John Tierney wrote:
The women surveyed were less willing to marry down -- marry someone with much lower earnings or less education -- than the men were to marry up. And, in line with Jane Austen, the women were also more determined to marry up than the men were.
As far as I know, this is true in all ancient and modern hierarchical societies, such as prewar Japan and present-day India. Anthropologists call this the "leftover Brahmin woman problem." Household status is determined by the husband's social position, so men feel much freer to marry below their station.
You may think that women's attitudes are changing as they get more college degrees and financial independence.
Why would I think that? On the contrary, the most highly educated sector of society tends to be the most conservative, because people who go to college have money and they have the biggest stake in the status quo. If anything, increased female participation in higher education will lead to increased conservatism among women, and more concern about obsolete social mores, hierarchy and the other petty concerns that dominate the waking hours of most primates.
A women who's an executive can afford to marry a struggling musician. But that doesn't necessarily mean she wants to.
And is unlikely that she will, in any traditional society (including the conservative sectors of our own).
Which means that, on average, college-educated women and high-school-educated men will have a harder time finding partners as long as educators keep ignoring the gender gap that starts long before college.
Say what?!? The problem is not the gender gap, it is the obsolete social mores. Women should stop worrying about who they marry. Educators did not cause the gap to appear and they can do nothing to close it. If anything, university level educators tend to be prejudiced in favor of men, since most still are still men and they tend to be wealthy and therefore conservative. In my experience, having sent two daughters through universities, professors and the university establishment make trouble for women, and they make thing much more challenging -- which is probably why the women succeed, come to think of it. As my mother used to say, you have to do twice as well as a man to get half the credit.
Anyone who doubts that academic professionals tend to be stick-in-the-mud conservatives and conformists should look at their response to cold fusion.
In the 1930s through the 1950s, U.S. university professors earned such small salaries they could barely make ends meet, and their wives usually worked. In the late 1960s, when Mizuno became a junior professor he earned about $400 per month (as he describes in his new book). After the baby blue of the 1960s and the changes in the educational establishment, professors began earning far more money, and the whole complexion of the professorial class changed. The radical left-wing professor is a myth, 50-years out of date.
Advocates for women have been so effective politically that high schools and colleges are still focusing on supposed discrimination against women . . .
That is utter nonsense.
. . . the shortage of women in science classes . . .
. . . is a good indication of how prejudiced and sexist the science establishment still remains.
By the way, the academic gap measured in SAT scores and the like only exists in middle and lower class children. Wealthy children of both sexes do about equally well, and the men tend to get into the university more easily because by tradition they get a free pass and everyone cuts them slack. That is why lazy, towel-snapping gentleman's C- dolts and frat-boys such as G. W. Bush and Al Gore managed to get into -- and out of -- Harvard Business School, and why they still end up being the president of the United States. See:
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~immerman/play/opinion05/WithoutADoubt.html See also: "The New Gender Divide At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust" http://www.nytimes.com/2006/07/09/education/09college.html - Jed
