On International Women’s Day, feminists typically go nuts about how unequal women are to men and circulate repeatedly disproved claims such as the gender wage gap.
No, it’s not real, and can easily be explained why women typically bring in less than men, none of it having to do with “patriarchy” or “discrimination.”
But feminists tend to clutch their pearls over underrepresentation quite a bit, namely in fields such as CEOs of massive companies, STEM, and even firefighting. To them, this is a surefire example of how the system is stacked against women, and why men are so awful. Oddly, they’re quite silent in the lack of women in fields that require dirty work, such as sewage workers, garbage collectors, and construction jobs.
They also seem to be silent about another discrepancy, and it’s in how much more women earn in terms of college degrees than men do.
According to the American Enterprise Institute just last September, women have been out-earning men in college degrees for eight years running, and by a high margin to boot.
For the eighth year in a row, women earned a majority of doctoral degrees awarded at US universities in 2016. Of the 78,744 doctoral degrees awarded in 2016 (Table B.25), women earned 40,407 of those degrees and 52.1% of the total, compared to 37,145 degrees awarded to men who earned 47.9% of the total (see top chart above). Women have now earned a majority of doctoral degrees in each academic year since 2009. Previously, women started earning a majority of associate’s degrees for the first time in 1978, a majority of master’s degrees in 1981, and a majority of bachelor’s degrees in 1982 according to the Department of Education. Therefore, 2009 marked the year when men officially became the “second sex” in higher education by earning a minority of college degrees at all college levels from associate’s degrees to doctoral degrees.
Where is the outrage over lack of equality from feminists now? Where are the marches, Google-backed videos on YouTube, and articles galore about how unequal it is that women earn so many more doctoral degrees than men? Men are being underrepresented! Where’s the solution?
As George Mason University economist Walter E. Williams, puts it as paraphrased by AEI:
If America’s diversity worshipers see any female under-representation as a problem and possibly even as proof of gender discrimination, what do they propose should be done about female over-representation in higher education at every level and in 7 out of 11 graduate fields? After all, to be logically consistent, aren’t female over-representation and female under-representation simply different sides of gender injustice?
Seems that for all the talk of combating inequality, feminists are strangely silent about inequality when it fails to benefit their victim narrative.
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