Sixteen Volts

Back when we lived in Tampere in Finland, there were two universities. (Today there is also a former polytechnic that loves to pretend to be a real university, although it obviously is not.) The bigger university is situated downtown and is a general liberal arts university. The one that I worked in is a technical university about half the size of the first one, and is situated in a suburb. As a reasonable person could guess, the student population of both places was very different and continues to be so. The technical university was something like 80% male, whereas the downtown university was widely called a "girl lycaeum" for its almost opposite gender disparity, and not entirely as a joke.

Of course, in both universities the sex disparity varied significantly depending on the department and major. As a rule of thumb, the more reality-based the field, the higher the male presentation in it, whereas all kinds of fluff fields that have a weaker basis on objective reality tend to attract a significant overrepresentation of female students. Since the Finnish universities and polytechnics have to constantly expand their student intake to match the increased number of high school graduates, but they try to resist doing this as much as they can, there is significant competition to get in the most popular female-dominated fields, whereas anybody with good math and science skills is virtually guaranteed a place in some technical university. (In the Finnish education system, half of the students go to high schools after the ninth grade and the othe half continues to trade schools, but this ratio has been constantly sliding towards going to high school.)

The sexual disparity of undergrads has been a hot topic recently also in this side of Atlantic. No surprise there, I guess, since such trend seems to be common in all industrialized countries. In America, something like 60% of today's freshmen are women. The reasons why young men don't go to college are well-known and better listed elsewhere, and now that college degree has become an important signaling mechanism in the job market, this trend is getting worrisome. If nothing else, pretty soon the young white women of America will learn what their black sisters exactly mean when they complain about shortage of educated men to marry. And speaking of which, if I have understood the situation correctly, the white men from the lower socioeconomic strata and the nonwhite men leak out of the education pipeline much more severely than their middle-class white brothers. This is not really surprising, since the societal changes and structures that favour women naturally tend to hurt the marginal males the worst, whereas men who are in a stronger position due to their talents and social position get to skate away completely scot free. This must be a great annoyance to leftists and feminists. (Or at least it should be, if they could ever bring themselves to think about it. But they don't, but rather just avoid the issue and reject it with violent doublethink whenever they are forced to face it.)

Even so, us non-marginal men don't really need to be afraid of this development, for a few reasons. But first, heck, it's probably fun to be a college student when there are lots of women around instead of the whole thing being a sausagefest, and after the college, the net effect of this disparity on your life is negligible --- provided that you are one of the guys who gets in, of course. For example, in Tampere where the majority of the female students downtown are not really that motivated about leftism but merely attend the university for the degree and its associated status, the famous massive "bomb shelter parties" that the technical university regularly arranges are very popular among the senior female students of the downtown university, to look for a man with future earnings potential. For some reason, the parties of male-dominated departments in polytechnics and trade schools are not quite as popular with these women. I can only chuckle when I imagine how much such betrayal of leftist values must annoy the leftist-humanist gang that is a numerical minority but a loudness and annoyance majority.

The female overrepresentation is heavily concentrated on the fluff fields that have no pesky objective standards (or if there are, they are easily sidestepped whenever needed, since nothing is really "true" or "real" in the end), which makes these fields suit the female mind better. This includes all fields that were originally designed as entertainment for the idle rich, the various brands of resentment studies, and basically all fields that don't require any mathematics or logical and analytical thinking beyond the elementatry school level. Men still continue to dominate the reality-based fields where the ultimate arbiter between truth and falsehood is the objective reality instead of emotions and whatever happens to be trendy at the moment. In engineering, the design either works or not, no matter how much you bat your eyelashes, stomp your feet and how strongly you feel about it.

Since only a small portion of men and women end up in any kind of important positions anyways, the sex disparity of undergrads could even be a lot larger and it still wouldn't matter for the winner males, since only the disparity at the top end of the distribution really matters. Even in the female-dominated fields, the top individuals still tend to be men. The vast bulk of female students who major in fluff fields do so because they just need a degree and the fluff fields are the easiest way to get it, whereas the top-performing men are there because they value the field itself and want to cut through the fluff and get to the important parts. This tend to make a pretty huge difference.

Of course, the differences between sexes are statistical and there is a very significant overlap. For the women who choose to study the reality-based fields and excel in them, this choice was good and will advance their lives much better than spending four years in humanities and culminate this experience in a navel-gazing thesis about how she felt when she encountered The Other. Women in reality-based fields actually are strong and intelligent, and for exact the same reason that the average and top men in the fluff fields are vastly superior to average and top women there, the average women in reality-based fields are vastly superior to average men there, and the top women are as good as the top women, although they are numerically far more smaller.

Actually, I can't help but wonder what kind of internal tension there must be in the ranks of women since there are these smart and intelligent reality-based women, and then there are their fluffier-minded sisters who generally tend to be hostile towards reason and objective reality while they love to proclaim that they are "strong" and "intelligent" even though they obviously are neither. (Just like with many other important adjectives, people who really are these things never actually need to say it out loud.) This tension and conflict doesn't flare out in public as much as it does with men, but I am pretty certain that it has to be there. Since women tend to avoid open conflict, the loudmouthed leftists dominate the discussion, and the opposing voices are few and far between. I would be more than delighted to see them, if anybody can offer links.

But let's go back to the original problem. If I were a dictator, a lot fewer people of both sexes would go to colleges and universities in the first place, to maintain the overall quality of college education. It's astonishing to think that there once was a time (and it wasn't even that long ago) when the high school diploma had the same signaling value as the bachelor's degree has today. But that's inflation for you. A good solution would be that colleges and universities drastically decrease their student intake, possibly by a third or so, end all the preparatory courses that teach things that should have been taught at the junior high, and increase the difficulty and workload required in the courses and for the degree accordingly. Of course, I know that this is not going to happen in the present situation, but one can always dream.

Now that I am thinking about it, there were also other interesting and significant differences between the two universities in Tampere. The female-dominated liberal arts university downtown was a well-known hotbed and bastion of Stalinism a few decades ago (oh I know, I know, correlation does not imply causality), and it still continues to be extremely left and quite vocal in all brands of left-wing activism. Its student union is dominated by greens and leftists and acts accordingly. On the other hand, any kind of leftism or left-wing activism (or for that matter, any political activism) was basically nonexistent in the male-dominated technical university. You can see this difference easily by comparing the student newspapers, or by comparing what kind of opinions their professors express in media. In addition, I don't recall ever seeing a poster that, say, chastised us for our "transphobia". After I moved here, I heard that there was some kind of effort for organizing a club for gay tech students, but I seriously doubt that this club would ever organize a single loud protest march or go harass the administration for their real and imagined slights against the gay people. (They must have had some interesting sauna and Christmas parties, though.)

I have noticed a similar inverse correlation between leftist attitudes and reality-based thinking around local universities. A couple of times we have visited other universities, such as my wife's alma mater at the nearby town of Kitchener. When you walk through the buildings and enter some corridor or hallway, you can almost by a glance tell how reality-based that particular department happens to be. When you enter, say, the sociology or women's studies department, the posters on the office doors tend to be very different from the posters in, say, the physics or computer science department, in a revealing way that I probably don't need to elaborate further. A few winters ago when it was cold, I read that some local professor was demanding that homeless people should be allowed to take shelter and live in the hallways of university buildings. It wasn't exactly difficult to guess which department the said professor worked in.

But enough of that. Now that I am thinking about it, there was also another difference between the two universities in Tampere that is quite curious when you think about it, so I want to point it out in hopes that someone else can build something out of it. Smoking was virtually nonexistent in the technical university, whereas it was (and still is, as I understand) quite common downtown. For example, the department in which I worked in had maybe one or two smokers among the 50-60 people working there, and they didn't smoke at work. In such an environment, the notion of breaking a meeting or a lecture for a "cigarette break" would have been surreal. But in the downtown university where smoking is common even among the professors, so were the "cigarette breaks". Over there the professors used to happily smoke in their offices and coffee rooms until the national anti-smoking law forbade this, which I bet annoyed them greatly.

I think it was Tommi from whom I originally learned the observation that the more "socially conscious" and "free to challenge the traditional oppressive constraints" and "bold to express her opinions" a woman is, the more certain she is also to smoke. That is so true. Of course there are important cultural differences in smoking and its connotations (for example, I would expect the correlation to be much lower in France and Germany where pretty much everybody smokes everywhere), but here you can just look at which people are the loudest to complain about not being allowed to smoke and draw your own conclusions. In the civilized nations where smoking is considered a dirty and smelly activity akin to farting, mental illness and general loserdom correlate strongly with smoking. And when you think of it, doesn't the leftist thinking tend to correlate with these things, at least slightly?

Perhaps I shall end this post with an amusing anecdote. One time when a bunch of us members of the younger generation of the department had gone to a downtown bar after the deparment's annual training and sauna day, a long-haired guy approached our table and asked for a cigarette. There was about eight of us around the table, and after a short silence one of us said the guy that none of us smokes. Which was true, and completely natural. The guy looked at us for a moment, changed his expression to be bit sadder and more offended, said quietly "Oh, I get it. You are angry. I am sorry that I bothered you" and walked away. I guess that for a guy like him, the concept of a group of eight people of his age so that none of these people smoke was so vanishingly improbable that I can't blame him for going for an explanatory hypothesis that he would consider to be orders of magnitude more likely.

Posted by Ilkka Kokkarinen on Saturday, April 01, 2006 at 9:11 AM