A few days ago, Robert wrote an excellent piece on the self-obsession of many people today, especially men. http://hanrott.com/blog/pared-back-living-and-the-modern-male. He mentioned a creeping sexism in which men are encouraged to have big experiences, whereas women are meant to find happiness at home. I responded by highlighting that part of the problem with gender relations nowadays is the gender gap in university enrolment. In both the UK and the USA, women are significantly more likely to attend university than men. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/education-36266753. https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2016/03/28/look-how-women-outnumber-men-college-campuses-nationwide/YROqwfCPSlKPtSMAzpWloK/story.html. I wanted to explore why this is occurring, and its effects on the way men and women behave.

The most common explanation for the growing gender gap at university is the lack of male school teachers. If young boys had strong academic male role models to look up to, more of them would aspire to get a degree of their own. For me, this explanation isn’t sufficient. Women teachers have long outnumbered their male counterparts, yet the gender gap in educational attainment keeps growing. A lack of male teachers doesn’t explain why the problem is getting significantly worse. The other explanation I don’t buy is the idea that men are being discriminated against in the admissions process. This is complete nonsense; as someone who recently went through the admissions process, I experienced no discrimination of any kind as a man. Universities cannot help it if more women are applying to university than men.

My explanation for the gender gap is that men are less suited to academia and life at university. At school they tend to be worse behaved, less disciplined and less hard working. They are more easily distracted. They get into fights, and are more likely to commit crime or be expelled. Men also seem less able to commit to projects for a long period of time, like coursework, which means they won’t cope as well with dissertations or long essays. I also think men have more and better-paid options that don’t require a higher education. Many of my male friends have gone straight from school into the media, banking, accounting or engineering- all of which tend to be male-dominated.  Women’s best paid options seem to be education, research and law, which all either require or greatly benefit from a higher education. Of course, all of these are a generalisation, but the statistics show the overall trend is strong.

The conservative National Review magazine has an interesting explanation. They say that family breakdown and the rise of fatherless households is to blame. http://www.nationalreview.com/article/425506/why-do-more-women-men-go-college-anna-sutherland. Without a strong father figure, men lack a decent role model at home. Since fatherless households tend to be poorer, boys growing up with a single mum are less likely to succeed, even if the mums in question work very hard. I think this explanation has some credibility. The only person I know at university who grew up without a father is a woman, and her brother hasn’t done especially well at all. National Review is very keen to stress that a degree is not a pre-requisite for a happy life, but it certainly makes one more likely. Having said that, it’s not clear if the government can do anything to prevent families from splitting apart. Unlike National Review, I don’t think religion can do much either. In the US, black children are more likely to grow up without fathers, despite black people being significantly more religious than white Americans.

The worsening gender gap at university has several implications. One of the most significant is that is does damage to the notion that our society is a meritocracy. Your ability to get a higher education should not depend on something you can’t help. If National Review is right, then your life chances are also dependent on the your family status, which is something else beyond the control of the child.

The gender gap at university also threatens women’s prospects of marriage. People tend to marry within their own social class, because they have more in common with those of a similar educational background. University is often where people meet their future husbands and wives; it’s where my parents met. The gender gap will leave an increasing number of women without a husband, and mean that those who do find a husband are less likely to have as much in common with them. At the same time, it allows men to be too choosy. If there are an excess of women, why settle for a women who doesn’t fit your predisposed notions of beauty, charisma or charm? The luxury of men being able to be picky could lead to an increase in misogyny, where women are judged for superficial traits that wouldn’t have any bearing if the number of men and women was equal. Even before marriage, there’s evidence that an excess of women makes men more promiscuous at university, whereas an excess of men makes them more monogamous. http://time.com/money/4072951/college-gender-ratios-dating-hook-up-culture/.

The purist libertarians amongst you may not see this as a problem. After all, women are choosing to go to university at higher rates, so why not respect that choice? What’s important is people’s freedom to choose, without being discriminated against. There’s certainly some merit to this argument. If women believe they will gain more from a degree than men, then that’s their decision to make. I certainly wouldn’t want a crude quota system that would lead women to believe they are the subjects of formalised discrimination, like how affirmative action in the US makes whites and Asians believe they are discriminated against.

Having said that, I don’t think we can ignore the problem entirely. The fact is, degrees are a requirement for many professions, and incredibly advantageous to many others. Increasingly, having a postgraduate degree will open up more opportunities than it does currently, let alone an undergraduate degree. So if men don’t get more degrees soon, they will be locked out of many professions in the future. An increasing amount of frustrated and disillusioned men could have all sorts of consequences, from an increasing crime rate, to a higher suicide rate, to increasing support for extreme political movements. One of the reasons why Trump won the presidency was that many men felt they had suffered the effects of deindustrialisation, and America’s transformation from a manufacturing power to a service and knowledge-based economy. Now there’s nothing Trump can do to reverse this trend. But if men can’t adapt to and succeed in the modern world, we will see plenty more Trumps for years to come.