There’s a large gap between male and female enrolment, across all racial groups. The enrolment gap has increased steadily since the 1970s. There;s also a gap in graduation rates – men are much more likely to drop out –which compounds the effect of the enrolment gap. Recently,

The enrolment gap now extends all the way to the doctoral level: doctoral programs remained majority male much longer than the other degree levels, all the way until 2005, but have also seen the greatest decline, plummeting from 90% in 1970 to 44% as of 2021. Across all

Numerous professions have switched from male to female dominant over the last century, e.g.high school teaching, interior design, veterinary medicine, bank tellers. Research indicates that at between 30% and 60% female involvement, an occupation is coded as feminine, and men exit

Morton Schapiro, an economist and former president of Northwestern University, was interviewed in a recent Freakonomics podcast on the subject of the plummeting male participation in higher ed, and confirmed that this 60% threshold for male flight is being seen in academia, too:

So what is the reason for male flight? Are the boys scared of cooties? Is it misogynistic bigotry against women? Most men probably can’t quite verbalize why female spaces feel uncomfortable, it is simply an instinctive realization that one is in the wrong place. There are good

Why do women punish men who work in female professions? It’s very simple, really. Social status is a significant component of female attraction. Men gain status by competing with other men. As such, male-coded professions serve as status arenas. Those who enter and succeed within

Competition with women does not demonstrate these traits at all, because it is usually too easy. Getting in a fight with a woman is a lose/lose proposition: if you lose the fight, you got beaten up by the girl; if you win the fight, you beat up a girl. No one is impressed by

This is also one of the reasons why ‘women’s work’ is intrinsically low-status, although really it would be better to say ‘zero-status’, since women’s work is orthogonal to the male status hierarchy – not so much below it, as outside of it. A female kindergarten teacher isn’t

A natural consequence of this is that once an occupation becomes women’s work, it ceases to be capable of providing prestige (and in fact, confers negative prestige on men who enter it), and also drops in income – this is the source of the infamous ‘wage gap’ feminists love to

Here I interrupt this thread to point out that there’s a much more detailed, and better written, version of this, which if you respect yourself you will prefer. You can find the link on my pinned post. 11/22

So, there’s a 60% tipping point of female involvement at which men abandon an occupation, at which point that occupation gets coded as women’s work, drops in prestige, and resources are restricted. Universities recently reached this level. We should expect that society will

About a decade ago Clayton Christensen, a professor at the Harvard Business School, predicted that before this decade is out half of America’s colleges and universities would go tits up. His prediction is right on schedule. Christensen doesn’t blame the presence of too many

A recent Gallup poll revealed that the confidence of Americans in higher ed has plummeted over the last decade or so. This is something I’ve written about before, and there are obviously more reasons for this than just academic work being women’s work ... but again, that

Male flight is likely to make academia a lot less productive, too. The overwhelming majority of Nobel prize winners are men, which feminists blame on muh patriarchy, but is really because the combination of traits that creates a genius are much more likely to be found in men:

Successful female academics tend to have exactly the opposite personality profile of the cantankerous autistic genius, conforming instead to the ‘head girl’ archetype: just bright enough to do perfectly adequate work, high in agreeableness (they want that pat on head from

Not only do men tend to do more interesting work than women – they do more of it.This very funny thread from @epkaufm turned this up in, of all places, a Nature paper trying to torture its data into providing empirical support for diversity hiring (their data refuted their own

If female scholars are less productive, produce less interesting research, and tend to be preoccupied with enforcing consensus, we should see signs of that. Sure enough,disruptive science has been declining for generations. There are more reasons for this than just women being

Meanwhile, science funding – yes, even in the NSF – is being directed towards frivolous DEI-themed non-research. A recent Senate committee went through a bunch of NSF grants and found that over a quarter of them were given to diversity nonsense. This is due to a top-down

Is there a way for academia to pull out of this death spiral? There is! Women are not homogeneously distributed in academia. They absolute dominate in education, health sciences, psychology, but STEM, not so much. There are obvious reasons for this – natural disposition,

There are all sorts of programs trying to force meme women in STEM – special girl-only science camps, special scholarships, special mentoring programs, special admissions targets, special hiring targets. That STEM is still male dominant is considered a travesty, an affront to

Reminder that there is a more detailed, and more entertaining, version of this, the link to which is provided at my pinned post. 22/22

Outside of the DIEing academy, there are other ways of keeping intellectual life alive. One is to start new universities not based on equalitarian principles - University of Austin trying this, but it's expensive ($200M to start it I think), and has a small student body. In

Of course, there a few other status arenas in which ambitious young men are finding places for themselves. 24/22

Academics fretting about male flight from the academy couch their concerns in worries over the consequences for the futures of young men – reduced opportunities, reduced incomes. It’s true that young men are doing pretty poorly right now. They’re depressed, withdrawn, suicidal,

The best typos you miss are the ones right at the beginning.

I could not be more proud that my thread has inspired this small but symbolic act of resistance. https://x.com/zapplepie2020/st...

@martianwyrdlord Thank you, thank you, thank you for writing this thread. I’m a man currently trapped in a female-coded profession and it is devastating for all the reasons you mentioned. What makes it even harder is that I can’t talk to people about it. They either don’t understand, or don’t

@luxluc3t It needs to be talked about more. Our society has been turning away from reality for far too long. That needs to stop.

@martianwyrdlord One general pattern when women become dominant in a field previously dominated by men is that the quality standards are lowered. This is clearly happening in Western academia, where e.g. many PhDs are handed out for completely worthless work with zero intellectual value.

@Stefan3334 Correct.

@martianwyrdlord I do agree with your assessment, may I add that quilting and needlework may be tedious and dull work to men, at least it creates something of useful, beautiful and well loved by all. Society never seem to appreciate woman's work.

@angel75_burst It was not my intention to devalue needlework or any other craft! The world is much poorer without them.

@profclbrown Hey, you found a typo on Twitter dot com, congrats! You are very smart.

@martianwyrdlord *its Oh, the irony.

@meadowgroove If you read to the end of the thread, you'll see I pointed out that out as soon as it was brought to my attention, because it is obviously funny. What's even funnier is that the only thing any of you have found to correct is a typo. Congrats.