If colleges really want more men they should beef up their engineering schools. I go to a school mostly known for engineering and it has never had any problem attracting males. Women benefit too. I never intended to do computer engineering, but being in an environment where engineering is viewed as a positive thing allowed me to explore such options.

Robert,

There is a huge body of evidence of this on the internet.

". A second argument is that the lower status of women in the larger social context is transferred to the workplace,

devaluing jobs with a high percentage of women workers,resulting in lower

compensation and prestige(Englandet al., 1994; Kilbourneet al., 1994;

Maume, 1999"

http://research.bus.wisc.edu/lhunter/Published%20Articles/Where%20Do%20Womens%20Jobs%20Come%20From.pdf

ANd there's more

http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/encyclopedia/Clo-Con/Comparable-Worth.html

"In fact, although it has been widely shown that men and women are concentrated in different occupations, it is still true that this corresponds to a system awarding social value based on occupation and consequent material and symbolic acknowledgements differentiated according to gender.

Women’s jobs usually have less prestige, less career opportunities and lower salaries than men’s; within jobs that are undergoing feminisation men’s conditions are also worsening.

A survey carried out by the CNEL (National Council of Economy and Labour) in 1993 confirms the positive trend in the offer of qualified women’s work, defined "prestigious":

"it concerns a rather limited number of women workers although this has increased over the last ten years at a constant rate" .

http://donnalavoro.ticonuno.it/inglese/ipaper4.htm

"...passion for poetry, their desire to discover vaccines and their conviction that they can make the world a better place..."

In other words, these girls are good at verbalizing their good intentions. Talk about construction jobs. There is a road for them to pave out there.

What this article shows this man is that female admissions officers connect more easily with female applicants b/c they speak the same language of romantic idealism. It is the same language which draws women to chic lit and romance novels.

You won't find a lot of high-school guys putting on such a song and dance. So let's hope test scores, grades, athletics, etc. still count for something. Boys have always been more about action and outcome than poetry and world peace.

Funny thing, so is the rest of the world.

Lytonya, please accept my apology for this careless error.

Lytonya, please accept my apology for this careless error.

[First, a claimer: No one is more opposed to unfair discrimination in hiring or anything else than I. This post is made solely in the interest of truth.]

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Lytonya, whose job is to statistically evaluate fairness in hiring, writes:

There's something going on if you're hiring the men from that applicant pool at a rate 2 SD's higher than the women from that applicant pool--not to mention even the fact that a low application rate of females in a region where there are plently of qualified females is an issue of recruitment and job advertisement.

The first assertion, which may appear to be obvious, is extremely doubtful.

Here is an example from the annual American Crossword Puzzle Tournament (which is taking place in Stamford, CT, this very weekend). This is the only annual national crossword tournament, and has taken place each year since 1978.

According to last year's statistics, (see http://www.crosswordtournament.com/2005/index.htm), there are close to the same number of males and females among the 455 contestants. Here is the breakdown among the 20% of contestants who ended up with the highest scores. (The scoring is 100% objective. And no one has ever suggested that the knowledge helpful in solving these puzzles favors one sex over the other.) Two percent of 455 is 9.1, so we use 9 people to represent each 2% here:

Top 2%:    2F, 7M

2nd 2%:    2F, 7M

3rd 2%:    2F, 2M

4th 2%:    4F, 5M

5th 2%:    1F, 8M

6th 2%:    2F, 7M

7th 2%:    2F, 7M

8th 2%:    4F, 5M

9th 2%:    1F, 8M

10th 2%:   0F, 9M

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Among the top 20%, (91 people) there are 20F, 71M.

No one knows the explanation for the disproportionate statistics, but they are not a fluke; a similar pattern has occurred over the 27-year run of the tournament (not counting this, 28th, year, whose rankings won't be known until tomorrow afternoon).

Over the 27 years before now, a women has won the tournament 3 times, a man 24 times.

Skill at crosswords per se is irrelevant to any other endeavor, but it may well indicate that some skills that employers seek may be much stronger, on average, in one sex than in the other.

The phenomenon of winning the tournament may be quite similar to being the person chosen to be hired when several hundred applicants, roughly equal numbers of each sex, apply for one job opening.

I have not the slightest doubt that the exact reverse of these statistics -- showing women to have some skills moe strongly, on average, than men. The point is simply that an objectively disproportionate distribution of certain skills between women and men can easily happen.

Conclusion: Disproportionate hiring ratios are not by any means clear evidence of any discrimination in hiring.

As Lytonya writes, there's "something going on" -- but it may very well have nothing to do with discrimination.

No, I don't think women are lazy. Do you? The same BLS Time Use Survey I cited earlier shows that, among men and women who work, men work more paid hours and women do more household chores and childcare. When it's all added together (paid and unpaid work), working women average about 15 minutes more of work per day than working men.

As to jobs mostly held by men being more dangerous than those held by women, they are. This is not a debatable point. 91% of on-the-job fatalities are to men. I wonder why you chose to make a snide remark about architects instead of spending 5 minutes on the Internet finding out the facts. In this case the truth is easy to find, but you elected not to. Care to explain why?

Men as appropriate victims of violence as depicted in popular culture: Well, all you have to do is turn on the TV any time of the day or night or attend a movie. The old sitcom 'Ally McBeal" was always good for some cathartic anti-male violence. I remember one episode when two of the attorneys in the office who were married to each other had an argument in the unisex bathroom. He insulted her hair (she bleached it) so she kneed him in the crotch and knocked him out with a slug to the jaw. Nothing in the show suggested that maybe she shouldn't have resorted to domestic violence.

More generally, though, the "bad guys" are almost always men. So the drug gangs are always males and when the cops shoot them to pieces, that's depicted as appropriate, because they're degenerate druggies.

Women as inappropriate victims. Again, this is an almost invariable rule. I watched 'Crash' last night. (It was as bad last night as when I watched it the first time. Is it possible that that movie won Best Picture?) Matt Dillon plays a lousy LA cop who stops a black couple and feels up the woman. She did nothing to warrant such treatment and is therefore an inappropriate victim. I can't remember an example of a woman's being portrayed as so bad that she deserved to be beaten up, shot, etc. It is routine with men.

No, I am not suggesting that women don't seek construction jobs because they fear violence. That part of my previous post had nothing to do with occupational issues.

LeCastor, as long as we're responding to each other's posts, would you please respond to mine of several days ago? You previously stated that "men's" jobs pay more BECAUSE they're held by men. I asked you to cite evidence and you never have. I'm asking you again. Please show me the evidence for your proposition.