Female Supremacy Articles - Page 23
BIG MAN ON CAMPUS LIKELY A WOMAN
By Amy Fagan
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
March 27, 2007
Women's share of college enrollment is at an all-time high as education researchers continue to debate what is causing the trend of more women than men going to college, and what the future impact of the trend could be.
"It is a topic of some conversation within the admissions community, and they certainly are looking at it," said Barmak Nassirian, associate executive director of the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers. "I don't think we have a proper understanding of what would be at the root."
"It's well-documented that there's a female majority on college campuses," said Jacqueline King, director of the American Council on Education's Center for Policy Analysis and author of a 2006 study on the topic. "I think where there's not a consensus is why this is the case."
Historically, more men than women have graduated college. In 1870, the first year a national survey was conducted, 7,993 men and 1,378 women received bachelor's degrees. But by the 1980s, women were outpacing men and that trend has continued through today.
In the 2003-04 school year, 595,425 men received bachelor's degrees, compared with 804,117 women, according to the Department of Education's National Center for Education Statistics. The department's fall 2004 numbers show that 57.2 percent of college enrollees were women -- the highest percentage ever.
The department estimates that by the time the 2013-14 school year rolls around, women receiving degrees will outnumber men by more than 300,000.
Every year, the situation gets worse and worse and worse," said Tom Mortensen, a higher-education policy analyst who publishes Postsecondary Education Opportunity newsletter and has beat the drums on the issue since the 1990s.
"It's a very serious and long-standing problem, and there's no solution in sight," said Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the conservative American Enterprise Institute and author of "The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism is Harming Our Young Men."
Catherine Hill, director of research at the American Association of University Women, added that "there's a lot to celebrate" in the trend, saying that not too long ago, it was rare to have women in certain fields, like medicine, while today it's routine.
But the discussion of possible causes of and solutions for the broader college gap between men and women continues. One possible cause is that since the 1980s, some older women have gone back to college to get degrees, said Ms. King. There is a degree of "pent-up demand," Ms. Hill agreed.
Mr. Nassirian said some college admissions officers think the problem stems primarily from shortcomings in the K-12 education system, while other officers think the problem lies in colleges' marketing and messaging -- that somehow boys are overlooked or discouraged by the messages they receive from higher education. "My guess is that a little of both would be the case," Mr. Nassirian said.
Ms. King's 2006 study found the college gap is still the widest between minority men and minority women -- leading some, like Ms. Mead, to argue that if the word "crisis" is to be used, it should be used for the plight of minority boys.
But Mrs. Sommers said problems for all boys begins in younger grades. She said girls, on average, adapt better to school from the early grades, traditional classrooms aren't set up to accommodate boys' natural energy, and that, while state and federal efforts have aggressively aimed to improve girls' performance in science and math, there hasn't been an equal effort to help boys' in their weaker subjects of reading and writing.
"All of the emphasis has been on girls. Boys were left on the back burner," Mrs. Sommers said.
Judith Kleinfeld found the imbalance -- which is happening in other Western industrialized countries, too -- so troubling that she started the Boys Project, a coalition of scholars, educators and nonprofit groups that tries to help engage and inspire boys at the local, state and national levels. She said girls' surging college success is important and welcomed, but it's also clearly time to encourage boys to the same degree.
"Boys don't like school -- this is the root," she said.
Mrs. Sommers said if the trend continues, the result could be a generation of poorly educated and unemployable boys facing a generation of women who are considerably more educated, a situation causing "all sorts of psychological ramifications."
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Girl power has seized the day at university and college campuses
Peggy Curran
CanWest News Service
Sunday, February 04, 2007
MONTREAL -- Of the 32 students in Romina Perri's third-year dentistry class at McGill University, 20 are women. In Tamara Finkelstein's fourth-year graduating class, the male-female split is slightly less dramatic, but it's still predominantly female. "As you walk along the corridor of the dentistry
building, you can't help noticing there are all these portraits of past graduates, and they are all men," says Finkelstein, 27. "Then there will be one woman, or maybe two, until very recently, when suddenly you can see women start coming in huge numbers."
In law at McGill, women hold seven of the nine student association positions for the first time that anyone can remember. Yet, with 91 women to 79 men, law at McGill is as close to equal as professional schools get these days. In courses such as psychology, Linah Hashimi says whenever a guy asks a
question, people take notice. "Everyone turns their heads to see who's speaking," said Hashimi, 22, in the final year of a double major in biology and psychology at McGill.
With many of her classes as much as 90-per-cent female, male students are as rare and exotic as a snowy owl that has veered off its natural flight path. People get ready, there's a change a-coming. An extraordinary experiment is brewing at university and college campuses across Canada. Girl power has
seized the day, setting the stage for a seismic shift in hospitals and clinics, legal practices, corporate headquarters and academia, changes that will reshape the way the country works in the generations to come, determine who earns what, even who has children and how many.
Women make up more than 60 percent of university students across this country. More women than men are training to be doctors, dentists, lawyers, pharmacists, and scientists. The trend is most pronounced in Quebec, where the high-school dropout rate for boys is higher. Think of it this way: Within the next 10 to 15 years, by the time the last gasp of baby boomers is ready to retire, nearly every profession will be overwhelmingly female.
Already, more than half of Canada's doctors and dentists are women. Given the current trend, odds are by 2015, your pediatrician, investment broker, family veterinarian, divorce lawyer and therapist will be a woman but your computer technician, housing contractor, electrical engineer, and orthopedic
surgeon will still, most likely, be a man. At McGill, 60 percent of medical students are women. Females also hold down most of the spots in architecture, law, dentistry, environmental science,
and management.
The gender gap is even more startling at Quebec's French-language universities. At Universite de Montreal and Universite Laval, seven in 10 medical students are women. Same goes for U de M's future dentists, pharmacists, optometrists and veterinarians. More than 60 percent of law and business undergrads are female. Spurred by mentoring programs and government-sponsored initiatives such as Chapeau, les Filles!, women now make up a whopping 78.9 percent of students in U de M's science faculty. Meanwhile, men have made only marginal incursions into disciplines that have been traditionally female. Women are holding their own in social work and nursing. Elementary-school education and clinical psychology are more female-dominated than ever.
Universities still welcome thousands of brilliant young men with ambition, dedication, and drive. However, women now outnumber men in all but a smattering of disciplines, notably mathematics, engineering and computer science. Even there, the male stranglehold is loosening. As a group, young women get better grades than young men and take less time to complete their education. And university administrators say they appear to know exactly what they want.
Today's students are on the hunt for a secure job with all the trimmings. And while most also confess they want a spouse and children, they fully expect a shuffling of household chores in keeping with their professional status, career responsibilities and income. Universities don't break down awards by gender, but if anecdotal evidence is anything to go by, female students are picking up the lion's share of the prizes and scholarships, at least at the undergraduate level.
"The rapidity of the change is astonishing," said Paul Cappon, president of the Canadian Council on Learning. "In 2003, women were 62 percent of university grads. Only a decade ago, the split was still 50/50." "It's a big issue," said Morton Mendelson, McGill's deputy provost for student life and
learning. Female undergraduates have outnumbered males at McGill for roughly 20 years, but it's only in the last few the balance shifted to 60/40, with women commanding most of the spaces in professional schools.
McGill's admissions system is "gender blind," Mendelson said, and there are no plans to adopt affirmative action policies or otherwise alter entrance criteria to beef up male enrolments. He said nothing would prevent recruiters from targeting particular schools or otherwise encouraging boys
who are offered admission to ultimately choose McGill. So far, he said, McGill hasn't felt the need to take extra measures -- as one of Canada's elite schools, it gets the cream of both male and female applicants. That doesn't mean there hasn't been informal discussion about possible
consequences, both social and pedagogical, when a particular field is dominated by one gender.
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Women dominate high schools as students, teachers, heads
By Margaux Ortiz
Inquirer
03/19/2007
MANILA, Philippines -- Women rule in high school.
According to a study by the Department of Education, there are more female students, teachers and school heads in public high schools than their male counterparts. In the latest Country Education for All Mid-Decade Assessment, the DepEd noted that more girls completed elementary and high school than boys did.
"Aside from economic reasons, one possible reason behind boys dropping out from school is the dominance of female teachers in the (educational) system," DepEd Assistant Secretary Lilia Roces said in an education workshop organized by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) at the Eugenio Lopez Center in Antipolo City over the weekend.
Roces added that the system might not be sensitive or responsive to the teaching and learning needs of boys, prompting them to drop out later on.
She said that despite having more male enrollees in the early childhood education (ECE) and elementary level, key outcome indicators showed that basic and functional literacy rates of male youths and adults were lower than their female counterparts in high school. "Female dominance in education is also manifested in persons who hold key positions in the system," Roces said in her presentation, explaining that majority of public elementary school teachers and school heads are female.
She added that females likewise dominated key management positions such as the superintendent and director levels.
"We are going to conduct a more in-depth study to find out and confirm the reasons behind this trend," Roces said.
In the same presentation, the DepEd official said the government's 2005 targets in elementary and secondary net enrollment and completion rates had not been attained.
"There was a decreasing trend in elementary and secondary enrollment and completion rates from 2000 to 2005," she said.
DepEd studies showed that the number of Grade 1 applicants with ECE had been erratic, with the country failing to attain its 2005 target of 67 percent.
"The DepEd has a very limited allocation for ECE, which is less than one percent of its yearly budget," Roces said.
The DepEd studies also revealed that more students dropped out from the system as they reached higher levels in high school. The lowest completion rate and highest percentage decrease from 2002 to 2005 were registered in the rural areas.
Roces said the disparity between the highest and lowest performing regions in net enrollment ratio at the elementary and high school levels had worsened over time. "The decrease in elementary net enrollment ratio could be attributed to non-school factors such as poverty, armed conflict and calamities as the government has already been able to establish elementary schools in almost all villages," she said.
"The department's budget of P139 billion in 2007 is not enough," Roces said, explaining that 85 percent of the budget would go to payroll while only P2 billion would be allocated for classroom construction.
She added that the National Government Expenditures for Basic Education as a percentage of the gross domestic product had decreased over time.
"The under-investment in basic education is further revealed in the decreasing allocation by the national government to basic education from 2004 to 2006," Roces said.
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Study finds women connect sex with submission
University of Michigan News Service
July 18, 2005
ANN ARBOR, Mich.—A University of Michigan study suggests that women, but not men, automatically associate sex with submission and that connection reduces the quality of their sexual experience.
U-M researchers Amy Kiefer, Diana Sanchez and Oscar Ybarra conducted four studies to reach the conclusions in the paper, "Sexual Submissiveness in Woman: Costs for Sexual Autonomy and Arousal," scheduled to appear in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin next year.
Key findings show that women implicitly associate sex with submission and that this leads to a submissive sexual role, which in turn leads to lower arousal and difficulty becoming aroused. This association appears to lower their arousal by reducing their sexual autonomy.
Researchers tested subjects by showing target words associated with submission on a computer screen, preceded by subliminal primes (words with a specific connotation, in this case sex primes and neutral primes. For instance, sex and oven).
Women's responses were on average faster when submissive words were preceded by a sex prime than by a neutral prime. This faster response indicates the two concepts are related in women's minds, said Kiefer, a recent doctoral graduate in the psychology department.
Further, on average the quicker the response, the more likely the women were to report engaging in submissive sexual behavior.
The priming results indicate that women may have unconsciously picked up the message that they should be sexually submissive, raising the possibility that women have internalized societal pressure, said Sanchez, a recent doctoral graduate in the psychology department and women's studies.
Previous research suggests that social norms promote deference to men, and this extends to intimate relationships. This message is constantly repeated by the media in magazines, television and movies that "commonly display male sexual dominance over women and female sexual submission to men," the paper states.
In a follow-up study, researchers asked the women a series of questions to gauge the impact of submissive behavior on arousal.
"The more women reported engaging in submissive behaviors, the less arousal they reported experiencing from a range of sexual activities. The problem with submissive behavior seems to be that women don't experience these behaviors as authentic expressions of their selves. Submission to their partner's desires appears to undermine their ability to assert themselves within the sexual context," Kiefer said. "I would say it's really important to recognize the fact that women associate their personal submission with sex, and this association seems to be detrimental to their sexual health."
Adopting a submissive role may cause women to have difficulty not only getting aroused, but also impair their communication with sexual partners, undermine their ability to insist on birth control, and increase their susceptibility to sexual coercion.
The researchers plan a series of papers on the topic of how conformity to traditional gender roles affect men and women's sexual behavior.
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Young women take their place amid violin virtuosos
By Kyle MacMillan
The Denver Post
March 21, 2007
Ask people about the violinists they know, and depending on their age, names such as Jascha Heifetz, Itzhak Perlman and Joshua Bell are likely to be heard -- all men.
But with the explosion of a new group of top-level female exponents of the instrument, the days of the word "violinist" automatically being associated with a man are fast coming to an end.
"That will change once this generation hits the center of their careers," said Alan Fletcher, president and chief executive officer of the Aspen Music Festival and School. "It's still more men that jump to mind as major stars in the age range 40 to 60, but in 10 or 15 years, that's not going to be true."
Heading this new crop of violinists in their teens and 20s is Hilary Hahn, 27, who some experts in the field believe has the talent, intelligence and imagination to attain a status in the classical world akin to that of celebrated cellist Yo-Yo Ma.
Other fast-rising stars, who already have built sizable discographies and performed in major concert houses, include Nicola Benedetti, 19; Julia Fischer, 23; Janine Jansen, 29; Leila Josefowicz, 29, and Jennifer Koh, 29.
So dominant are these female soloists that Fletcher said he could not name even a fifth as many emerging male violinists in the same age range.
No one is exactly sure what is behind this new burst of female talent, but most observers see it paralleling the strides women have made in all facets of life.
"We're probably just reaping the benefits of the changing society," said violinist YuMi Hwang-Williams, concertmaster of the Colorado Symphony. "The old-boys club, so to speak, of classical music and that image is fallen with this sort of new age."
Women have made up at least half of the violin students in music schools for at least 15 years, and the ratio has even reached 80/20 in certain classes, said Fletcher, former head of the school of music and professor of music at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh.
It doesn't hurt that along with enormous talent these young women possess no shortage of sex appeal, something not lost on market-savvy concert presenters and record companies.
"When you have the combination of a violinist who has incredible ability and the marketability, that's a recipe that has been intriguing to the field," Hwang-Williams.
She points to successful female ensembles such as the Eroica and Ahn trios, who have the skills to compete with other groups but don't shy from capitalizing on their pulchritude.
Certainly, there have been noted female violinists in the past, such as the Hungarian soloist Jelly d'Aranyi (1893-1966), who was the dedicatee of Maurice Ravel's famed "Tzigane," but they were typically the odd exception.
More recently, violinists such as Kyung-Wha Chung, who was born in Korea in 1948, and younger artists such as Anne Sophie Mutter, 43, and Midori, 35, have served as trailblazers for this new generation of performers.
Linda Wang, a violinist in her mid-30s who recently joined the music faculty at the University of Denver's Lamont School of Music, said several of these artists, including Chung and Mutter, served as role models for her.
"I think that helped -- to have these people out there performing," she said.
Dominant as this influx of female violinists is, Hwang-Williams believes this generation is just the beginning of a continuing explosion of talent.
"The younger kids have a much more open vision of what it could be," she said. "They're not limited by feeling like this is a man's world. With each generation, it just pushes the envelope more, and they feel empowered."
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Woman Expected to Lead Harvard
Drew Gilpin Faust, whose appointment is likely on Feb. 11, would be the institution's first female president.
By Jane Porter
Business Week
(Note: Ms Faust was elected and will take over on July 1, 2007)
Harvard is poised to name the first female president in the university's 370-year history: Drew Gilpin
Faust, dean of the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies, is to be ratified by the school's Board of
Overseers on Feb. 11, The Harvard Crimson and The Boston Globe reported on Feb. 9. She would pick up from the tumultuous presidency of Lawrence Summers, who resigned in June. Faust was one of two women who were being considered for the job after a third contender, a man, withdrew.
University spokesman John Longbrake said on Feb. 9 that he could not comment on the process while it is still officially under way, but the prospect that a woman would get the top job was already winning praise in some parts of the venerable Cambridge campus.
"It's about time, I should think," says Peter Gomes, a university preacher who teaches a course called the
History of Harvard & Its Presidents. "Harvard is a little behind the times."
Daunting Task Includes Healing
Faust's strengths, Gomes says, lie in her scholarly background. An expert in American history, in 2001 she was appointed dean of the Radcliffe Institute, a research powerhouse that focuses on women, gender, and society. In 2005, she spearheaded the initiative for diversity on campus—she was described by the Crimson as "Summers' trouble-shooter"—by helping develop task
forces on the advancement of women at Harvard. "She understands how faculty think, or don't think as the
case may be," Gomes says. "She will be both progressive and steady at the same time."
Managing Harvard's gargantuan endowment of $30 billion will be the new president's greatest challenge, John Isaacson, founder of Isaacson, Miller, an executive search firm that conducts large academic searches, said before Faust emerged as the school's choice. The president's task, says Isaacson, will be to "use these resources to invent something we have not seen before at this scale at Harvard."
The task ahead of Faust is daunting on many levels, including an undergraduate curriculum overhaul, a
decentralized faculty, and campus expansion. After Summers' stormy presidency—involving a turbulent
relationship with Arts & Sciences faculty, his controversial assertion that women have an innate
inferiority in the sciences, and his pretentious people skills—just navigating the muck of tension left
behind is challenge enough for Faust. Efforts "to try to heal some of the wounds in the faculty," says
Gomes, may be the biggest task ahead of her. New Campus Development
Another of her projects will be the development of a new campus in Allston, what Richard Bradley, author of Harvard Rules: The Struggle for the Soul of the World's Most Powerful University, says is "the biggest
transformation of Harvard in history." The campus, sprawling across 91 acres, has the potential to expand research and academic facilities in the sciences, according to Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College and professor of computer science. "As wonderful a place as Harvard is…we don't really get the best out of what we have," Lewis says. Plans for the Allston campus are currently in the works and would help mobilize such talent.
Elena Kagan, dean of the Harvard Law School, was the other finalist for the presidency. Until last week,
Thomas Cech, president of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, was also a final contender. Cech withdrew his name from consideration during the committee's final days of deliberation, leaving the two female leaders as finalists.
The selection committee took a decidedly different approach to the presidency this time around, forgoing
celebrity standing for academic experience. "A celebrity won't make Harvard," says Gomes. "Harvard
will make someone a celebrity." Overnight, it seems, Faust could leap to stardom.
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Where Japanese Women Rule
Time magazine
Thursday, Jan. 25, 2007
Michiko Toyama / Tokyo
The door to the Swallowtail opens and there stands Saionji, good man that he is, as skilled a butler who ever buttled. He takes our coats and bags and shimmers away, leading us down the corridor past gilded mirrors, Monet prints and bursting bouquets to our table in the Swallowtail's elegant tearoom. As I move to sit at our table, a second butler, named Mikami, materializes to ease me into my chair. "Good day, princess," he says to my dining companion--and not, I assume, to me. I order the Earl Grey tea and
the Macbeth--a petite ham-and-cheese panini, the preferred snack of bloody-minded Scottish tyrants. Mikami leaves to prepare the tea but not before showing us a golden bell we can use to summon him. We hunger. We ring. He runs. Six seconds. Jeeves would be proud.
A little explanation: the Swallowtail is a "butler café," a Tokyo restaurant staffed entirely by Japanese facsimiles of English manservants, down to the formal tails, white gloves and gracious manners. That's the first cultural oddity. Here's the second: Swallowtail is for women--specifically the burgeoning numbers drawn to manga and anime (Japanese comics and animation), a world that usually caters to slightly antisocial male obsessives. These women are known as otome (their male counterparts are called otaku), which roughly means "maidens," and their tastes run to the medieval fantasies found in their favorite manga, which explains why some of them dress as if they shop at Grimm's of Hollywood, in flowing gothic dresses of whitest white or blackest black. It's all part of the costume play--"cosplay"--that
figures heavily in otaku-otome culture.
For men, the desire to live like a manga character gave rise to "maid cafés," staffed by waitresses dressed in extreme French-maid outfits. The possibility that women might want a tearoom of their own prompted a group led by Yoko Otsuka, 29, a pleasantly bookish young woman, to create
Swallowtail, Tokyo's first butler café. Since Swallowtail opened last March, customers have lined up for reservations. The café tripled its space in October, but tables are still booked solid. The most ardent customers come daily and might never leave if Otsuka hadn't put an 80-minute limit on reservations. The restaurant's success has spawned a wave of similar butler cafés elsewhere in Tokyo, including some that offer gaijin (foreign) butlers who help female patrons practice their English, but Swallowtail remains the
gold standard.
It's easy to see why. Otsuka has planned every detail of the café, from the two months of training would-be butlers undergo to the grandfather clock by the fireplace to the leather volumes of obscure poetry (by that famous Victorian bard, William Allingham) that adorn the shelves. "There's no place
like this, so we had to make it from our imagination," says Otsuka. It doesn't hurt that the food is surprisingly good, prepared with the help of Paul Okada, a hospitality consultant who spent 12 years as the food-and-beverage director at the Four Seasons Tokyo.
But while the cakes are delicious, the appeal for regular clients is clearly in the service. Swallowtail gives otome a chance to act out their fantasies--say, to be a princess with a footman for teatime--but there may
be something even more basic behind its success. Tokyo is a hard town, and it can be even harder for women. Under pressure to conform and marry--which often means surrendering much of their independence--they face a daily battle against the sexism that still pervades Japan, where fewer than 10% of corporate managers are female. The butler café may be to otome what the local bar is to the old company man, a place to unwind from the pressures of the outside world--and where the only members of the opposite sex are literally at your service.
As for me, I could get used to having a footman on call. Not long after I finished my Macbeth (is this a cream scone I see before me?), Saionji appears. "Mademoiselle, your coach awaits," he says to my dining companion--the signal that our 80 minutes are up. We step through the open door and flag down our coach on the Tokyo street.
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Strap me on, I'm going in
Female Sex Fantasies
AskMen.com
By Vanessa Burton
(Women's Sexuality Correspondent)
By far, one of the most popular fantasies women have is getting to be the man... literally. They would like to act and dress up like a man -- straight down to the genitals. That's right, I'm referring to a strap-on penis.
One woman actually had the opportunity to fulfill her fantasy and took full advantage of her boyfriend's willingness. "It was absolutely incredible to be able to penetrate a man and feel the empowerment usually associated with being the aggressor."
"There's something about having a man in a vulnerable position that is an incredible turn-on." Carol admitted. "The idea of knowing that we're in the position that is usually assumed by men is probably the biggest aphrodisiac of all."
