So many good points in here. When women begin to enter fields, first people cheer the pioneers. Then women do it more...and men get nervous. And then men run. And then they declare they NEVER wanted to do it anyway. Education is for GIRLS. celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-d... - ThreadSky

beebrookshire.bsky.social • 86 days ago

So many good points in here.

When women begin to enter fields, first people cheer the pioneers. Then women do it more...and men get nervous.

And then men run.

And then they declare they NEVER wanted to do it anyway. Education is for GIRLS. https://celestemdavis.substack.com/p/why-boys-dont-go-to-college?triedRedirect=true

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jadehawk.bsky.social•86 days ago

and somewhere during this process salaries start plummeting and women have to once again hear how really it’s their fault for picking a low-income career. except in this case it’s more like “lol why did you take out student loans, university degrees are for elitists”

guineys-mom.bsky.social•86 days ago

You are so right! As soon as a field is more than fifty percent women, the wages go down. I love watching YouTube videos of male nurses complaining about how hard nursing is and that it doesn't pay enough. Women have done that job for low wages for decades. They need to get over themselves.

granitegeeknh.bsky.social•86 days ago

Excellent post - clarified thoughts I've had but never nailed down.

There was a point in my childhood when I was worried about catching "girl cooties". Maybe that thinking sticks with us men more than we want to admit.

guineys-mom.bsky.social•86 days ago

My first degree was in Environmental Studies. I had to take a Soils Studies course. There were four women in the class. We were sorted by the professor into groups of five, each woman paired with four men. In my group, the men would not allow me any input into decisions.

guineys-mom.bsky.social•86 days ago

Grades were given by group and our group was failing. If they would have taken my input, we would have been averaging a B or maybe a low A. But they wouldn't. At one point, I lost it when one man asked for my input and another just cut me off. The professor noted the exchange.

guineys-mom.bsky.social•86 days ago

After class, the professor pulled me aside and asked what happened. I told him. The next class, all four of us women were put in a group by ourselves. I really think the professor thought we wouldn't be able to do the last project. We got an A on it. Yippee.

guineys-mom.bsky.social•86 days ago

That A plus the C from my original group's assignment, minus the last project (they got a C on it), should have resulted in a B for the class. All four of us women got Cs. We asked why and we're told that it was because we couldn't get along with others. The men in our groups were not penalized.

guineys-mom.bsky.social•86 days ago

Men do not like it when women show them up. Some male professors don't like it either. We complained to the dean and all four of us got the grades we deserved - As. I firmly believe that the drop in males attending college is because they don't like it when women do better than them.

beebrookshire.bsky.social•86 days ago

And it's so wild how other men will bend over into pretzels to avoid this conclusion.

Surely there must be other reasons!

When really, can we ask: Why are men so fragile that a woman's success makes them RUN SCREAMING.

lurks-no-more.bsky.social•86 days ago

Speaking as a man, this is very weird and more than a little embarrassing. I guess the fear of cooties lives on?

More seriously, there seem to be way too many insecure men who depend on their gender as the cornerstone of their egos. I wonder how we can change that?

beebrookshire.bsky.social•86 days ago

The examples people talk about now are STEM fields and higher education (and a REVERSE example of this? Coding used to be "for girls" and devalued, and now? Well.). Men are now calling biology or neuroscience "easy" because women do it.

But before that? We had English. Music. Art...

jadehawk.bsky.social•86 days ago

oh yeah, neuroscience, so easy *lolsob*

they do often excuse their devaluation of fields by claiming they’ve been “contaminated” with ideology; but what they mean is that the false assumptions that infested these fields due to the shared biases of the dominant group get weeded out

beebrookshire.bsky.social•86 days ago

Women entered those fields because they were most accessible with the "feminine accomplishments" of the 19th century, when widespread female education first became popular.

And men immediately saw novels as girly. Painting, so GIRLY, music, BLEH SO GIRLY.

beebrookshire.bsky.social•86 days ago

Now non-men are showing they can succeed in pretty much anything we put our minds too (because guess what we have highly similar minds), and soon? The only manly thing left is gonna be Bitcoin grifting.

Unless Hawk-Tuah girl succeeds in making that girly.

beebrookshire.bsky.social•86 days ago

Anyway in 2025, dudes, feel free to be a Real Man.

A Real Man doesn't fear spaces where women are in the majority, because a Real Man grew the eff up and doesn't believe in Cooties anymore.

tigermakers.bsky.social•86 days ago

My wife is a Vet Pathologist. It's still a 60/40 male/non-male split, but anecdotally, almost all of her residents are female.

She can cut the head off a horse in record time.

jeffv.bsky.social•85 days ago

Very interesting article!

I’m curious about this:
“As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses …, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.”

Public perception includes the opinion of women. Why do women devalue an occupation after it’s majority women?

beebrookshire.bsky.social•85 days ago

Because women also live under patriarchal norms! We value what we are told are the right things to value.

knittergamer.bsky.social•86 days ago

Will be interesting to see if the US military gets to 50/50 ratio of female to male members, if the males abandon military service they way they have the “pink ghetto” professions.

This article makes excellent points that all the pundits will talk about everything —except male fragility

artgardner.bsky.social•86 days ago

Interesting essay. Thanks for posting!

visioneer.bsky.social•86 days ago

This reminds me of how women's enrollment in computer science dropped off a cliff after the movie "Weird Science." I remember my first CS class (of, like, 300 people) had one woman in it. It was a bit of a bummer going most of my schooling rarely running into women who shared my interests.

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