Went and dug a little deeper and it seems that for high-income nations, this trend of more women than men graduating in universities (as well as outperforming in school) has been going on for multiple decades now.
Apart of me wants to think its just right-wing hysteria because this was brought to my attention by some random podcast clip using this example as somehow proof that patriarchy doesn’t exist lol. Some articles I read did mention how other factors (particularly class and race) was a higher determinant of school/university success.
And I particularly do not like biological explanations anyways (too essentialist to my taste, but I can’t say for sure). I forgot which article in particular but it did argue it’s because men used to be able find jobs in more traditional blue-collar industries, leading to this present day discrepancy.
What do you all think?
Yeah, this is basically it. Women are performing better in school but on average still get lower paying jobs after schooling because patriarchy instills a sense of doing work ‘for the sake of it’ in women. Men do school in order to be “better providers”, but if that traditional structure breaks down, they become lost and confused.
What we need is to take gender less seriously, for one. And two, we need more dignity in “less desirable” jobs. A fast food worker doesn’t work less hard than a lab tech. But rather than deflate the lab tech, the fast food worker should be raised up and equalized and given a career.