Every year in my genetics class we play a little game. The first lab is dedicated to learning some basic rules of probability and running through some simple statistical tests, and one of the exercises is to look around the room and count male-presenting vs. female-presenting students, and test whether the distribution is close enough to 50:50. It never is. then we test against a 40:60 male:female ratio, which used to be the ratio for my university as a whole, and it’s always significantly different than that. This year I have closer to a 30:70 ratio.

Another anecdotal observation: all the men in the class spontaneously segregated themselves to one lab bench. I told them it looked like a high school dance with all the boys nervous and shy about asking someone to dance. The women also looked comfortable with the separation. I’ve long wondered what’s going on, why men are avoiding college, and today I found an article that ponders the same question.

In the 1950s, men outnumbered women 2:1 in college.

By the 1990s, the ratio was 1:1.

Today the ratio is 4:6 with fewer men than women attending college.

The question on everyone’s mind is why? Why aren’t men going to college anymore?

Yeah, why is that? Let’s hear some hypotheses.

Ruth Simmons, president of A&M University thinks “the problem is the way we treat our boys in k-12. They turn away from school because of the negative messages they get at school… Behavior that is rewarded for boys doesn’t fit well with good student behavior.”

I call bullshit on that one. Do you think women don’t get negative, discouraging messages in k-12? The whole damn culture is rife with a bias that girls are supposed to be homemakers and squirt out babies.

Another college president, Donald Ruff believes it boils down to money. “Honestly I think it’s the sticker shock. To see $100,000 that’s daunting.”

True, tuition is ridiculously high, but being a woman does not qualify you for a discount, so that’s a bad explanation.

Author Richard Reeves thinks, “The main reason is that girls are outperforming boys in school.“

I can confirm that! I’ve looked at final grade distributions in my classes, and typically the top 10% in the class are all women. However, that doesn’t explain why we have this difference in performance. I don’t think women are intrinsically smarter than men (I confess to being biased by my experience), and I struggled to understand where this performance difference might come from. Once I thought it might be that the men are all distracted by sports, but no…our male students are often engaged with our sports teams, but I’m more often seeing that women are putting in long hours with the swim team, the volleyball team, the soccer team. When there’s an away game it produces bigger holes in the women student audience than the men’s group (partly, of course, because there are fewer men in the first place.)

There are other suggestions bounced around.

• Men can make more money without a college degree than women can, so women need college more.

• Higher rates of alcohol, drug use, gangs and prison for boys negate college as a viable option.

• Colleges are usually left-leaning, so right-leaning students increasingly don’t feel comfortable there. And more men than women lean right.

• Men join the military more than women.

• A man will sometimes have to provide for wife/kids before he can finish college.

OK, but those disparities were just as great, or greater, in the 1950s as they are now. They don’t explain the 𝚫 at all. But the author proposes an interesting, if rather circular, explanation.

What has changed is an increase in girls.

When you look at other areas where this exact same thing has happened, it is not such a head scratcher why fewer men are going to college.

We’re just not talking about it.

Here’s a phenomenon I have witnessed in almost 40 years of teaching: vocational choices have been shifting.

In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.

By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1

By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

That’s also true for med school. Every year I’m writing recommendations for vet school, med school, and grad school, mostly for women. It’s not for the usual annoying excuse I hear from some people, that those professional schools and those occupations have gotten easier, with reduced standards, to accommodate “the girls”* because, if anything, admissions have become even more competitive over the years. Probably the toughest school to get into is vet school, and that’s where the disparity between male and female applicants is highest, in my experience.

So one simple explanation is…cooties. Girls’ germs.

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” – Dr. Anne Lincoln

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:

“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”

Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.

Great. I’ll inform the administration that one way out of our enrollment and budget declines is to admit fewer women.

But seriously, there is something going on here: witness the spontaneous segregation of men and women in my genetics lab. I don’t understand why men are averse to working with women, but it’s a real phenomenon I’ve witnessed. There is no shortage of stupid explanations, at least!

Because the concept of school is feminine.
In Spanish, school is ‘escuela’, ending in -a, which is a feminine.
Think about what you do in school.
You sit down, you accept that you don’t know sh:t and you accept that your teacher is right and you have to shut up and listen.
Obedience is what school requires, which is a feminine trait.
What is masculine is standing up in the classroom and saying “Fvck this sh:t, I’m going to do it my way, you’re wrong, I’m right, I’m not gonna listen to you”, that is a very masculine thing to do, and that’s why men, who are on average, more masculine, essentially do that.

The concept of school is feminine…but never mind that women were often forbidden from attending college, until relatively recent decades.

In Spanish, ‘escuela’ has a feminine gender…damn, this is an argument from a man who has never studied languages, because the article attached to a word has no necessary association with sex.

Since when is good teaching and good learning a matter of rote memorization? My best students ask questions. I encourage them to ask me to clarify or explain why something I say is true. To assume that obedience is a feminine trait is straight up wrong and bigoted, and to think that the manly way to learn is to announce aggressively that you’re not going to listen, is antithetical to learning anything. That guy gets everything wrong.

It’s a useful example of the problem, though. It tells me that the problem is a deep cultural bias, where loud-mouthed, ignorant men are shouting out their sexist biases and indoctrinating other men into a dumb attitude that reinforces their bigotry even further. Somehow, men can acquire authority by being loud and aggressive, no matter how stupid their views are, and that just generates more loud, aggressive, stupid men, enshittifying whole generations of young people.

That’s my perspective from the world of education. I can’t think of any examples from the world of politics, for example, can you?

* One thing that bugged me about the article is that it uses men/women, boys/girls, male/female interchangeably. I’m working with college-aged students, and I can’t think of them as boys/girls — they’re adults, or nearly so — and as a biologist male/female has connotations of sex, which I avoid with students. They’re men and women in my classes, that’s it.

[Optimism would be nice.]

I’ve previously written briefly about Googie design, the space-age futuristic look from the middle of last century. Though its extremely car-centric, I still find the futurist style appealing. Googie is interesting, and it’s different, and it’s often fun. The frequent use of neon doesn’t hurt, either. Plus, it’s nice when a restaurant or gas station looks like something.

The New York Times recently wrote about the fight to save Googie, and the article includes some excellent pictures.

Link: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/12/21/realestate/googie-architecture.html?unlocked_article_code=1.o04.jwGj.H1fVoQVYvO97&smid=url-share

[The movement against car bloat is nascent, but it has righteousness on its side.]

In recent decades, the size of cars in America has ballooned. These oversized cars increase risks for everyone else on the road, a negative externality similar to secondhand smoke. At Vox, David Zipper suggests that the anti-tobacco playbook could be used to push back against car bloat.

Much like secondhand smoke, driving a gigantic vehicle endangers those who never consented to the danger they face walking, biking, or sitting inside smaller cars. Although not widely known, car bloat’s harms are well-documented. Heavier vehicles can pulverize modest-sized ones, and tall front ends obscure a driver’s vision, putting pedestrians and cyclists at particular risk. Deaths among both groups recently hit 40-year highs in the US.

It’s hard to imagine clearing our roads of these oversized vehicles. But not that long ago, it was impossible to believe the tide could turn on smoking in public places.

Link: https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/391733/gigantic-suvs-are-a-public-health-threat-why-dont-we-treat-them-like-one

Another good thing associated with America’s least objectionable retail behemoth:

A real-estate developer in Los Angeles is testing a new blueprint for affordable housing: stack apartments on top of a Costco.

Thrive Living is planning to begin construction in early 2025 on an 800-unit affordable-housing complex with the megaretailer on the ground floor in the Baldwin Village neighborhood of South Los Angeles. The project, which includes a rooftop pool and fitness center, would have 184 apartments for low-income households.

The property would be the first residential development in the U.S. with a built-in Costco, which is best known for its fiercely loyal customers who load up carts with everything from bulk pickles to gold bars. The rent that Costco Wholesale pays Thrive will help the developer rely less on government subsidies for the affordable housing, according to Thrive’s founder, Ben Shaoul.

If it works, Shaoul said he hopes to use the same tools elsewhere to create more affordable housing. “I want to build thousands and thousands of apartments every year, not hundreds,” said Shaoul, who also runs Magnum Real Estate Group, in New York.

The Baldwin Village location would give Costco access to a densely populated urban market as well as an automatic customer base in the apartments upstairs. Many residents might join the tens of millions of Costco members who pay fees to shop there.

A great idea I hope gets spread elsewhere.

The post One small victory against NIMBYs appeared first on Lawyers, Guns & Money.

[“The Society for Totally Useless Pranks and Immature Dumbassery” has my current favorite acronym of 2025.]

Friend-of-the-site Colin T. knows of my love of both truck-eating bridges and googly eyes. So naturally, he swiftly alerted me to the existence of Lansing, Michigan’s Big Penny.

My favorite part is the tally of trucks munched. We ought to bring that to Storrow Drive here in Boston.

Link: https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2024/12/how-michigans-capital-learned-to-love-a-truck-eating-bridge.html

Sexism in gaming isn’t a new thing at all — good ol’ Dungeons & Dragons was full of it. Here’s Gary Gygax, one of the creators of the game, opining on women in gaming sometime in the early 2000s:

There were never many female gamers in our group. My daughter Elise was one of two original play-testers for the first draft of Wi, Usa ‘what became the D&D game, and both of her younger sisters played…and lost interest in a few months as she did.
In our campaign group that cycled through in a couple of years (74-75) something in the neighborhood of 100 or so different players, there were perhaps three females.
As a biological determinist, | am positive that most females do not play RPGs because of a difference in brain function. They can play as well as males, but they do not achieve the same sense of satisfaction from playing.
In short there is no special game that will attract females–other that LARPing, which is more csocialization and theatrics and gaming–and it is a waste of time and effort to attempt such a thing.
This calls to mind when Lionel made pastel colored trains and train cars to appeal to females. The effort bombed, the sets were recalled and re-dine as standard models, and those pastel ones that survived are rare collectors items.
So much for this topic.

One thing that jumped out at me was his flat statement that he was a “biological determinist”. Gygax had no training in biology, no college degree at all — he was an insurance agent before he became famous as a gamer. You can dismiss anything he says about “brain function” as a product of ignorance.

He mentions that few women were interested in his game in 1974-75, when they “tested” the idea. Women were not interested, according to him, because their brains were different. I have an alternative explanation: here’s Gygax writing about the subject in 1975.

I have been accused of being a nasty, old, sexist-male Chauvinist-pig, for the wording in D&D isn’t what it should be. There should be more emphasis on the female role, more non-gender names, and so forth. I thought perhaps these folks were right and considered adding women in the ‘Raping and Pillaging_ section, in the ‘Whorses and Tavern Wenches’ chapter, the special magical part of dealith with ‘Hags and Crones’, and thought of perhaps adding and appendix of ‘Midieval Harems, Slave Girls and Going Viking’. Damn right I am a sexist. It doesn’t matter to me if women get paid as much as men, get jobs traditionally male, and shower in the men’s locker room. They can jolly well stay away from war-gaming in droves for all I care. I’ve seen many a good wargame and wargamer spoiled thanks to the fair sex. I’ll detail that if anyone wishes.

Wow. Just wow. What an asshole.

Were you shocked by gamergate in the 2010s? I was. I shouldn’t have been, if I’d been paying attention in the 1970s. I don’t think Gygax was a cause, but a symptom of an attitude common at the time.

Let’s not forget the weird racism in old school D&D, either. I suspect he was a “race realist” in addition to being a “sex realist”, and now it’s coloring my impressions of the game.