Chances are that if you're a woman and you're in college and you work really hard to boost your GPA, turn up regularly at all of your extra-curricular activities, and generally try to make as good on your crazy expensive investment as you can, there's a college man out there playing the latest iteration of Madden football and totally not giving a shit.


In an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, President of the College of St. Benedict MaryAnn Baenninger relates the conclusions she's drawn from national data and from research at her own institution concerning the disparity between male and female students throughout their college careers. Baenninger explains that while women have unprecedented access to higher education, women and men still begin college with "different self concepts." She continues,

Their orientation toward academic work and leadership differs, and they participate differently in what we call engaged learning. Research suggests that college has little impact on these differences, or on helping students take them into account.


Three major differences between the college men and women have emerged through Baenninger's research: while women are more likely to underestimate their abilities than their academic performance suggests, men are more likely to overestimate their more meager output; men spend more time at leisure activities, i.e. video games and sports, than women; women have higher GPA's through their college careers than men "even when the sexes show equivalent aptitude on standardized tests."

It seems that college men are...what's that really popular word right now for people who think they do and deserve more than they actually do and deserve? Oh, yeah — entitled. Baenninger points to familiar inequalities such as the dearth of women in science-related fields and the similar lack of men are in teaching fields, but her most alarming observation is that the push for post gender colleges "didn't plan well for a society that taught one sex that it had to work harder to gain access, and the other sex that access was guaranteed." As women struggled to gain equal access to higher education and professional careers, it would seem that men gorged themselves on frozen pizzas and created games that just ooze with leisure and entitlement, like ultimate Frisbee. The result is a system of higher education in which the majority of women believe that they have to work twice as hard for the same access that men take for granted.

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But never mind the lassitude of male collegians — all this hard work for women must naturally pay, i.e. in dolla dolla bills, off. While college men lounge around their dorms or join a flag football team or slap together last-minute term papers, college women are working with an eye to the job market and the prospect of out-earning their male counterparts.

Dudes, dudes, relax, I'm totally j/king you — you'll still out earn women by like 75 percent.


For Women On Campuses, Access Doesn't Equal Success [Chronicle Of Higher Education]