Female Supremacy Articles - Page 20
His and hers ... well, mostly hers
The reasons vary as much as the reactions when husbands take their wives' last names.
By CHANTAL LAMERS
The Orange County Register
July 17, 2006
The guests at Dayton Smith and Bobbie Jeanne La Grua's wedding didn't talk about the bride's embroidered organza dress, the five-tiered spice wedding cake or the freakishly warm October weather.
As the vows ended and the newlyweds turned from the altar toward their family and friends, the priest said something peculiar.
"I now present you with Mr. and Mrs. La Grua."
The crowd gasped. They looked around, eyes wide. Then they snickered. There must have been some sort of mistake. But as guests would soon learn, there was no slip-up. No faux pas on the priest's part.
Dayton Smith, upon marrying Bobbie Jeanne La Grua in 1975, agreed not only to take her in sickness and in health, but to take her last name, too.
Beginning around the 1960s, more women were choosing to keep their maiden names or hyphenate their names after marriage. The number of women choosing to retain their maiden name dipped in the mid-1990s. Bride-to-be Web site TheKnot.com reported in 2004 that 81 percent of women planned to assume the last names of their husbands. But what about the study on men who give up their surnames?
Some, it turns out, do it to preserve their wife's rare last name. Others to wipe the slate clean and start a new life, turning marriage into something akin to the French Foreign Legion. Some guys do it just to be different.
Bobbie Jeanne, whose last name is linked to a Sicilian castle, and who is one of a few dozen people with her last name left in the United States, didn't want to trade in her unusual last name for the most usual – Smith.
So Dayton, of Huntington Beach, checked with his father, who was raised in an orphanage, about whether it was OK for him to become a La Grua. His father, unsure at the time if Smith was his given last name, didn't mind.
Dayton says no one blinked an eye 31 years ago when he decided to take his wife's last name. Though he did have to swear before a Superior Court judge that he wasn't changing his name to escape the law.
While some women don't mind adding a hyphen, or even combining their name with that of their husband to create a whole new last name, that wasn't an option for Jill Dominguez when she got engaged to Richard Vais 12 years ago.
Jill, president of a community investment corporation, was raised by a feminist mother and grew up reading Ms. magazine. Through her Women's Studies courses in college she learned that for centuries, women were obligated to give up their last names when they married. Under the law, women actually became the property of the men they wed, thus assuming one identity.
"He knew I was adamant about me not taking his last name," says Jill. "But he didn't know I wanted him to take my last name."
So in one breath, Jill proposed and asked Richard to take her last name and marry her the next day in Las Vegas.
"I was flattered, actually," says Richard, who talked over the decision with his parents first. "I said yes right away. I didn't want her to get away either."
Mostly, the Westminster couple say, it's a conversation starter. The switcheroo occasionally results in an inquisitive look and a line of questioning. When it comes to paperwork, for example, various clerks look at Jill's maiden name and ask if they had the same name when they met.
"A little old lady at the Social Security office told me that he was a real keeper and she'd never heard of anyone doing it before," says Jill.
Men ask if it's legal (it is). Women want to know where Jill found him (they are old friends).
Everyone wants to know if Jill wears the pants in the family (Richard says she does).
"No one gives me trouble about it," says Richard.
Shannon Hickman was surprised when her fiancé, Joe Cothman said, "What do you think about me taking your last name?"
Joe said he wanted the family, which included Shannon's daughter from a previous relationship, to have the same last name.
"I was like, OK, that's sweet," says Shannon, 35.
"We discussed it, got the legal documents and consulted a lawyer. It works just like a female changing her name."
So when Joe called Shannon's father to ask if he could marry her, he also asked if he could take their last name. Joe, 29, who says he never had a close relationship with his father or grandfather, thought of the switch as a way to harmonize the new family and wipe the slate clean with the old.
The Rancho Santa Margarita couple didn't tell anyone before the wedding. But unlike at the La Grua wedding, no one thought the priest had made a mistake.
"Because I tend to have a strong personality, everyone's initial thought was that it was my idea," says Shannon. "No one actually said anything to us at the wedding. My best friend said, 'I think people are talking about it.' "
Joe's grandmother tried to talk him out of it. His father, who wasn't invited to the wedding, is still angry about the name change.
Joe has no regrets. But it did take some getting used to. Throughout high school, people always called Joe by his last name. So when he ran into an old buddy at a wedding recently, he had to correct his friend.
"He said, 'Hey, Cothman.' And I said, 'Actually, it's Hickman now.' "He was like, 'Shut up.' "
Like Joe Hickman, Kelly Williams, 35, wants everyone in her family to have the same name.
Only problem is, she promised her father before he died that she'd keep her name. And her husband, Groove Rothenburger, whom she married four years ago, isn't sold on the idea.
"I was originally planning on changing my name a couple months before (my father) died," says Williams, a doctor at Mission Hospital in Mission Viejo.
"He cried and asked me not to change it. He was really proud that I was a physician, that there was a Williams doctor in the family, and my sister had already changed her last name."
Kelly, who has a 14-month-old daughter and is pregnant, is conflicted. The thought of going back on her word agonizes her, but so does the prospect of not sharing a last name with her children.
"I just want to be a family with the same name," she says.
Groove, 32, counters that while he endured being called "Rottenbuger" growing up, changing his name to his wife's isn't a manly thing to do.
"Most of my friends probably wouldn't say anything," he says. "They'd probably just say, 'Wow, dude, you really must be whipped.' "
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What Shamu Taught Me About a Happy Marriage
By AMY SUTHERLAND
New York Times
Published: June 25, 2006
As I wash dishes at the kitchen sink, my husband paces behind me, irritated. "Have you seen my keys?" he snarls, then huffs out a loud sigh and stomps from the room with our dog, Dixie, at his heels, anxious over her favorite human's upset.
In the past I would have been right behind Dixie. I would have turned off the faucet and joined the hunt while trying to soothe my husband with bromides like, "Don't worry, they'll turn up." But that only made him angrier, and a simple case of missing keys soon would become a full-blown angst-ridden drama starring the two of us and our poor nervous dog.
Now, I focus on the wet dish in my hands. I don't turn around. I don't say a word. I'm using a technique I learned from a dolphin trainer.
I love my husband. He's well read, adventurous and does a hysterical rendition of a northern Vermont accent that still cracks me up after 12 years of marriage.
But he also tends to be forgetful, and is often tardy and mercurial. He hovers around me in the kitchen asking if I read this or that piece in The New Yorker when I'm trying to concentrate on the simmering pans. He leaves wadded tissues in his wake. He suffers from serious bouts of spousal deafness but never fails to hear me when I mutter to myself on the other side of the house. "What did you say?" he'll shout.
These minor annoyances are not the stuff of separation and divorce, but in sum they began to dull my love for Scott. I wanted — needed — to nudge him a little closer to perfect, to make him into a mate who might annoy me a little less, who wouldn't keep me waiting at restaurants, a mate who would be easier to love.
So, like many wives before me, I ignored a library of advice books and set about improving him. By nagging, of course, which only made his behavior worse: he'd drive faster instead of slower; shave less frequently, not more; and leave his reeking bike garb on the bedroom floor longer than ever.
We went to a counselor to smooth the edges off our marriage. She didn't understand what we were doing there and complimented us repeatedly on how well we communicated. I gave up. I guessed she was right — our union was better than most — and resigned myself to stretches of slow-boil resentment and occasional sarcasm.
Then something magical happened. For a book I was writing about a school for exotic animal trainers, I started commuting from Maine to California, where I spent my days watching students do the seemingly impossible: teaching hyenas to pirouette on command, cougars to offer their paws for a nail clipping, and baboons to skateboard.
I listened, rapt, as professional trainers explained how they taught dolphins to flip and elephants to paint. Eventually it hit me that the same techniques might work on that stubborn but lovable species, the American husband.
The central lesson I learned from exotic animal trainers is that I should reward behavior I like and ignore behavior I don't. After all, you don't get a sea lion to balance a ball on the end of its nose by nagging. The same goes for the American husband.
Back in Maine, I began thanking Scott if he threw one dirty shirt into the hamper. If he threw in two, I'd kiss him. Meanwhile, I would step over any soiled clothes on the floor without one sharp word, though I did sometimes kick them under the bed. But as he basked in my appreciation, the piles became smaller.
I was using what trainers call "approximations," rewarding the small steps toward learning a whole new behavior. You can't expect a baboon to learn to flip on command in one session, just as you can't expect an American husband to begin regularly picking up his dirty socks by praising him once for picking up a single sock. With the baboon you first reward a hop, then a bigger hop, then an even bigger hop. With Scott the husband, I began to praise every small act every time: if he drove just a mile an hour slower, tossed one pair of shorts into the hamper, or was on time for anything.
I also began to analyze my husband the way a trainer considers an exotic animal. Enlightened trainers learn all they can about a species, from anatomy to social structure, to understand how it thinks, what it likes and dislikes, what comes easily to it and what doesn't. For example, an elephant is a herd animal, so it responds to hierarchy. It cannot jump, but can stand on its head. It is a vegetarian.
The exotic animal known as Scott is a loner, but an alpha male. So hierarchy matters, but being in a group doesn't so much. He has the balance of a gymnast, but moves slowly, especially when getting dressed. Skiing comes naturally, but being on time does not. He's an omnivore, and what a trainer would call food-driven.
Once I started thinking this way, I couldn't stop. At the school in California, I'd be scribbling notes on how to walk an emu or have a wolf accept you as a pack member, but I'd be thinking, "I can't wait to try this on Scott."
On a field trip with the students, I listened to a professional trainer describe how he had taught African crested cranes to stop landing on his head and shoulders. He did this by training the leggy birds to land on mats on the ground. This, he explained, is what is called an "incompatible behavior," a simple but brilliant concept.
Rather than teach the cranes to stop landing on him, the trainer taught the birds something else, a behavior that would make the undesirable behavior impossible. The birds couldn't alight on the mats and his head simultaneously.
At home, I came up with incompatible behaviors for Scott to keep him from crowding me while I cooked. To lure him away from the stove, I piled up parsley for him to chop or cheese for him to grate at the other end of the kitchen island. Or I'd set out a bowl of chips and salsa across the room. Soon I'd done it: no more Scott hovering around me while I cooked.
I followed the students to SeaWorld San Diego, where a dolphin trainer introduced me to least reinforcing syndrome (L. R. S.). When a dolphin does something wrong, the trainer doesn't respond in any way. He stands still for a few beats, careful not to look at the dolphin, and then returns to work. The idea is that any response, positive or negative, fuels a behavior. If a behavior provokes no response, it typically dies away.
In the margins of my notes I wrote, "Try on Scott!"
It was only a matter of time before he was again tearing around the house searching for his keys, at which point I said nothing and kept at what I was doing. It took a lot of discipline to maintain my calm, but results were immediate and stunning. His temper fell far shy of its usual pitch and then waned like a fast-moving storm. I felt as if I should throw him a mackerel.
Now he's at it again; I hear him banging a closet door shut, rustling through papers on a chest in the front hall and thumping upstairs. At the sink, I hold steady. Then, sure enough, all goes quiet. A moment later, he walks into the kitchen, keys in hand, and says calmly, "Found them."
Without turning, I call out, "Great, see you later."
Off he goes with our much-calmed pup.
After two years of exotic animal training, my marriage is far smoother, my husband much easier to love. I used to take his faults personally; his dirty clothes on the floor were an affront, a symbol of how he didn't care enough about me. But thinking of my husband as an exotic species gave me the distance I needed to consider our differences more objectively.
I adopted the trainers' motto: "It's never the animal's fault." When my training attempts failed, I didn't blame Scott. Rather, I brainstormed new strategies, thought up more incompatible behaviors and used smaller approximations. I dissected my own behavior, considered how my actions might inadvertently fuel his. I also accepted that some behaviors were too entrenched, too instinctive to train away. You can't stop a badger from digging, and you can't stop my husband from losing his wallet and keys.
PROFESSIONALS talk of animals that understand training so well they eventually use it back on the trainer. My animal did the same. When the training techniques worked so beautifully, I couldn't resist telling my husband what I was up to. He wasn't offended, just amused. As I explained the techniques and terminology, he soaked it up. Far more than I realized.
Last fall, firmly in middle age, I learned that I needed braces. They were not only humiliating, but also excruciating. For weeks my gums, teeth, jaw and sinuses throbbed. I complained frequently and loudly. Scott assured me that I would become used to all the metal in my mouth. I did not.
One morning, as I launched into yet another tirade about how uncomfortable I was, Scott just looked at me blankly. He didn't say a word or acknowledge my rant in any way, not even with a nod.
I quickly ran out of steam and started to walk away. Then I realized what was happening, and I turned and asked, "Are you giving me an L. R. S.?" Silence. "You are, aren't you?"
He finally smiled, but his L. R. S. has already done the trick.
Amy Sutherland is the author of "Kicked, Bitten and Scratched: Life and Lessons at the Premier School for Exotic Animal Trainers" (Viking, June 2006).
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The New Gender Divide
At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust
By TAMAR LEWIN
New York Times
July 9, 2006
Nearing graduation, Rick Kohn is not putting much energy into his final courses.
"I take the path of least resistance," said Mr. Kohn, who works 25 hours a week to put himself through the University of North Carolina, Greensboro. "This summer, I looked for the four easiest courses I could take that would let me graduate in August."
It is not that Mr. Kohn, 24, is indifferent to education. He is excited about economics and hopes to get his master's in the field. But the other classes, he said, just do not seem worth the effort.
"What's the difference between an A and a B?" he asks. "Either way, you go on to the next class."
He does not see his female classmates sharing that attitude. Women work harder in school, Mr. Kohn believes. "The girls care more about their G.P.A. and the way they look on paper," he said.
A quarter-century after women became the majority on college campuses, men are trailing women in more than just enrollment.
Department of Education statistics show that men, whatever their race or socioeconomic group, are less likely than women to get bachelor's degrees — and among those who do, fewer complete their degrees in four or five years. Men also get worse grades than women.
And in two national studies, college men reported that they studied less and socialized more than their female classmates.
Small wonder, then, that at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees.
It is not that men are in a downward spiral: they are going to college in greater numbers and are more likely to graduate than two decades ago.
Still, men now make up only 42 percent of the nation's college students. And with sex discrimination fading and their job opportunities widening, women are coming on much stronger, often leapfrogging the men to the academic finish.
"The boys are about where they were 30 years ago, but the girls are just on a tear, doing much, much better," said Tom Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Pell Institute for Study of Opportunity in Higher Education in Washington.
Take Jen Smyers, who has been a powerhouse in her three years at American University in Washington.
She has a dean's scholarship, has held four internships and three jobs in her time at American, made the dean's list almost every term and also led the campus women's initiative. And when the rest of her class graduates with bachelor's degrees next year, Ms. Smyers will be finishing her master's.
She says her intense motivation is not so unusual. "The women here are on fire," she said.
And when it gets to graduation, differences are evident too.
At Harvard, 55 percent of the women graduated with honors this spring, compared with barely half the men. And at Florida Atlantic University in Boca Raton, a public university, women made up 64 percent of this year's graduates, but they got 75 percent of the honors degrees and 79 percent of the highest honors, summa cum laude.
Of course, nationwide, there are young men at the top of the class and fields like computer science, engineering and physics that are male dominated.
Professors interviewed on several campuses say that in their experience men seem to cluster in a disproportionate share at both ends of the spectrum — students who are the most brilliantly creative, and students who cannot keep up.
"My best male students are every bit as good as my best female students," said Wendy Moffat, a longtime English professor at Dickinson College in Pennsylvania. "But the range among the guys is wider."
From the time they are young, boys are far more likely than girls to be suspended or expelled, or have a learning disability or emotional problem diagnosed. As teenagers, they are more likely to drop out of high school, commit suicide or be incarcerated. Such difficulties can have echoes even in college men.
Women in the Majority
What is beyond dispute is that the college landscape is changing. Women now make up 58 percent of those enrolled in two- and four-year colleges and are, over all, the majority in graduate schools and professional schools too.
Most institutions of higher learning, except engineering schools, now have a female edge, with many small liberal arts colleges and huge public universities alike hovering near the 60-40 ratio. Even Harvard, long a male bastion, has begun to tilt toward women.
"The class we just admitted will be 52 percent female," said William Fitzsimmons, Harvard's dean of admissions.
While Harvard accepts men and women in proportions roughly equal to their presence in the applicant pool, other elite universities do not. At Brown University, men made up not quite 40 percent of this year's applicants, but 47 percent of those admitted.
Women now outnumber men two to one at places like the State University of New York at New Paltz, the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and Baltimore City Community College. And they make up particularly large majorities among older students.
Thomas diPrete, a Columbia University sociology professor, has found that while boys whose parents had only a high school education used to be more likely to get a college education than their sisters, that has flipped.
Still, the gender gap has moved to the front burner in part because of interest from educated mothers worrying that their sons are adrift or disturbed that their girls are being passed over by admissions officers eager for boys, said Judith Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska professor who has created the Boys Project (boysproject.net), a coalition of researchers, educators and parents to address boys' troubles.
"I hate to be cynical, but when it was a problem of black or poor kids, nobody cared, but now that it's a problem of white sons of college-educated parents, it's moving very rapidly to the forefront," Dr. Kleinfeld said. "At most colleges, there is a sense that a lot of boys are missing in action."
Beyond the data points — graduation rates, enrollment rates, grades — there are subtle differences in the nature of men's and women's college experiences.
In dozens of interviews on three campuses — Dickinson College; American University; and the University of North Carolina, Greensboro — male and female students alike agreed that the slackers in their midst were mostly male, and that the fireballs were mostly female.
Almost all speculated that it had something to do with the women's movement.
"The roles have changed a lot," said Travis Rothway, a 23-year-old junior at American University, a private school where only 36 percent of last year's freshmen were male. "Men have always been the dominant figure, providing for the household, but now women have broken out of their domestic roles in society. I don't think guys' willingness to work and succeed has changed, it's more that the women have stepped up."
Ben Turner, who graduated from American this spring, said he did not believe that work habits were determined by gender — but acknowledged that he and his girlfriend fit the stereotypes.
"She does all her readings for classes, and I don't always," Mr. Turner said. "She's more organized than me, so if there's a paper due a week from Monday, she's already started, and I know I'll be doing it the weekend before. She studies more than I do because she doesn't like cramming and being stressed. She just has a better work ethic than I do."
Ms. Smyers, also at American, said she recently ended a relationship with another student, in part out of frustration over his playing video games four hours a day.
"He said he was thinking of trying to cut back to 15 hours a week," she said. "I said, 'Fifteen hours is what I spend on my internship, and I get paid $1,300 a month.' That's my litmus test now: I won't date anyone who plays video games. It means they're choosing to do something that wastes their time and sucks the life out of them."
Men are underrepresented when it comes to graduation and honors. Eighty-three percent of women who were Dickinson freshmen in 2001 graduated four years later, compared with 75 percent of the men. Dickinson women, who made up just over half of last year's graduates, got slightly more than two-thirds of the cum laude, magna and summa degrees.
Since the process of human development crosses all borders, it makes sense that Europe, too, now has more women than men heading to college. The disengagement of young men, though, takes different forms in different cultures. Japan, over the last decade, has seen the emergence of "hikikomori" — young men withdrawing to their rooms, eschewing social life for months or years on end.
At Dickinson, some professors and administrators have begun to notice a similar withdrawal among men who arrive on campus with deficient social skills. Each year, there are several who mostly stay in their rooms, talk to no one, play video games into the wee hours and miss classes until they withdraw or flunk out.
Of course, female behavior has its own extremes. In freshman women, educators worry about eating disorders and perfectionism.
But among the freshman men, the problems stem mostly from immaturity.
"There was so much freedom when I got here, compared to my very structured high school life, that I kept putting things off," said Greg Williams, who just finished his freshman year. "I wouldn't do much work and I played a lot of Halo. I didn't know how to wake up on time without a mom. I had laundry problems. I shrank all my clothes and had to buy new ones."
Whether the male disadvantage will persist even as women's academic achievement soars is an open question. But many young men believe that, once in the work world, they will prevail.
"I think men do better out in the world because they care more about the power, the status, the C.E.O. job," Mr. Kohn said.
"And maybe society holds men a little higher."
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Report: More women in college
Male dominance in class dwindles at colleges
Most Ohio institutions are included in trend
By Carol Biliczky
Beacon Journal staff writer
Any woman going to college for an ``MRS degree'' -- in other words, to find a husband -- may be sorely disappointed these days.
A report released Tuesday by the American Council on Education says far more women are going to college than men.
That is true just about everywhere in Ohio, including Kent State University, where 60 percent of the students are female, and at the University of Akron, where 54percent are.
``The situation has reversed itself over the last 25 years,'' said Bill Kraus, associate vice president of enrollment management at UA. ``Going to college has become more of an accepted practice for women.''
While the number of men and women earning bachelor's degrees is on the rise nationwide, women are doing so at a faster clip, said Jacqueline E. King, director of the ACE Center for Policy Analysis and author of the study.
Among white students in 2003-04, the year on which the study was based, the male population dropped to 46 percent, down from 49 percent in 1995-96; among Hispanic students, the male population dropped to 43 percent from 45 percent during the same time span.
Those gaps are due largely to enrollments of larger numbers of low-income white females and low- and middle-income Hispanic women, the report shows.
African-Americans still tend to have the largest gender gap, even though male college attendance rose from 37 percent to 40 percent.
And Asian-American males are losing their dominance in education, with Asian-American females now going to college at the same rate.
King, who wrote the report, said she didn't know why more women favor college, but it could be economics.
``Women who have a high school diploma really have a difficult time making a good wage,'' she said. ``Young men can find they can earn a good wage working on a construction site or driving a delivery truck.''
Those men don't necessarily change their minds and enroll in college later, the report suggests.
The older the male, the less likely he is to go college, according to the report. Men 25 and older represent only 15 percent of undergraduates nationwide.
That may be one reason that Stark State College's enrollment in North Canton is 40 percent male and 60 percent female. The rapidly growing state school concentrates on certificate and associate degree programs for both younger and older adults.
While Stark State offers everything from automotive technology to nursing, ``I think the emphasis has been on encouraging women to further their education in recent years,'' spokeswoman Irene Lewis-Motts said.
Despite the report, there is some local evidence that more males are going to college.
At private Mount Union College in Alliance, the ratio is 53 percent women and 47 percent men. But this fall's freshman class will have 387 men and 314 women -- possibly because the college won a Division III national football championship last year, spokeswoman Diane Thomas said.
And at private Hiram College, last year's enrollment tipped toward men and so will this fall's.
Jim Barrett, executive director of admissions, said he didn't know what sparked the change, as Hiram hasn't added a program that would be unusually attractive to men and admissions are blind when it comes to gender. ``It was an accident of fate,'' he said.
Does it matter to students when the ratio skews to one sex or the other?
It's evident on the dating scene and in class, possibly because men don't attend as rigorously, said Krista George, a Mount Union junior majoring in history.
Because guys don't want to settle down and have many women to pick from, ``a lot of my friends struggle with finding someone they like and that likes them,'' she said.
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Fewer men on campus
USA Today
July 12, 2006
A wistful line from Jan and Dean's classic Surf City song - "two girls for every boy" - has come true within the California State University system.
California commission recently looked at gender imbalances in the nation's largest higher education system and came away astonished. Most startling are the male dropout rates. The state university system's entering class in 2000 was 57% female, and the graduating class in 2005 was 66% female.
So what's happening to men on campus in California and elsewhere? The answer can't be the result of population differences: men make up 51.3% of the state's population between ages 18 and 34. Everyone has a theory: Parents blame toxic culture, teachers blame lax parents, and psychologists say boys are confused over shifting gender roles.
All are plausible, but the primary reason increasingly appears to be a relative lapse in boys' verbal skills. Not to worry, argues a recent report from the Washington think tank Education Sector that has generated considerable attention. This is not bad news about men, the report argues, but rather good news about women. The only gender problem on campuses involves minorities, it says.
It's true that black men lag the most. Three decades ago, black men and women were evenly represented in California's public university systems. By 2004, men had dropped to 36% of the black population enrolled.
But the education gender gaps transcend race and class. Among high school seniors who have at least one parent who graduated from college, 23% of the boys read at "below basic" levels on national tests, compared with only 7% of the girls. At many nearly all-white high schools, girls dominate the academic honors and run the prominent student activities.
On Tuesday, the American Council on Education reported that the biggest slide on campus has occurred among lower-income white males and Hispanic men. Among white students from all income backgrounds, the report found, gender gaps first emerged in the late 1990s and have widened each year since then.
Boys from higher-income families continue to go to college at high rates, mostly because there's a college for anyone whose checks don't bounce, even C-average boys. But too many of these boys end up in unchallenging courses or drop out because they were poorly prepared for college work.
College matters because workers with bachelor's degrees earn salaries that average 62% higher than full-time employees with only high school diplomas. More important, in a global economy a bachelor's degree just gets you to the starting gate.
The blue-collar jobs that once supported families are drying up, affecting males more than females. So if a focused effort isn't made to address boys' needs, as was done successfully a generation ago for girls, many boys' futures will be grim, and the nation's ability to compete will slide.
Two girls for every boy sounded good to Jan and Dean, but it's not a healthy ratio for America's colleges and workplaces.
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Women gaining on men in advanced fields
By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer
Thu Jun 1, 2006
WASHINGTON - Women now earn the majority of diplomas in fields men used to dominate — from biology to business — and have caught up in pursuit of law, medicine and other advanced degrees.
Federal statistics released Thursday show that in many ways, the gender gap among college students is widening. The story is largely one of progress for women, stagnation for men.
Women earn the majority of bachelor's degrees in business, biological sciences, social sciences and history. The same is true for traditional strongholds such as education and psychology.
In undergraduate and graduate disciplines where women trail men, they are gaining ground, earning larger numbers of degrees in math, physical sciences and agriculture.
"Women are going in directions that maybe their mothers or grandmothers never even thought about going," said Avis Jones-DeWeever, who oversees education policy for the Institute of Women's Policy Research.
"We're teaching girls that they need to be able to explore every opportunity that they are interested in. It's good to see that is happening," she said.
The findings were part of a 379-page report, "The Condition of Education," a yearly compilation of statistics that give a picture of academic trends.
Women now account for about half the enrollment in professional programs such as law, medicine and optometry. That is up from 22 percent a generation ago.
The number of women enrolled in undergraduate classes has grown more than twice as fast as it has for men. Women outnumber men on campus by at least 2 million, and the gap is growing.
In business, by far the most popular degree field among undergraduates, women earn slightly more than half of all bachelor degrees; it was one-third in 1980.
"You have a large number of women in the administrative work force, and in the past, they were never able to be the managers and the vice presidents," said Claire Van Ummersen of the American Council on Education. "Now they have those opportunities, and they are taking advantage of them. They can be something other than an administrative assistant."
The U.S. population is 51 percent female, the same as it was three decade ago. Yet legal and cultural barriers have fallen during that time, creating opportunities for women, experts say.
Women also have become savvy about boosting their income for themselves and their families by recognizing the value of advanced degrees, Jones-DeWeever said.
The enrollment of men in professional degree programs is declining.
"There's every reason to celebrate the success of women. And one has to be concerned about what's happening with men," said Russ Whitehurst, director of the Institute of Education Sciences, a research arm of the Education Department.
"Women have been making educational progress, and the men are stuck," he said. "They haven't just fallen behind women. They have fallen behind changes in the job market."
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Women taking on greater role on world stage
By David R. Sands
Washington Times
May13, 2006
Power these days comes in both pink and blue.
Last week's well-reviewed U.S. tour by German Chancellor Angela Merkel was yet another reminder that political barriers to real power are falling for female leaders -- and in some unexpected places.
Mrs. Merkel, elected last fall, is one of a dozen female presidents, prime ministers and chief executives around the world. Britain's Margaret Beckett made history last week when Prime Minister Tony Blair tapped her as the country's first female foreign secretary.
Israeli Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and French Defense Minister Michele Alliot-Marie not only hold key ministerial portfolios, but are both seen as serious candidates for higher office in the near future. Some U.S. political forecasters project an all-distaff 2008 presidential race between Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, New York Democrat, and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
"The numbers are definitely on the increase," said Laura Liswood, secretary-general of the Washington-based Council of Women World Leaders, "and women are increasingly moving intothose key jobs that are the springboard to the top ranks."
The council was formed a decade ago as a networking group for current and former female heads of government. Membership now totals 34.
Already this year, four women on four continents have become either president or prime minister: President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf of Liberia, Africa's first female elected head of state; Chilean President Michelle Bachelet; Jamaican Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller; and South Korean Prime Minister Han Myung-sook.
The 12 female chief executives now serving is one short of the record set briefly in July 2002, when Latvia, Finland, New Zealand, Ireland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, Indonesia, Panama, Bangladesh, Senegal, Sao Tome and Principe, and South Korea all boasted a woman in one of the top slots.
Miss Liswood said that about one-third of the women who have achieved ultimate political power are "legacy leaders" -- women who came to office through their fathers, husbands or their ties to a powerful family. A number of South Asian female leaders -- from former Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi and former Pakistani Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto to Bangladeshi Prime Minister Begum Khaleda Zia and Philippine President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo -- originally came to power this way.
While legacy leaders often promote gender equality and women's issues in their societies, it is the women who rise to the top on their own -- from Britain's Margaret Thatcher to Mrs. Merkel and Mrs. Bachelet -- who "really tend to bring with them a sea of change in values and attitudes," Miss Liswood said.
Mrs. Bachelet, who took office in March, kept a campaign pledge to balance her Cabinet. Women hold half of the ministerial posts in her government and 15 of the 31 subsecretary jobs.
Martin K.I. Christensen, a Danish journalist, has privately compiled what might be the world's most extensive compendium of women in power. His "Worldwide Guide to Women in Leadership" -- found at www.guide2womenleaders.com -- is a box score of almost staggering comprehensiveness to the state of female political power.
Mr. Christensen attributes his interest to reading a world history book as a boy about such historical figures as Queen Elizabeth and Catherine the Great.
According to Mr. Christensen's research, Miss Rice and Britain's Mrs. Beckett are two of 17 female foreign ministers around the world, while France's Mrs. Alliot-Marie is part of a more exclusive club of eight female defense and security ministers.
Four countries -- Brunei, Russia, the Vatican and North Korea -- have no women above the vice ministerial level in government, while two countries -- Monaco and Saudi Arabia -- have never had a female minister at any level in their history.
With four women (27 percent) in President Bush's Cabinet, the United States ranks below such European powers as Britain (34 percent), Norway (45 percent), Spain (47 percent) and Austria (50 percent). The prime minister of Mr. Christensen's native Denmark, Anders Fogh Rasmussen, is male, but women run both the main leftist opposition party and Mr. Rasmussen's conservative partner in the coalition government.
Miss Liswood said most female chief executives welcome an invitation from the council as a way to make contacts and share the special challenges they face as women. But there have been exceptions.
"Margaret Thatcher never accepted our offer to join," she said.
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Girls look up to female politicians
By Jennifer Harper
Washington Times
May 5, 2006
Lady lawmakers, politicians, candidates, officials and presidential wannabes: behave and be noble. Teenage girls are watching.
Magnified by the press, the female politician is a role model for adolescent women, according to a study released Wednesday by the University of Notre Dame, inspiring political interest and even future voting behaviors in young women.
"A highly visible woman politician in the future -- perhaps even as the top of a major party presidential ticket -- has the potential to generate significant interest in political activity," note authors David Campbell and Christina Wolbrecht.
The concept of women holding office comes at a complex cultural moment, however. Actress Geena Davis -- who played a president on ABC's "Commander in Chief" -- plans to appear at the National Press Club to address "the importance of women leaders to the future of America's democracy." A spokesman said yesterday that Miss Davis will share the dais with members of the White House Project, a District-based interest group promoting, yes, a lady president and feminine leadership.
Mr. Campbell and Miss Wolbrecht say the phenomenon of female politicians benefits teenage girls because of their emotional -- and girlish -- natures. The study authors found that girls react more emotionally to the media-driven hubbub of politics than boys.
"Female candidates lead girls to have greater confidence in political institutions. Because fellow women are involved in politics, girls may view political institutions as more responsive to their concerns and worthy of their trust," the authors say.
Female politicians also inspire productive girl talk, leading girls to "envision" themselves as political participants.
"Girls and their peers may react to the presence of female politicians by adding politics to the list of topics they discuss among themselves, and that they will discuss with their teachers and parents," the authors continue. "The singular importance of discussions at home underscores the primary role played by the family in the process of political socialization."
The authors based their conclusions on an analysis of Monitoring the Future, a yearly survey of 16,000 high school seniors that plumbs their views on drugs, alcohol, tobacco and, to a lesser extent, politics. The research is funded by the National Institutes of Health. The study will be published May 25 in the Journal of Politics.
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A Peruvian Woman of A.D. 450 Seems to Have Had Two Careers
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD
Published: May 17, 2006
The New York Times
A mummy of mystery has come to light in Peru.
She was a woman who died some 1,600 years ago in the heyday of the Moche culture, well before the rise of the Incas. Her imposing tomb suggests someone of high status. Her desiccated remains are covered with red pigment and bear tattoos of patterns and mythological figures.
But the most striking aspect of the discovery, archaeologists said yesterday, is not the offerings of gold and semiprecious stones, or the elaborate wrapping of her body in fine textiles, but the other grave goods.
She was surrounded by weaving materials and needles, befitting a woman, and 2 ceremonial war clubs and 28 spear throwers — sticks that propel spears with far greater force — items never found before in the burial of a woman of the Moche (pronounced MOH-chay).
Was she a warrior princess, or perhaps a ruler? Possibly.
"She is elite, but somewhat of an enigma," said John Verano, a physical anthropologist at Tulane University, who worked with the Peruvian archaeologists who made the discovery last year.
Christopher B. Donnan of the University of California, Los Angeles, was not a member of the research team but inspected the mummy and the tomb soon after the find.
"It's among the richest female Moche burials ever found," said Dr. Donnan, an archaeologist of Peruvian culture. "The tomb combines things usually found either exclusively in male or female burials — a real mystery."
The National Geographic Society announced the discovery and is publishing details in its magazine's June issue. The excavations, more than 400 miles northwest of Lima, were supported by the Augusto N. Wiese Foundation of Peru.
The Moche culture flourished in the coastal valleys of northern Peru in the first 700 years A.D. The people were master artisans and built huge adobe pyramids. The woman's tomb was near the summit of a pyramid called Huaca Cao Viejo, a cathedral of the Moche religion.
Dr. Verano's X-ray examination revealed that the mummy was a young adult. Lying near her was the skeleton of another young woman who was apparently sacrificed by strangulation with a hemp rope, which was still around her neck. Such sacrifices were common in Andean cultures.
Radiocarbon analysis of the rope indicated that the burial occurred around A.D. 450.
"Perhaps she was a female warrior, or maybe the war clubs and spear throwers were symbols of power that were funeral gifts from men," Dr. Verano said.
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Their Day in Court
Since the birth of the modern legal profession, lawyering has been a male-dominated career. Law schools, especially the prestigious Ivy League institutions, have been viewed as "boys' clubs" since they opened their doors to the first entering class. The patriarchal nature of the legal field, however, appears to be headed out the door, according to this year's statistics.
Original Article.
The Daily Texan, Volume 101, No. 118
2001 March 27
American Bar Association data indicates that women accounted for 49.4% of the 43518 students who entered American law schools fall 2000, which is amazing, considering that just 40 years ago, the entering law school classes were only about 4% female. And the trend is going to continue, if projections based on the profiles of law school applicants for next fall's first year class are accurate.
The ABA says that more women than men applied for admission to law school for the fall 2001 semester, establishing, for the first time in history, a female majority in this traditionally masculine field. The ramifications of this development for both the state of the legal profession and that of the law in general could be revolutionary and far-reaching.
For decades, feminist legal scholars have argued that male domination of the legal field is centrally responsible for the unequal treatment women receive in society. Regardless of attempts by male jurists to create legislation and case law to remove institutional obstacles to female advancement, such laws always remain the products of mens' minds, or at least of a system dominated by male sentiment.
Whether you think that feminism should be about gender-blindness or finding equality while embracing difference, there is a definite benefit, at least in terms of public perception, to having a female majority in our law schools.
On the one hand, this is another step for women, proving that they can come to dominate the same institutions that men can control and have controlled for many years. On the other hand, the female majority in the law schools probably heralds the beginning of a general shift in the kinds of perspectives that shape the law from primarily masculine to more inclusive of the feminine.
Some might argue, however, that the system itself will still be male-dominated, even if there are more female lawyers, because of deeply entrenched institutional barriers to female advancement in the professions most often pursued by lawyers: lawyering, politics and business. So the most powerful and influential positions in those fields will continue to be occupied by men, leaving women to do the grunt work. While that may be true for a while, hopefully it won't stay that way for long.
Women seeking careers in the post-law school job market today probably encounter remnants of the same barriers their predecessors experienced trying to gain admission to law school 40 years ago. Those barriers, according to the most recent admissions statistics, have crumbled. With more and more women entering the legal profession, the institutional hurdles that exist in employment will also begin to crumble.
When the majority of the 2004 "crop" of new lawyers is female, employers will have no choice but to make adjustments in their operations to allow for women to advance past the glass ceiling and into the offices that have previously been exclusively male territory. Now women finally have more than just a foot in the door they've blown the door wide open.
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Women Surpass Men in Ph.D. Degrees
Women earned more doctorates than men at American universities in 2002, according to results recently released by the Survey of Earned Doctorates.
Original Article.
Stacy Waite, College Reporter
Badger Herald
2003 December 9
The percentage of males who earned doctorates in 2002 has dropped steadily since 1997 by nearly 15%. While women earned almost 51% of doctorates in 2002, the total number of awarded degrees is falling, the report found.
American students earned the lowest number of Ph.D.s in a decade last year at 39955, a decrease of 2% from the previous year and a 6% drop in the last 5 years.
But experts have differing opinions about the trends these statistics show.
Joan Burrelli, senior analyst at the National Science Foundation, said she felt the drop in males awarded doctorates led to the higher female doctorate percentage.
"There's been a drop in the white college age population," Burrelli said. "But the people who are doctorate recipients have been in school for seven to 10 years, so [the percentage of men earning Ph.D.s] is going up now."
Burrelli said although the numbers of men awarded doctorates decreased, not all male groups are on the decline.
"It's the predominantly white males that have dropped," she said. "For the most part, minority males [awarded doctorates] have continued to go up."
Nearly 19% of American doctorates were awarded to minority groups in 2002, the largest percentage in history; 40% of the doctorates awarded to African American students were in education, while 1/3 of all doctorates earned by Asian Americans was in life sciences.
Burrelli said NSF was still collecting data for 2003, but that the drop in men enrolled in graduate programs has leveled out, as opposed to decreases in the past decade.
Maresi Nerad, faculty at the University of Washington, director of The Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education and associate dean for research at University of Wisconsin graduate schools, believes the results showcase a different trend entirely.
"In actuality, numbers of women Ph.D.s have increased," Nerad said. "Federal agencies have been very good to increase participation in women to earn their doctorates."
CIRGE at the University of Washington conducts research on alumni careers and the effectiveness of graduate programs, both for other graduate schools and the employers of most U.S-trained Ph.D.s.
Nerad said although it is positive that an increasing number of women are earning doctorates, the real problem arises after the qualified women reach the job market.
"If women want to go on and stay in academia, there comes the trouble," she said. "Institutions have done a lot to increase women in doctorate work, but it stops there."
Nerad said that while 61% of all women Ph.D.s had a spouse with a Ph.D., J.D. or M.D. in 2002, only 21% of men have spouses who are highly educated.
"The combination of being a woman and having a partner that is also highly educated is tricky," she said. "Very few universities have dual spousal hiring, and it's very complicated to get both people stimulating jobs in the same town, and one partner has to make a sacrifice to stay together."
While women have earned the majority of doctorates awarded in education and humanities, Nerad said social and biological sciences were split evenly in 2002, and female engineering doctorates fell short of 20%.
"The number of successful women who have had Ph.D.s awarded are not medical," Nerad said. "But women earning doctorates in 2002 made an increase in all fields."
SED is sponsored by six federal agencies, including the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the Department of Education. Data is compiled by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and used to spot trends in Ph.D. recipients.
