Women Don’t Want to Get Married Because of Educational Gender Gap?

In prime proof of reasons women don’t want to get married, an Education Week blogger cites his own concepts of a man’s unwanted status:  women’s education.  If Richard Whitmire’s post isn’t enough to turn women off to marriage, or more to the point, argue the studies that men are just too much work, you can read the b.s. for yourself.  Whitmire says that fewer African American women choose marriage because fewer African American men have degrees. If this were sound logic, it might be worth discussing, but since African Americans have long been denied educational advantages, I wouldn’t say that just because African American women have made gains that they then decide they are somehow “too good” for the men.

For a good barf, read on…

The End of Men? Not quite, concludes the New York Times columnist today, who nicely cites Why Boys Fail.

From the column:
My hunch is that we’re moving into greater gender balance, not a fundamentally new imbalance in the other direction. Don’t hold your breath for “the end of men.””One reason is that women’s gains still have a catch-up quality to them. Catch-up is easier than forging ahead.

Moreover, the differences in educational performance are real but modest. In math, boys and girls are about equal. In verbal skills, 79 percent of elementary schoolgirls can read at a level deemed proficient, compared with 72 percent of boys, according to the Center on Education Policy.”

The real gender divides are in the outcomes, which in the end is all that matters — 62 percent of two-year degrees going to women and 57 percent of four-year degrees. What impact this will have on the economy (given that men and women pursue different careers) is unknown.

What is inevitable from these imbalances falls on the personal side, the “marriageable mate” dilemma that has affected so many African American women. Unable to find an equally educated mate, they chose not to marry. Will this happen among white women? It already is: even among whites as a group, 57 percent of the four-year degree earners are women. I’ve seen no other explanation for the sharp rise in the number of college-educated white women opting for sperm banks rather than husbands.

Mr. Whitmire, perhaps you should read the facts about why women don’t want to get married, mainly because men aren’t great for return on investment for women.  Funny that Mr. Whitmire “can’t see any other reason for white women opting for sperm banks rather than husbands,” when some husbands are sperm banks with responsibilities or abusive tendencies, liars, cheats, and the list goes on in reasons why women don’t want husbands.  Mr. Whitmire’s argument and his inability to see “any other reasons” seems like the ridiculous rhetoric women seek to simply avoid by not marrying at all, thereby lessening their chances of dealing with men who can’t see beyond their own perspectives, cue Mr. Whitmire now please…

My post on why Women Don’t Want to Get Married and Have Kids, has been my number one post of all time, read internationally, inspiring some rather nasty debates and lots of male reader comments. Perhaps Mr. Whitmire could read it and write a more well-informed piece, or maybe he would read it and make more excuses for mens’ overall lack of performance, even with a majority of the market share.

It seems that Mr. Whitmire’s poorly constructed arguments might have stemmed from a wonderful piece written by a UK writer, Christina Patterson.  Read the whole bit, if you will, because her style is sharp, witty, and well-spoken, taking no prisoners in the fields of whiny men bemoaning their fate.  (She might, like me, just adore break-up songs too…)  But, realistically speaking, Ms. Patterson simply wrote a good piece about the advent of women not becoming just equals, but of perhaps being better equipped to handle the post-industrial society:

OK, so they run the economy. And the country. And the world. OK, so they earn more. In global terms, an awful lot more. OK, so they took that having dominion malarkey – over the fish of the sea, and the fowl of the air, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth – horribly literally, extending it to all kinds of areas (the duvet, the remote control) that God forgot. But men had better look out. Poor darlings, they’re doomed.

That, at least, is the conclusion of a new article in Atlantic Monthly, which has created a bit of a stir on both sides of the pond. “Earlier this year,” says its author, Hanna Rosin, “women became the majority workforce for the first time in US history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what,” she asks, in a manner faintly reminiscent of a super-coiffed Carrie Bradshaw tapping away at a laptop before nipping out for a Cosmopolitan, “if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, post-industrial society is simply better suited to women?”

Women in poor parts of India are, she says, learning English faster than men. Women own more than 40 per cent of businesses in China. In some war-torn states, women are “stepping in as a sort of maternal rescue team”. And in America, parents are beginning to choose girls over boys. “We can,” she says, “see with absolute clarity that in the coming decades the middle class will be dominated by women.” It is, in other words, as the headline makes screamingly evident, “The End of Men”.

Oh, well. All good things must come to an end, etc. Anyway, they’ve had a pretty good innings. And being on the sidelines isn’t that bad. Sort out the hair, the pecs and the buns and they’ll be just fine. Cheer up, lads! It might not happen!

For my part in America, I have not seen parents choosing girls over boys.  I have seen an alarming number of boys born with or acquiring neurological or genetic disabilities that render them less capable of competing in the classroom, boardroom or courtroom, but not because of parental action in choosing girls over boys.

Ms. Patterson cites the Higher Education Policy in her commentary, mentioning no hard facts to validate Rosin’s comment of parents choosing boys over girls (which is perhaps what inflamed Mr. Whitmire; although with such a whiny and self-indulgent streak as his, totally lacking in assigning any level of personal responsibility to these golden sons, one never knows):

According to a new report from the Higher Education Policy Institute, 17.2 per cent of young male graduates are failing to find jobs, compared to 11.2 per cent of women. “One possible reason,” says Carl Gilleard, the chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters, when called upon to explain this largely middle-class male meltdown, “might be a degree of complacency because of an extensive period of growth… and it may be that these male students think the fact they went to university is going to be enough to guarantee them the dream career.”

So, spoilt, lazy and bursting with inappropriate confidence! Is this the legacy of those primary schools that give children stickers for turning up, or smiling, or breathing? Primary schools like the one where I once did a residency, where the children ended a report on a school football match by congratulating themselves on their performance and just looked baffled when I pointed out that they’d lost? Is it the legacy of pass-the-parcel parties where everyone gets to open one and stagger home with a Naomi-Campbell-sized goodie bag? Is it the legacy of parents who wanted to be cool with their kids, parents who often behaved like kids?

Perhaps spoilt and lazy best describes the field of gender studies when it comes to men lately.  Have you notice all the wannabe leaders of free worlds have an awful lot of complaining to do and very little responsibility for their own success or failure?

I think she sums it up best when she says this:

The much bigger problem is the boys without degrees, the boys, in fact, without any qualifications at all. White working-class boys are doing badly. So, unfortunately, are black ones. With the migration of manufacturing to the Far East, and the disappearance of most of the traditional blue-collar options, these boys – many of whom don’t have a working parent, let alone a male one – are vomited out of an inadequate school system at 16 and left to rot.

I do, however, have to take the issue of said 16-year old boys who are left to rot because they are the victims of the same school systems as the girls.