barefoot 'n' pregnant

fwd from [email protected]

Begin forwarded message:

>
> "Affirmative Action" for Men on College Campuses
>
> This article made me want to throw something at the
> deans of admissions for many reasons.
>
> "The Campus Crusade for Guys"
> http://salon.com/mwt/feature/2006/02/15/affirmative_action/
> index_np.html
> (watch a short ad to see the whole article)
>
> Basically, colleges are starting to give preference to
> men, even when they are not as prepared to enter
> college, over women because women are in the majority
> on college campuses and tend to graduate more than
> men. Oh, horror! We can't have women outnumber men in
> the work force, too! Who's gonna stay home barefoot
> and pregnant? Something must be done.
>
> I checked the census to see if women are just simply
> in the majority, and the numbers are roughly equal.
> 105 men per 100 women, ages 10-20 in 2000.
> Interestingly, men's numbers plummet as they get
> older. I knew women lived longer than men, but didn't
> know there are over 1 million women over 90 and only
> 300,000 men. WWI and WWII may have had something to do
> with that, though.
>
> Here are a few quotes from the article:
>
> "New York Times Op-Ed writer John Tierney made waves
> in January with an essay warning that educational
> success will come back to haunt women as a dearth of
> educated, eligible husbands turns them into miserable
> spinsters – and in a rebuttal, Nation columnist Katha
> Pollitt asked why, years ago when she was in school
> and men made up the majority, no one was worrying
> about whether they'd find wives."
>
> "And it's not just former women's colleges facing a
> 40-60 [men to women] divide anymore. A quick survey of
> colleges and universities around the nation found that
> Kalamazoo College in Michigan comes in at 45-55, the
> University of New Mexico at 43-57, New York University
> at 40-60, and Howard University at 34-66 (low-income,
> minority men and women are most affected by the
> educational gender gap)."
>
> "Despite their flagging performance in elementary and
> high school, men have hardly abdicated their power to
> women. While women may have held the majority in
> higher education for more than a decade, men still
> earn more than women, still hold the vast number of
> tenure-track university positions. Women possess
> executive positions at less than 2 percent of Fortune
> 500 companies. Could it be that men aren't going to
> college because they don't have to?"
>
> "…a Department of Education sample of more than
> 9,000 high school students, interviewed over a period
> of eight years, revealed that women with bachelor's
> degrees earn 24 percent more than women without, while
> young men with bachelor's degrees experience no
> significant economic gains."
>
> "'On the one hand, you want to embrace the success of
> women," he (Tom Mortenson, of Opportunity) tells me.
> 'Yet, as more and more women substitute careers for
> having babies, I've come to see that we're looking at
> a population crisis. The most educated women have the
> fewest children – this is not rocket science, it's
> just the way things work. We need women to have 2.1
> children [in order to maintain the U.S. population],
> but the recent Census Bureau reports show that
> American women with bachelor's degrees average only
> 1.7. You can do the math – if we continue this way
> the white population is headed for extinction.' "
>
> Yes, you read that last one right. And thankfully, Ms.
> magazine steps in:
>
> "In the fall 2005 issue of Ms. magazine, Phyllis
> Rosser wrote that rather than being 'celebrated for
> [our] landmark achievements, [women] have engendered
> fear,' and offers up this fact, conspicuously absent
> from most media coverage of the gender gap: 'There has
> been no decline in bachelor's degrees awarded to men,'
> she writes. 'The numbers awarded to women have simply
> increased.' Put simply, in the words of Jacqueline
> King, director of the Center of Policy Analysis at the
> American Council of Education, who is quoted in
> Rosser's piece, 'The [real news] story is not one of
> male failure, or even lack of opportunity – but
> rather one of increased academic success among females
> and minorities.' "
>
>
>
>
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