TIME: Guys Just Want to Have Fun
And why they know exactly what they're doing
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
Posted Sunday, Jul. 23, 2006
When I was in college, I followed a simple strategy: Go where the boys are. Sure, that led me into many settings where inebriants flowed, but my reasoning was strictly practical. Men ruled the world, as anyone could see, so the trick was to do as they did. No girlie major like art history or French lit for me. I started in chemistry and then proceeded up the gender gradient to physics, finally achieving in Classical Mechanics the exalted status of only girl in the class.
But that was an era when the cool kids smoked Gauloises and argued about Kierkegaard and Trotsky. Today, as two recent reports have revealed, it's the girls who achieve and the boys who coast along on gut courses congenial to hangovers. Boys are less likely to go to college in the first place (only 45% of college students under 25 are male) and are less likely to graduate as well. If I tried to follow my original strategy now, I would probably end up with an M.A. in Madden, the football video game, and a postgraduate stay in rehab.
The trend has occasioned some predictions of a coming matriarchy in which high-achieving women will rule over a nation of slacker guys....But it may be that the boys still know what they're doing. Among other things that have changed since the '60s is the corporate culture, which once valued literacy, numeracy, high GPAs and the ability to construct a simple sentence. No doubt there are still workplaces where such achievements are valued, but when I set out as an undercover journalist seeking a white-collar corporate job for my book Bait and Switch, I was shocked to find the emphasis entirely on such elusive qualities as "personality," "attitude" and "likability." Play down the smarts, the career coaches and self-help books advised, cull the experience and exude a "positive attitude."...
***
Maybe we need a return to gender-segregated higher education, with the academic equivalent of Pinocchio's Pleasure Island for boys, where they can hone their "people skills" at keg parties. But we will need those high-achieving girls more than ever. Someone, after all, is going to have to figure out how to make an economy run by superannuated slacker boys competitive again in a world filled with Chinese and Indian brainiacs. I'd still major in physics if I were doing it again, just because there ought to be at least a few Americans, of whatever gender, who know something beyond the technology of beer bongs.
(Ehrenreich is an essayist and the author of the books "Bait and Switch" and "Nickel and Dimed.")
http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,1218047-1,00.html?cnn=yes
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