessedly free of sermonizing.
Students in different programs at the same university aren’t really in competition with one another in any meaningful fashion. The nerd in mechanical engineering isn’t comparing his grades to the wordcels in English literature, but to the other aspiring mechanical engineers. Allowing STEM departments to remain male is by far the easiest solution, as it requires universities to do nothing at all. By simply sitting back and allowing nature to take its course, male-dominated departments could persist inside otherwise majority-female universities, providing meaningful arenas for the boys, who would otherwise enjoy rich hunting grounds amongst the girls filling the psychology, literature, education, communications, and biomedical lectures, without the risk of the girls thinking they were weird for walking into their change rooms.
Sadly for the prospects of academia, there is almost no prospect of universities letting well enough be. The persistence of a few small pockets of patriarchy in the midst of the gynocratic hegemony is an affront to everything the longhouse stands for. We endlessly hear about the crisis of female underrepresentation in those departments that have not yet been conquered, principally STEM. There are special recruitment programs for women, special scholarships for women, special mentoring programs for women. STEM departments are under constant internal and external pressure to bring in more women. This has led to a culture inside STEM departments that shows immense favouritism to women, particularly at the student and early career levels (boomer male professors are generally only too happy to shove their younger male colleagues aside in the name of gender equity; they then congratulate themselves for being enlightened). Look at these slides from a recent piece at Heterodox STEM:
This even reaches down to the elementary school level. My nephew was recently prevented from going to science camp at the local university, because the university was only running a science camp for girls.
University faculties and administrations are packed full of activist girlbosses for whom admitting, mentoring, hiring, and promoting other activist girlbosses is their entire animating purpose in life. Any cessation of programs intended to increase the female fraction in male-dominant disciplines will run full into the snarling teeth of the Future Is Female, which will screech like banshees about it being the resurrection of the patriarchy or whatever.
Universities could probably stem the flow by letting boys congregate in STEM. Instead, they’re doing everything in their power to drive them out. If the last male-dominant spaces in the academy are swallowed by the devouring mother, male flight will become male route, with calamitous consequences.
Why will male flight be disastrous for the academy? In every possible way.
For universities, the catastrophe is not only that declining male enrolment will reduce income streams from tuition and residence fees. Much worse is the loss of status that inevitably follows male non-participation. Academia is fuelled almost purely by prestige. By and large academics do very little that is particularly useful. Most research is frivolous, or too esoteric to be good for anything beyond publishing unread papers in obscure journals. Society has lavished funding on higher education because the dissemination and growth of human knowledge is seen as an intrinsically high-status pursuit. It is a luxury good, supported for the same reason that Renaissance princes provided patronage to the arts, or Medieval lords gave extravagant donations of gold and land to the Holy Mother Church. Governments compete with one another to invest more in their university systems in order to be seen as patrons of the arts and sciences; private individuals donate large sums of money to endowments in order to raise their own status via association.
If academia comes to be seen as a feminine occupation and therefore orthogonal to male status hierarchies, public esteem evaporates, academia’s prestigious halo disappears, and it is reduced to something of purely utilitarian value ... and the practical value of academia is extraordinarily questionable.
Thus, one would predict that in addition to reduced revenue from tuition fees due to the smaller student body, government investment in and private donations to institutions of higher learning would also fall off a cliff, levelling a one-two-three roundhouse punch-headbutt-dropkick combo to the financial viability of universities.
This is happening at the same time that decades of below-replacement fertility is reducing the total pool of potential students.
About a decade ago Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, predicted that before this decade is out half of America’s colleges and universities would go tits up. Here’s how his prediction is holding up:
Score one, Christensen. Declining enrolment, funding squeezes, and reduced philanthropic donations have already closed something like 25% of American institutions of higher learning in the last decade.
Christensen doesn’t blame the presence of too many women, of course; that would be impolite. But the largest enrolment declines have been seen among men; there are good reasons to ascribe this to male flight; and one of the known consequences of male flight is a collapse in prestige, followed by a restriction in the resources society is inclined to provide.
One might suggest counteracting this with appeals to the moral imperative of supporting women or whatever, but this will be about as successful as efforts to force the WNBA down the throats of sportsball fans. Marketing via shaming campaigns can only do so much.
Women’s sports are generally much less interesting than men’s sports for the simple reason that men are much stronger, faster, tougher, and meaner than women are, meaning that on the far distribution tails of athletic ability male athletes outperform female athletes to a comical degree. However much fun the ladies might have playing them, women’s sports aren’t that much fun for spectators. And when they try to compete with the boys...
This leads into a discussion of some of the more specific reasons that male flight will doom higher learning. Before going any further, and at the risk of being accused of cucking or, worse, (may Zeus forgive me for saying this word) simping, I want to emphasize that what follows is a discussion of averages, of general tendencies, which are only relevant at the level of the population. Yes, of course there are exceptions. I know many exceptions myself: brilliant female scholars who do absolutely fantastic work, and do not match these stereotypes at all. However. Stereotypes exist and persist for good reason: they are generally true.
Just as men outperform women athletically, men have a distinct advantage at the upper end of cognitive ability. The greater male variability hypothesis suggests that nature is more comfortable experimenting with relatively expendable men, leading to women being, on average, much more average – that is, having a reduced variance of numerous traits, IQ among them. The data suggest that women have a slightly higher average IQ than men, but that the greater variance of the male distribution leads to a larger fraction of men on the tails of the IQ Gaussian – there are more deeply stupid men than retarded women, but also more scintillating geniuses among men than there are first-rate intellects among women. It follows from this that a female-dominated academy will simply have a much smaller genius fraction, and therefore, as a body, produce much less intellectually compelling work.
There are salient intellectual differences between the sexes beyond the issue of raw cognitive horsepower. Men are comfortable with, no, they delight in heated arguments, passionately debating the merits and flaws of various ideas, raising doubts as to the veracity of evidence, poking holes in one another’s assertions, and generally questioning the quality of each other’s work. They don’t mind getting in fights, and indeed, often enjoy them. Academic rivalries have been infamously vituperative since the peripatetics were walking circles around the Platonists. A scholar stands out by standing up to the others in his field and surviving their most ruthless assaults. The result of this adversarial approach to the development of ideas is that ideas become stronger over time. The bullshit gets weeded out. It’s also just fun to watch, like an autistic cage fight.
If you attack a woman’s scholarly work head on, she has a tendency to cry. No one likes to see women cry, so as women’s presence in academia has increased, academics have become noticeably more conflict-averse and soft-spoken.
At the same time, women tend to prize consensus, and to ruthlessly punish those who violate it. The feminized academy is notable mainly for its single-minded conformity to an increasingly tangled bird’s nest of red lines that may not be crossed. What matters is no longer what is true, but ‘being a good person’. The female-dominated academy is therefore wholly incapable of generating new ideas, because new ideas hurt peoples’ feelings, and its primary imperative is maintaining internal social consensus. It is not properly speaking a university at all, but a convent for nurturing the involutionary spirals of Nth-wave feminism.
All of this makes the female-dominated academy, and this is perhaps its primary sin, exceptionally boring.
Academia is, at root, a luxury service.
A luxury service cannot afford to be boring.
Men also tend to be more productive. Men – white and Asian men, specifically – publish more papers, and more papers of higher quality, than women do. The below figure shows the gap between men and women in h-index6. The higher the h-index, the more papers an academic has published, and the more citations those papers have received. That men tend to publish more than women is consistent with what you’d expect if the men are devoting themselves heart and soul to whatever field they’re working in, spending every waking hour thinking about whatever problem they’re working on, while the women are clucking away in their nests on diversity and inclusion committees and running around the department with their ears perked up checking for compliance with this season’s lexicon of fashionable words.
One of the reasons men tend to achieve higher h-indices than women isn’t just that they do more work, but also that they tend to do more interesting work. Women tend to excel at careful, routine, detail-orientated tasks, the ‘ordinary science’ that ties up a loose end in a dangling theoretical postulate or adds an additional decimal place of precision to a pre-existing result. They’re particularly good at selecting tasteful colour schemes for the visualization of scientific data. This is not to devalue the utility of such services – science relies upon the painstaking collection and analysis of data. But it’s mostly the scientific equivalent of quilting, needlework, and interior decorating.
‘Extraordinary’ science – the kinds of creative, intuitive leaps that shatter the old wine bottles of exhausted paradigms and lead to breakthroughs in our understanding of nature – are solely the province of a very small number of geniuses. Geniuses are not only intelligent, but are also usually low in the personality trait of conscientiousness (they don’t care about following rules, half-ass their homework assignments when they even bother to turn them in, and cram at the last minute for the exam yet walk away with the top mark in the class anyhow due to sheer brilliance), low in agreeableness (they don’t care if you like them, and often go out of their way to annoy authority figures), and high in openness (fascinated by new ideas to the degree of being actively drawn to the esoteric, unconventional, and forbidden). Geniuses aren’t just smart, they are weird assholes. This personality profile is strongly tilted towards males, just as extremely high outlier IQ is heavily biased towards males. Thus, almost all Nobel prize winners are men.
The modal female academic, by contrast, is a ‘head girl’ with a personality profile almost precisely the opposite of the typical genius: high in conscientiousness (her textbooks are covered in colour-coded post-it notes; her homework is all submitted on time); high in agreeableness (she absolutely craves that pat on head from teacher, she desperately wants people to like her, and indeed she is usually very likeable); and low in openness (she has the most boringly conventional attitudes that it is possible to have on every subject on which it is possible to have an opinion, and gets very uncomfortable when you don’t agree). The head girl is reliable and a pleasure to work with, but she is almost never a genius.
If female scholars are less productive, produce less interesting research, and tend to be preoccupied with enforcing consensus, we should see signs of that. Sure enough, disruptive science has been declining for generations.
Outside of information technology, we’ve been in the doldrums of intellectual progress for a long time. This stalling out of scientific advancement has a lot to do with the bureaucratization of science as anything else – the decline started long before women entered the academy in large numbers, more or less at the time that large national funding agencies took over, enforcing peer review and turning academic research into an endless quest to please the grant commitee – but the growing presence of women has almost certainly been a contributing factor.
In short order, people will wonder why so much money is being spent paying women administrators to supervise women professors to teach women students the finer points of post-colonial critical anti-whiteness gender theory, and calling it ‘science’.
Not only is nothing recognizable as scholarship being performed, but the entire exercise manifestly ruins the women for anything useful, or even merely decorative.
Universities are driving their students insane, which isn’t helping their popularity.
You know it’s bad when the Guardian is starting to ask questions.
After all the nasty things I’ve said about women in the preceding paragraphs, it might surprise you to find that I don’t think women should be excluded from higher education on the basis that they have vaginas, or that the only way to resolve the problem is to cleave higher ed into men’s and women’s schools. One of the valuable functions universities serve – or should serve – is as an assortative mating market, by means of which intelligent young people can pair off with one another, thereby producing intelligent offspring. If a beautiful working class girl hadn’t attended university on a full-ride scholarship she won by placing first in an all-city academic competition, she never would have met the dashing young air force officer, amateur boxer, and budding economist that she fell in love with; as a result, my mother (who also attended university) would never have been born, and I wouldn’t be here today to pour my misogynistic bile into your mind over the Internet.
There have always been and will always be intelligent women who don’t fit into the usual mould. Among other things, universities are meant to be places where smart freaks can be happily sequestered from the normies so their weird brains can spark off of one another. Women shouldn’t be artificially prevented from participating, but nor should they be artificially forced in. If they can’t meet the standards, they shouldn’t be given special accommodations merely for the purpose of increasing female representation; if they can’t keep up with the boys, the boys shouldn’t be obligated to slow down for their benefit; if they can’t handle the emotional strain of having their ideas attacked, they should be encouraged to sit down with a nice calming mug of chamomile tea, and have a think about where they can find less aggressive company. On the other hand, if they can keep up, they certainly should. No one cares who came up with a good idea.
The academic sector could reverse the death spiral they’re perched on and revive itself by reverting to what was common practice until just a few generations ago: highly selective admissions that accept only the crème de la crème, upon whom the academy ruthlessly enforces the most exacting standards of intellectual, physical, and moral development. Graduates of such institutions would be manifestly superior specimens, both because of the initial selectivity, and thanks to the gruelling regimen that tempered the already high-quality alloy of their minds, bodies, and souls. As such, they would be likely to excel out in the reak world, and therefore be hot commodities on the sexual marketplace: in other words, alumni would be high status. Once men perceived these new institutions as arenas in which they could successfully compete for status, interest among young men would be greatly revived. In turn, the prestige of the institutions would increase; with it would come funding.
Exclusively male institutions might be worth thinking about; Celeste Davis herself suggested this in a footnote, though I suspect her tongue was planted in her cheek. However, one would not even have to explicitly exclude women from participation: so long as standards are high enough, relatively few women would meet them, the arena would be male-dominated, and therefore it would be a useful arena for male competition.
In any case, no such course of rejuvenation is available to existing universities, who are locked in to their current trajectory both due to the iDEIlogical monomania of entrenched faculty, and the mercantile necessities of their MBA-brained administrators, for whom the quantity of tuition-paying students is of far greater concern than the modal quality of the student body, and who therefore doom their captive institutions to lose both. As a result, the fate of academia is almost certainly to fade into irrelevance as they settle into comfortable mediocrity as finishing schools for young ladies. The ones that don’t simply go bankrupt, at least, which, as we’ve seen, about half of them are on course for. And that’s assuming that right-wing governments don’t pull a Henry VIII, and loot the monasteries for fun, profit, and social hygiene. Which is something that’s being talked about a lot, lately.
New universities founded on elitist, inegalitarian principles can be established, of course, but these are few and far between. It takes a lot of capital to set up a university. The University of Austin (which you can find here on Substack at
), for example, required a cool $200 million to get rolling, just to serve a student body of around 100, with an eventual goal of 1000.
In lieu of such infrastructure, ad hoc solutions have self-organized amongst the sensitive young men who no longer feel comfortable in the academic quilting bee. The right-wing anon sphere has essentially become an informal salon in which high-IQ youth7 gather behind anime avatars to discuss thinkers deliberately misrepresented or memory-holed by the DIEvory tower – Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Spengler, Evola, Guenon, de Coulanges, and so on. This has not gone unnoticed. Consider this recent Twitter thread, the main author of which is a Temple University geography professor:
Of course, there a few other status arenas in which ambitious young men are finding places for themselves. For example:
Notice anything about that image from the SpaceX control centre? You’re not the only one.
Academics fretting about male flight from the academy couch their concerns in worries over the consequences for the futures of young men – reduced opportunities, reduced lifetime incomes. It’s true that young men are doing pretty poorly right now. They’re depressed, withdrawn, suicidal, disenfranchised, bitter, and angry.
But they’ll be fine in the long run.
It’s the universities that should be worried.’
Fascinating, however status dynamics only work mostly with extroverted personalities. Academics in the hard sciences tend to be introverted, and for many, status is irrelevant, just an inconvenience that gets in the way that has to be managed, like paying taxes, changing the car oil, doctor appointments, etc. Introverts focus on doing what they like to do, and that is all. It is however true that with DIE, we have an influx of mediocrities in academia, who tend to come in e.g. via the route of "math education" research (e.g. the "math is racist cult"). These mediocrities by the way are very proficient at politicking, pursuing "status", infiltrating positions of power fo confer each other status, and so on.
Very interesting and stimulating article. I am in substantial agreement, and saw this conclusion coming several decades ago. I recommend trades for young men, with a degree if desired, obtained by after hours and weekend study, as "icing on the cake"...all of mine have done this and outperformed their peers over all metrics. Learning practical skills first allows the bread to be on the table, minimal debt, higher satisfaction, and development of critical thinking. ( Tradesmen are generally obligated to be real, sincere, and honest in their thinking to be effective). For example, an author of a very good text on welding, states that any person who is not honest should NOT become a welder...they will cause the death of someone. The truth is critically important...and is not taught in many universities...and therefore should be learned at home or with a trade master, before being exposed to the non-sensical propaganda passing for 'education' these days. The before and after photos presented in the article are telling...I would not even consider speaking to or 'dating' any of the 'afters', let alone marrying one. Good and thorough job on the research too...thank you...well done. P.s. you are not a misogynist, by my observation, at least.