Should NOW be advocating for greater representation of men on campus?

From All the Single Ladies by Rob Henderson.  The subheading is Men floundering, women most affected.

This information has been around for more than a decade but not many people pay attention to it.  It can be overblown for polemical purposes but it is, I believe, a real issue.  

Methodologically, there is a point I never see much addressed.  Or really, addressed at all.  Women are strongly overrepresented in many lower value degrees such as communications or education.  I have always wondered what the sex ratio numbers would look like if you were to strip out the lower valued degrees.  I suspect the ratios would be much more even than the current headline numbers.  But it probably doesn't make too much of a difference in terms of the social dynamics being described.

The dating market for women is getting tougher. In part, this is because fewer men are attending universities. Why would male enrollment in higher education matter for women? Because women, on average, prefer educated men. One source of evidence comes from women’s personal responses to dating profiles posted by men. Researchers analyzed 120 personal dating ads posted by men on the West Coast and Midwest. They found that two of the strongest variables that predicted how many responses a man received from women were years of education and income. Similar results have been found in Poland. Researchers analyzed how many women responded to dating ads posted by 551 men. They found that men with higher levels of education and higher income received more responses. A more recent study in Australia of more than 40,000 online daters found that women were more likely to initiate contact with a man if he had more education than themselves.

Still, young people today are more likely to use Tinder or other dating apps than Internet dating websites. Are things different on the apps? A study led by economics researcher Brecht Neyt of Ghent University found that, on Tinder, women were 91 percent more likely to “like” a man with a master's degree compared with a bachelor's degree. The researchers used the same male profiles, the only difference was level of education. They also tested how men would react to women with different levels of education, finding that men were only 8 percent more likely to “like” a woman with a master’s degree compared with a bachelor’s degree. Both men and women preferred more educated partners, but women had a much stronger preference.

This is straightforward evolutionary biology.  Women carry a much greater burden of risk factors with childbirth and they therefore have a strong incentive to find and retain powerful mates.  In modern society, power is usually expressed in terms of education and income.  

In other words, the dating pool for college graduates has 33 percent more women than men—or 4 women for every 3 men. Broken down by degree type across all ages in the U.S., for every 100 men with bachelor’s degrees, there are 130 women. For those with master’s degrees, for every 100 men there are 134 women. The situation for educated women seeking educated male partners doesn’t look good. Furthermore, more men identify as exclusively homosexual relative to women. Which suggests the dating pool for heterosexual women may be even smaller than the above numbers suggest.

Women have a significantly stronger preference for educated men than do men for educated women and there are fewer educated men than there are educated women.  At its crudest, this is an unbalanced supply and demand condition which has reasonably predictable consequences.

Jon Birger, in Date-onomics, describes the dating scene on campuses with imbalanced sex ratios. On colleges with more men than women, such as Caltech, steady relationships are more widespread. Students go on dates, and men demonstrate commitment in partnerships. Men are more willing to do what women want in order to be with them. On the other hand, when there is a surplus of women relative to men, women are more likely to adapt to men’s preferences. They compete with one another to be what men want. And this is what we see on campuses with more female students relative to male students. On colleges with more women than men, such as Sarah Lawrence, casual sex is more widespread. Hookup culture is more prevalent, and men are less interested in entering committed relationships. Women are more willing to do what men want in order to be with them.

When I attended university, my school was only fifteen years out from having fully integrated all classes in terms of sex.  The university had moved from perhaps 40% female to 50% female in that time period and perhaps more importantly, women were in all programs not just some historically female schools like nursing.  

While the details differed, that was the broad trend across all Americans institutions of higher learning.  The details and timing differed but they broadly migrated from 40% to a balanced 50% by the late seventies or early eighties.  

There was of course an ideological aspect of this with NOW and comparable advocacy groups casting the 40% representation as being a civil rights affront.  And while not quite right, they certainly weren't wrong.  

Given how much universities now depend on federal dollars in terms of grants, loans, or research contracts, it is right that the public would expect all citizens to be treated equally by those universities.  It is reasonable to expect that men and women should be roughly equally represented (same with race, religion, etc.)

As women's presence increased into the low fifties, there was a pooh-poohing of the idea that women were now the dominant presence on campus and that they therefore ought no longer to have all the special programs afforded to them as a supposed disadvantaged group.  As their presence drifted into the higher fifties it became an increasingly apparent issue but an issue that the chattering classes decidedly do not wan to address.

But as Henderson is pointing out, there is a feminist stake in there being equal representation.  

The more that universities experience a female predominance, the worse women are treated.  It is not an intended goal and it is not an evil aspect of men.  It is a function of biological and social incentives in which everyone is participating.  But to the detriment of women in high mate competition environments where women are predominant.  Hookup culture is detrimental to individuals and to society in general.

Which leaves us with a great irony from an old feminist ideology perspective.  If indeed we wish to improve the lives of women at universities, we really ought to be taking a much more active role in ensuring that there are equal sex ratios at those universities.  Old style feminists ought to be advocating programs to get more men back on campus.

And I fully recognize that this is a lower priority problem as it is most pertinent to upper middle income people.  The problem is dramatically worse and more complicated for the 70% who do not attend university.