Female Supremacy Articles - Page 10

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Women's search for partners gets harder

Don Butler

The Ottawa Citizen

February 9, 2004

Girls won't make passes if guys don't take classes.

That variation on the old schoolyard taunt sums up one likely effect of the growing education gap between young men and women, say two American scholars who have studied the topic.

Andrew Hacker, whose book Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Women and Men was released last year, says the imbalance in male and female educational attainment is playing havoc with relationships between the genders. "Women are now choosier," says Mr. Hacker, who teaches political science at Queen's College in New York. "They have higher standards for their mates than they ever did in the past."

"It's really quite fascinating how brainy women in the past would settle for really quite dull guys," he says. "Now, they're not." As a result, predicts Mr. Hacker, more women either won't marry or will find their marriage unsatisfying and divorce.

Women now account for more than 57 per cent of all students in university undergraduate programs in Canada and the United States. Each year, about 30,000 more women than men earn bachelor degrees in Canada. In the U.S., the comparable figure is 200,000.

"That tells me that 200,000 women each year are not going to find equivalently educated men to marry," says Thomas Mortenson, a senior scholar at the Washington-based Pell Institute for the Study of Opportunity in Higher Education.