Have you heard of the phrase ‘basic white girl’? No, nor me, until I ran a series of workshops to help teenagers prepare for, amongst other things, university interviews. A number of courses would be mentioned and immediately dismissed by some as ‘basic white girl’ courses. These included: psychology (80% female), English literature (70%) and sociology (77%). (‘Basic white girls,’ I learned, also love side-stripe baggy trousers, Taylor Swift and being pretty.) These subjects represent the extreme trend in universities becoming female dominated: 57% of UK undergraduates are now female. The balance of academic teaching staff at universities in 2022-23 is 51% male and 49% female, but the wider university staff is 55% female. Is it possible that what happened in primary schools, where only 15% of teachers are male and secondary schools (35%), will happen in higher education? Are boys already self-excluding from this female-dominated world?
I bumped into a group of aforementioned students yesterday, a mixture of boys and girls all with high (conditional) offers from great universities, and had a chat about their A-Level revision. What alarmed me is the difference in enthusiasm between the boys and girls about their intended university adventures. The girls are locked in: open days and offer days enthusiastically visited, first choices chosen. The boys are altogether more diffident. One of them explained: “Me and my friends are just motoring along with no sense of purpose. We all have fantasies about going off on a great adventure, fighting animals, living in the wild.” One of the girls shoved him and said, “OMG, you’re so lame.”
I conducted a straw poll amongst my friends – all their children who are off to university have noticed the same sex divide: girls already enthusiastically planning university stationery and the boys reluctantly being sent on offer days by their parents. Our own 18 year-old son has decided on a gap year, unable, in spite of lovely offers, to muster up sufficient enthusiasm to justify the average student debt of £48,000. He and a mate are investigating mining opportunities in Australia.
And this is where we get back to the troubling idea of ‘basic white girl’ stuff. My husband shouts from the hammock, my pink straw hat balancing on his head to shade out the spring sunshine: “Don’t make these teenage boys sound like misogynistic bastards, because they’re not.” He’s right of course, teenage boys love teenage girls, they worship them, they adore them, they expand a considerable amount of energy trying to talk to them, have a coffee with them, and if they are extremely brave and successful, kiss them. But they do not want to predominantly hang out with big groups of them. They do not want to be the only boy in the psychology lecture theatre. Hence whole spheres of knowledge, education and training being written off by boys on account of the preponderance of female students. I’m not sure this is misogyny – just a natural preference to spend significant amounts of time with other males – and females – just not majority female.
When my son ordered university prospectuses I noticed a decided lacklustre attempt to recruit white boys (still the majority ethnicity of the UK at 74%). One top university did not picture a boring white male until page 26 – lots of happy photographs of girls in burkas, gentlemen from the Afro-Caribbean club, young men waving pride flags, but nothing for the majority male until page 26.
Of course all of these marketing efforts are well-intentioned efforts to correct a once male-dominated enterprise. The Oxford college I attended in the 1990s only admitted women in 1980. My history don said it was a marvellous thing to do so, as well as encouraging state school applicants. He explained: “Academic standards soared. When it was just aristos they used work on entirely the wrong subjects – throwing sofas out of windows – that sort of caper. Dreadful.”
Has the correction been too thorough? How alarmed should we be that a July 2024 House of Commons research briefing on ‘Equality of access and outcomes in higher education in England‘, reports that: “White pupils are less likely than any other broad ethnic group to go to higher education. … Access to Higher Education was higher among women than men.” Various “barriers to access, participation and outcomes” are listed that include: financial concerns, insufficient advice, sexual and racial harassment on campus or general lack of support. It seems to me however that the real peeling off of boys from the university system is a vague feeling of it being simply, somehow, not quite for them.
Would strict sex quotas help? 50% of all the student body and staff must be male and female? Not sure. Let’s see how this mining venture pans out.
Joanna Gray is a writer and confidence mentor.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.
White boys and the white working classes.
The real victims of EDI and Woke, and Lefty shite.
And no-one in power gives a fuck.
Even the above article – drawing attention to a serous problem – is rather tame:
‘Of course all of these marketing efforts are well-intentioned efforts to correct a once male-dominated enterprise.’
I would have thought ‘sinister’ would be an apter characterisation.
I’m surprised that the females aren’t offered reparations for the past domination of males.
But it’s also the course content. Will the knowledge and experience gained on the course be of sufficient use, like enhanced future income to help with loan repayment.
Given the subjects listed, maybe the boys have their heads screwed on more firmly. They know they are unlikely to shack up with a money supply.
I would also advise any young man to do what my four children did, all now in their forties. Leave school, work a bit, save up, go elsewhere and work a bit and come back and get a job.
All self-sufficient and debt free at 21. Eldest DID go to Uni, as a mature student, studying the Baroque Flute at the RAM. That’s it. Uni now pretty much a hit the buffers experience for far too many kids.
After WWII we had a three-tier higher education system. It worked so well, West Germany used it after the war, and still does.
Tech colleges for trades
Polys for professions that were not academic
Uni for those that were academic
This approach worked so well, we had no choice but to dump it; we also destroyed the Grammar school system, the main means of social mobility for working class kids, four of whom I had studying with this privately educated boy at my Oxford college, all going on to worthwhile jobs.
Why do we keep destroying EVERYTHING good about the UK?
I wish I could double tick that – it is so absolutely 100% correct. Also, back to maintenance grants and no fees with only 5% of school leavers going to university. Remove charitable status from universities that are offering half their courses(selling degrees) to foreign students.
I raise your double tick with a triple tick. I studied engineering from Technical College through to Polytechnic. Was is all male – not quite but very nearly. I have remained life long friends with the only female from my last course. Bringing back Polytechnics and allowing a less academic route is needed. My Poly used to only offer a 2 year degree course that was ideal for those with HNDs to go further if they wanted to but was forced to join the First Year degree courses and became a Uni of course. I believe Polys should be there to serve the local students and cut out all this campus life. There was only one hall of residence in my time but a walk around the area found them all over the place. And without having to fund accommodation there could be a return to grants to cover fees and travel.
“we also destroyed”
‘we’ being the Labour Party: it’s what they do every time be it education, the legal system or the economy!
And the winner is…yet again…none other than the newly converted to Islam…Andrew Tate! Nine million followers and zooming. Is the sisterhood aware of what behemoth they are.creating and what will happen to the “women and girls” of all races when islamisation of the UK is completed?
The Holy Trinity – Maths, Physics and Chemistry (with Engineering as St Peter and Computer Science as John the Baptist).
Arguably the hardest and most rigorous degree subjects of all. Still predominantly male at the two red-brick graduation ceremonies I’ve attended in recent years.
Subjects barely represented in politics, media and the chattering classes. Exponents too drawn to doing science, technology, engineering and business in the real world. Draw your own conclusions about what that professional, cultural and societal divide is telling you.
Like the proverbial Medical Doctor, it takes years to become fully proficient in most STEM careers. Then, after that accomplishment, to leap into a different career, like being an MP, or start running a business, doesn’t look that attractive, considering the effort of learning a completely new skillset, managing the risks, and disturbance to the rest of the family
And, as an MP with STEM experience, would anyone take any notice of you, if you haven’t conformed to the new state religion.
57% girls at University choose easy, nothing subjects that are mostly about emotions and opinion, of next to zero practical use to society when you want a plumber, or your car fixed – but sex discrimination is keeping women out of STEM subjects.
You’ve spelled out in three lines and one paragraph what I was being diplomatic about in seven lines and three paragraphs…
“… but sex discrimination is keeping women out of STEM subjects.”
Who is doing the discrimination, and when?
In my first job it was how the workers on the shop floor would react if a female engineer was employed to tell them what to do. For the female assistants in our design office it took a bit of getting used to the effect they had just walking around the factory.
It is a worldwide issue even in countries where women are disadvantaged. Females significantly outperform their male counterparts at undergraduate and postgraduate level in Iran. This goes beyond culture. The male cannot mainain enthusiasm in a hostile environment. Females are much better at it and of course there is the novelty factor of female liberation. The penis is seen as a weapon and yet in some ways it is very weak. It requires propitous circumstances for it to become hard and it can become deflated so easily.. You have to look to the realm of the spirit if you are to understand this phenomenon.
Academic excellence thrives on competition.
Hostility is a different matter all together.
And sarcasm is just such a waste of resources.
Of course all of these marketing efforts are well-intentioned efforts to correct a once male-dominated enterprise.
The exclusion and denigration of whites and males on the grounds that they are white and male can never be well-intentioned.
I should have read your almost identifcal remark before posting mine!
Enterprises were dominate by men for two simple reasons. Men are naturally competitive, much more so than women. This is very good in enterprises where winning business, and delivering is fundamental. Second, women used to have a job until they had children, at which point they took a 20 year break to raise and nurture a family, while the man went out and brought home the bacon for them. There was nothing wrong with how this worked, indeed this is why humans have been so successful. But all you need is a few people who couldn’t see that roles and responsibilities may have been very different, but they were both essential for our society to flourish.
Encourage them with the mining venture. They’ll have far more fun and learn much more about the real world as well as learning useful skills and work ethics that will be assets for life.
Uni is absolutely not the be-all and end-all and there are numerous other routes to success, which are often far more lucrative, and quicker about it too.
Your final paragraph is true of course, but to not have a degree, in a time when seemingly everyone has a degree excludes you from a lot of job opportunities, especially in the corporate world where vetting CV’s takes little interest in people with interesting but odd-ball experiences. When I visit my clients, I am more and more seeing the middle management and the office staff dominated by women. There is still a place for men through, usually as security personnel.
Depends if you wish to work in the corporate office environment. Not for me, and I do pretty well. There’s more to life than spreadsheets.
Think about whether AI/computing could do your job. For manual trades, not a hope. (I’m not referring to manufacturing here, but traditional physical trades which will always, always be needed and nowadays have some brilliant earning potential).
I’m on board with the general argument. But I’m always wary of sneaky word choices in reports: was *access* to higher education higher among women than men, or was it actually *attendance*? That’s the thinking behind the claim that black people don’t have access to the countryside because comparatively few black people choose to visit it. As long as white boys are not prevented from going to university or discriminated against in the application process (which discrimination does of course happen these days), they have access.
This observation is misdirecting us from the national problem.
STEM degrees give access to wealth creating jobs, especially when there is an insatiable demand for Energy, Food and Manufactured Goods.
While the country is drowning in Debt, it’s the STEM graduates, in productive STEM jobs, that need to be encouraged, especially if they are inquisitive Problem Solvers, that are courageous enough to put their skills into practice.
Arts and Humanities degrees, while they can improve the mind, are less likely to increase Wealth, for the individual or the nation.
Of course, these subjects are important, and enriching, but do we need a surplus of so many seconds rate graduates that are happy to take state financed or subsidied, often part-time, jobs with student debt that won’t be paid back, and can’t see where the country is headed, or don’t care? The status quo will only encourage all these highly marketable STEM graduates to emigrate. It’s not as though our National Culture is benefiting from this economic drain on resources. If anything, it’s being degraded.
And why do so many intelligent school leavers appear to not consider how the subject studied at an advanced level affects career development, and the resulting remuneration, over a lifetime?
Maybe reversing the ‘law’ that all advertising material must contain only ethnic minorities might help.
I went to university and studied a STEM subject. It has enabled me to have a good income and interesting work. Today it seems as if you still need to go there in order to acquire the skills but can you stick it?
£45 000 debt means that it has to produce the goods, but will it?
Continual woke diet means that you are uncomfortable, fighting all the time.
Feminine majority may mean that a man’s natural good qualities may not be valued.
Opportunities may well be limited by DEI.
Reputation of poor, impersonal teaching.
So I encourage offspring to consider things very carefully before jumping into it.
Maybe distance learning would reduce the severity of many of those things, maybe going to a foreign country.
Another strong option is an apprentice post.
Difficult.
Men are avoiding the teaching profession because of the ease with which they can be anonymously accused and the heavy-handed response to any accusation. My friend was recently “yellow-formed” by the headteacher (ie a safeguarding response) for telling a self-deprecatory joke to which someone decided to take offence!
£48,000! Wouldn’t they be much better off doing a course in electrical engineering? You can charge £150 an hour and can’t be replaced by software. Or robots. Not just yet.
Or plumbing? Another very lucrative trade.
And why the long summer holidays? Degrees might be cheaper if we got rid of those and shortened the length.
Nobody needs to go home to help with the harvest these days.
That applies to schools as well.
Lessons indoors from 8 am – 12 pm – 12pm – 1pm lunch.
1pm – 5pm teachers do marking and prep while students do sport and fun stuff like art, pottery, music etc with different teachers.
5pm – 7pm snack and supervised homework.
7pm collected by mum and dad.
No long summer holidays or half terms because teachers only have 4 contact hours a day so can do all their prep after lunch and homework supervision is on a rota.
I think we’d have happier healthier students with 2 hours of sport every afternoon and much less frazzled teachers.
Also less frazzled parents with no holidays to find childcare for.