A follow-up on men, women and equality

I said something here (and a little here) about women being better educated than men. Here's some further thoughts, based on data from Canada.

The conclusion: "Put (too) simply the only men who are good enough to get into university are men who are good at STEM. Women are good enough to get into non-STEM and STEM fields. Thus, among university students, women dominate in the non-STEM fields and men survive in the STEM fields. [...] I don’t know whether this story will hold up but one attractive feature, as a theory, is that it is consistent with the worrying exit from the labor market of men at the bottom."

Going back to what I said earlier, I'm not certain that "good enough" is the right way of looking at this: it might be that universities favour female traits over male ones, or that men are more likely to decide that university is not for them, or something else. But it's worth being reminded that the problem (if there is a problem) is not that STEM is favouring men, but that men are falling behind everywhere else.

British society really has changed from the 1950s (or wherever it is that reformers seem to get their stereotypes from). Men and boys are well behind in the educational races; the white British are the worst performing students (allowing for income); Christian churches are not oppressive structures in society but rather tiny groups struggling to deal with their irrelevancy. Social reformers seem to be very keen to fight the last war when they should be preparing for the current one, not least because I'm pretty sure that it would be far better if the cause of less well-off white, Christian-heritage males is not left to be defended purely by the likes of some home-grown Donald Trump equivalent.