The "Gender Imbalance" in Colleges: Is it a Real Problem or a Symptom of Something Else?

(warning, expletives)

Aug 14, 2024

I recently read the glowing annual letter from the president of the University of Vermont, UVM. In it, he mentioned the university’s “gender imbalance”: While only 38% of incoming students at UVM are male, college registrants are around 60% female across the country. That is quite a discrepancy in gender all around. He mentions that UVM is making “efforts to correct this imbalance.” I wonder, however, if the source of this imbalance is being addressed, namely the rampant privilege that most males enjoy and, therefore, don’t need to get a higher degree to succeed like females need to.

Women need a degree to earn a basic living wage. It rankles me that there is so much “concern” by the establishment for this “gender imbalance” in college attendance. Great efforts are made to “correct” it. Trust me; no correction is needed; it’s already a correction as a result of the gender-imbalanced-pay EVERYWHERE ELSE that no one seems to care about. Women still earn 75 cents to a man’s dollar. That comes out to about $15 an hour for a woman compared to $20 for a man. Obvious discrepancy. I mean, wouldn’t you be pissed if your colleague made $20 and you made $15 doing the same damn job?

Not only that, but inequity in the kinds of paying jobs that men get versus women is a HUGE “gender imbalance” that no one in the government has tried to correct. The government even recently eliminated affirmative action, which addressed one single but huge aspect of inequality: who got hired based on gender and race. I benefited from that program as a young woman in a white man’s world. However, the company that was meeting its affirmative quota didn’t have to provide equity in how the quota was met. As long as we minorities were kept in the lowest levels of status and income, the wyte boyz upstairs making the big bucks were happy to hire us “dykes, sρικs, and n’s.” (Pardon the use of bigoted semantics used here for emphasis on how we are seen by the majority of wyte boyz)

Now we’re back to square one, worrying about our boys’ ability to succeed in the world, and it’s our white boys we need to worry about, right? Because when they don’t do well, they burn shit down and raid government buildings. Am I right? Ironically, wyte boyz aren’t the ones clogging up prisons, but they are the ones launching missiles and passing laws on wym3n’s bodies, another sign of wyte m3n’s automatic, privileged status.

Fannie Lou Hamer said, “No one is free until we are all free,” in a speech at the Founding of the National Women’s Political Caucus, Washington, D.C., July 10, 1971. She likely included wyte boyz, but I’m so tired of hearing them whine. When a billionaire wyte boy whines about being deplatformed, or not making enough money, I have two urges: I want to both laugh and throw a pie in his face screaming “Moron.” I’ve written about that moron here before. Fannie Lou Hamer also said “I’m sick and tired of being sick and tired,” in a speech given with Malcom X. Preach sister! She said it first!

Ultimately, I believe the real “gender imbalance” in universities is not so much about equity or equality but about education; males, especially wyte boyz, are confident that their unearned privilege will serve them in life; they don’t even have to think about it, they don’t need a college or a liberal arts education to do well. I had a boyfriend who, with only a High School diploma, earned six figures at his organization, where the starting salary was $60k a year. Please fuck me in the face if teachers get a starting salary of $60k anywhere with just a High School diploma. Teachers, to even get a job teaching, need at least a bachelor’s; many states require a Master’s degree, and many teachers have multiple degrees. Along with those degrees come hefty college loans. Lawyers might start at $70k and up, and doctors starting salaries are usually in the six-figure region. A lot of whining goes on about medical school and law school, but do you ever hear about teacher colleges? Or the ongoing professional development required monthly and annually for teachers? Or all the certifications and licenses required by teachers to complete? Or the cost in time and money for those requirements? Also you probably don’t know about our country’s dirty little secret about teachers’ overtime pay.

Someone decided in the 1930s that teachers should be exempt from overtime pay, along with doctors and lawyers who can make up to tens times as much as teachers.

Yes, teachers who go home and work grading papers, lesson planning, and meeting with parents after school, and on whose shoulders lie the responsibility of developing an educated and wise society, are exempt from overtime pay by law.

WTAF?

Who teaches lawyers and doctors? Teachers, who are making less than lawyers and doctors. But why is this? Misogyny, of course!

Most teachers are wym3n, but far fewer are superintendents or presidents of universities. Misogyny is deeply embedded in our society, in our laws, and in our culture, so much that we don’t even notice it when it stares us in the face, or when Millions of Women March on the Capital demanding bodily autonomy and equal pay.

Back to the start of “gender imbalance” in college registrations.

If there is a concern about males entering college, it should be based on the worry that males are not learning important things about the world around them; for example, that their privileged status of male-hood is not extended to females or that race and gender are a subjective status that can be abused by people in power to drive wedges between us, or that equity and equality are not the same thing. There are so many wonderful things to learn in college about the world and our humanity, but obviously, m3n either don’t need to know or just don’t give a damn. My brother-in-law is the latter; he doesn’t give a damn about college and thinks education and reading are a waste of time and for fools. His High School diploma and two-year Army stint in Germany are all he needed to earn six figures. I’ll bet you guessed it, he’s a wyte boy. He also believes the Twin Towers were brought down by space lasers, and the planes were holograms, and that climate change isn’t real. Go to school, fool.

In Finland, where women were given the right to vote in 1906, and marital rape was criminalized in 1994, there is an actual social agreement that the government must work to be gender balanced between males and females, and assessments of gender balance be made in all aspects of regular life.

Is it any wonder that it is one of the most educated, happy nations with one the most successful educational system anywhere?

The World Economic Forum studied Gender Parity around the world, and guess what they found!

“Although no country has yet achieved full gender parity, the top nine countries (Iceland, Norway, Finland, New Zealand, Sweden, Germany, Nicaragua, Namibia, and Lithuania) have closed at least 80% of their gap. For the 14th year running, Iceland (91.2%) takes the top position.”

The USA ranks 42nd in gender parity, even dropping 16 points in 2023, and behind Columbia (which rose 33 points!) and, well, 41 other much more equity-informed nations. When Nicaragua and Rwanda are in the top 15 nations for Gender Parity ahead of your country, you know your country is screwing up royally. No offense to Nicaragua and Rwanda, but their troubled history is well documented, and they show how embracing gender parity floats everyone!

Yes, boyz, especially the wyte boys, need to go to school, if only to learn how damn lucky they are to live in a country that adores them to the detriment of everyone else, especially to mothers who have the highest mortality rates in all of the developed nations.

And can we talk about our infants and their highest mortality rates in all of the developed nations?

COULD FEMALE POVERTY BE A CONNECTION?

It would appear that the poorest women living in US states (mostly in the South) that actively discriminate against women and their children, and non-wytes, tend to have the highest infant mortality rates. Despite all the lip service given by “families first” and “pro-life” advocates.

That kind of poverty is a travesty against humanity, but it’s not like no one has known about it.

Women experience poverty at a much higher rate than men around the world, and the USA, the richest nation of all, is no different. The National Women’s Law Center’s “Snapshot” from 2023:

Using the official poverty measure, nearly one in 11 (8.9%) white, non-Hispanic women lived in poverty in 2021, compared to 7.1% of white, non-Hispanic men. However, many women of color were even more likely to live in poverty.
Black women: 18.8% of Black women lived in poverty.
Latinx women: 17.0% of Latinx women lived in poverty.
Asian women: 10.0% of Asian women lived in poverty.
Native women: 21.0% of Native women lived in poverty.10
More than one in seven (14.7%) women born outside of the United States lived in poverty using the OPM in 2021.
The OPM poverty rate for disabled women ages 18 to 64 was higher than it was for nondisabled women, 26.5% and 10.4%, respectively. The poverty rate among their male counterparts was lower: 23.3% of disabled men lived in poverty, and 8.1% of non-disabled men lived in poverty in 2021.

https://nwlc.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/2023_nwlc_PovertySnapshot-converted.pdf

How could that be corrected?

For starters, we could actually fund public schools equitably, raise the minimum wage to $20 (to almost match inflation since the late 1970’s), and abolish the health insurance scams by instituting Universal Healthcare or Medicaid (not Medicare) for all. Of course, that would mean cutting the military budget by a few billion dollars, a fraction of the hundreds of billions of dollars we sent overseas the past two years in bombs and cash to murder innocent people. It would also mean working together to improve the quality of life for everyone in an equitable society.

Is that really so hard to do? Do we really need to continuously wage endless wars around the world and overthrow other nation’s elected leaders with coups and fake revolutions? As Utah Phillips said: “The planet is dying, and those doing the killing have names and addresses,” And they are probably running the USA and pretending to let people vote for their leaders. What they are NOT doing is lifting people out of poverty, namely women and their children.

Incidentally, I learned today, 8/14/2024, that the UVM president has just taken a higher-paying job elsewhere where he can continue to solve the crisis of low male registration. He is now president of the University of Arizona, switching from the Catamounts to the Wildcats. Go him! Raaarrr!

“It’s not yet clear what how much Garimella will earn as UA’s next president (he reportedly made $509,331 at Vermont). Robbins’s base salary is $734,407, after he took a 10 percent pay cut in March, according to UA.”

(The author starts typing a search: how many women are university presidents in the USA?)

"We have a long fight, and this fight is not mine alone, but you are not free, whether you are white or black, until I am free."
--Fannie Lou Hamer

“Make a career of humanity. Commit yourself to the noble struggle for equal rights. You will make a better person of yourself, a greater nation of your country, and a finer world to live in.” —M.L.K. Jr.

“I have the audacity to believe that peoples everywhere can have three meals a day for their bodies, education and culture for their minds, and dignity, equality and freedom for their spirits.” —M.L.K. Jr.

“Sit down and read. Educate yourself for the coming conflicts.” —Mary Harris Jones

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