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Comment by bdndndndbve | Hacker News Reader

The trend among men, sadly, is a flight from higher education. It used to be a status symbol, but since more women are entering STEM fields men are increasingly looking for alternative credentials like bootcamps. This is a common phenomenon in many fields across time, where men flee "feminized" work and it becomes less prestigious.

A side effect of higher education becoming "low status" is that men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history. Which makes them more vulnerable to radicalization.

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Who is so fragile that they care about the gender of their coworker? This isn’t oil rigs or combat roles, where brute strength has legitimate value.

This is a proven trend that's happened in multiple fields. It's not about the gender of your individual coworkers, it's about the relative prestige of a field. When women become more prevalent the credential or field becomes less valued and men flee.

Either I’m dramatically misunderstanding, or others are. I’m asking, why does women entering a field make it less prestigious? Who are these snowflake men that can’t fathom working alongside women?

Discrimination and disparities have self-reinforcing loops. There is a gender pay gap. This is a very complex problem with multiple causes and effects: sexism, maternity leave, married couples making the rational economic decision that the lower earning spouse looks after the kids at home, etc. A person looks at a field, sees that it's lower pay and prestige, and sees that it's filled with women. If they are more sexist than average they draw the conclusion that women's work is worth less and justify discrimination's effects as caused by innate differences. Even if they are less sexist than average they are concerned that other people's sexism has demonetized that line of work. Thus the rational move is often to also perpetuate the disparity by avoiding the "pink collar" job, or not care that a high end job has features unfriendly to women. Advantage begets advantage. The inverse is also true.

Jobs, gender, salary level for a given job, gender roles, and whether child care is considered "work" are all social constructs.

Have you been paying attention to the sort of people who have been grabbing all the power in this country of late? Those people.

I had some mandatory philosophy at STEM university. It utterly failed to evoke any intellectual curiosity, perhaps even inoculated us against trying to get interested. And don't let me start on history education.

Interesting.

> men are going to vocational schools that don't teach "useless" topics like philosophy or history

And to be clear this includes prestigious nationally-ranked “tech” schools, right? Possibly even those with lip service to a liberal arts education where one can actually be excused from “distribution requirement” courses based on their high school experience. (Oh, you support that? Well… maybe I did too, but I sure didn’t understand the connections. Maybe a class would have helped.)

I'm not sure if I understand your point, but the point is there's a kind of credentialing treadmill where once women get into a particular field or class of institution it loses prestige and men flee to alternatives which become more prestigious. An example is undergrad biology becoming predominantly women and being seem as the "easiest" STEM major.

I think if you see a majority-female CS class graduating from Stanford it is a sign that VCs and other power brokers will begin weighting that credential less.

This is complementary to the anti-intellectualism that's already baked into fascism. Rich people like Peter Thiel have already started paying people to "not go to school" as an anti-intellectual backlash against inclusion and diversity.

I may be cynical but I don't think men flee fields were women manage to enter. I do see this trend though. But I rather see it as men moving to the next cool thing, leaving the leftovers of their no longer prestigious / downward trending field for women to finally enter, who may see it as a victory without realizing the goalpost has yet again shifted on them/carpet has been pulled from under their feet already.

Much like women no longer qualified as gamers for playing the same games that men grew up with (point n click, puzzle games...) because men flocked to newer genres since (actions/shooter) Bit of a dated caricature but fitting imho.

If men wanted to keep women out, it is easily managed, case in point programming was seen as secretarial work until men decided it made good money and they should appropriate it.

(Fully expecting to be downvoted for saying this)

Can you get a good job with only a 1st degree in biology? I doubt it.

My observation is completely the opposite. Higher education is the source of today's youth radicalization. Harvard, Columbia, UPenn are all ground zeros of radicalization that we as society going to suffer from for decades.

What kind of radicalization do you mean? The kind that tries to violently overthrow the government after an election they don't like?

The same leftist university students that brought Islamic revolution to Iran and cultural revolution to China. It all starts with universities. Today's protesting students from Columbia are tomorrow's political elite and mark my words, Germany's 30s will look like a walk in a park comparing to what will be in US.

And regarding your Idaho farmers and other nutters with horns on the head, they are too irrelevant and dumb to cause anything serious even in large numbers.

Yet people with lower education were (again) more likely to vote for the most radical president in the US history.

Social media and its propagandists are the source of modern radicalization, together with failure of neoliberalism to produce growth that benefits the little guy. The university far leftist radical and rural Trump voter have lots in common in hating the status quo. They just blame different things, often the wrong ones like migrants or white privilege.

Everyone not in the billionaire club should hate neoliberalism.

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