My experience tells me that enhanced success of women in school and in a lot of fields has a lot more to do with their penchant for following rules and kissing ass. Indeed, I know women in my law school class and on the Law Review at UT Austin who slept with professors, an opportunity not so available to us men.

Under ass-kissing opportunity I include employment in situations where lots of things besides merit account for advancement, like any civil-service job, public-school teaching, and judgeships, or any job that runs a popularity contest or that requires that the employee be nice, look right and dress to please others. There are far fewer women in pursuits like hard science, math, engineering, film making, producing and directing, haute cuisine and haute couture, welding, cabinetmaking, and so on, for which standards of performance are more objective and where success doesn’t depend so much on those factors extraneous to actual job performance.

For that reason, women will always be well represented in the ranks of high-school math and science teachers, for example, but will mostly continue to show up missing in the list of Fields Medal winners and Nobelists and in the ranks of captains of high tech companies like Microsoft, Apple, eBay and Google, etc. The surprising thing to me is the dearth of women in judgeships, even at the Supreme Court level, where none of the members, except perhaps Breyer (in high school), has shown any distinction in any hard science, math or engineering, having without exception taken degrees in those wishy-washy academic areas like history, economics, English literature, philosophy, government and international affairs. In all of them, apart from economics, a person can get a PhD in Amerika without ever having sat through a college-level class in science, math or engineering. Perfect for women! It is even about time for a woman to become President, since, in contradistinction to England (Thatcher) and Germany (Merkel), no recent president except Carter has studied or distinguished himself in the hard sciences.

Yet another explanation is that the performance of a male student has a higher variance than a female (given all the information at the time of admission), and colleges, especially the good ones, tend to be risk-takers in admission, since it is disproportionately valuable for them to get the very top students.

"Under ass-kissing opportunity I include employment in situations where lots of things besides merit account for advancement, like any civil-service job, public-school teaching, and judgeships, or any job that runs a popularity contest or that requires that the employee be nice, look right and dress to please others."

How about the business world, which places a premium on all of the above?

"In all of them, apart from economics, a person can get a PhD in Amerika without ever having sat through a college-level class in science, math or engineering."

I don't know where you went to school, but most colleges require two or three science courses and at least one math course.

I don't know what you mean by "hard sciences" but I found the natural science courses I took in college to be graded on a much more easy scale than the social science and humanities courses. The tests in the introductory courses in every discipline were multiple choice, but in the social science and humanities courses you had to score about a much higher percentage to even get a B.

The key difference between the social sciences and the natural sciences is that the former utilize observational data and stochastic probability, and latter typically utilize experimental data and deterministic probability. But this is a generalization. Certain fields and subfields such as astronomy or population biology are entirely observational.

Judge Posner remarks: "One puzzle remains is why women have better college grades than men."

Perhaps the women simply outperform the men.

"One puzzle remains is why women have better college grades than men. One possibility is that colleges discriminate against men in admissions. For if colleges admitted blindly on the basis of academic prowess, they would keep admitting women until male and female grades were equal at the margin."

Typo? If that's the explanation, it would be discrimination against women, not men.

"Perhaps the women simply outperform the men."

They do, that's the whole point. Getting higher grades = outperforming. But if a college admits purely on the basis of academic performance, the expected performance of the average man should be the same as that of a woman - otherwise a college should be admitting more women. The question is, if colleges admit in such a way, why are average performances still different?
As a fairly recent college grad, my guess is, HS guys are way better at fooling admissions officers. A lot of us should not have been let in...

Professor Becker, could you clear this up for me?
You wrote
'One puzzle remains is why women have better college grades than men. One possibility is that colleges discriminate against men in admissions.' Doesn't the lower college grades of men imply that women are discriminated against, because at the margin they are choosing to let in poorer performing males over better performing females?

Dear Professor Becker, God created the Eva and Adam respectively,it means that will be a lot of differences between man ane woman, i don't think the discussion about who is better is neccessary. but as a woman, i just want to say it's unfair that discrimination exsits in the society. we're not week, even strong and better. do you know "hua Mulan" who is the excellent woman in China legend.

I'm not an economist, but I'm not sure if that is my problem with Posner's first and last paragraphs. Can somebody explain to me what Posner is trying to say in the first (regarding discrimination) and last (regarding ratios)paragraphs? I didn't understand how men were being discriminated against in that example, and I thought the ratio (men-to-women) had flipped the other way. Nothing personal, but I never have trouble understanding what Becker is saying. Thanks.

Thank you Messrs. Becker and Posner for another thought provoking blog. I note that reading Becker who is the 'economist' is always less taxing than reading Posner the lawyer. My conclusion at this moment in time is Posner is a more gifted brain -- a lawyer and an economist, and I am biased, a prince...today I got to look up 'diminishing marginal utility of money income' and Asher Meir. Becker writes from a global perspective but thinking green we must buy local. Also he brings to mind Justice Scalia's new law clerk....top grades from Harvard and blew out all grades at Standford law...maybe Eric Posner could consider afternoon tea with this lady.....they might actually understand each other for an hour or so....

The "grade gap" between males and females should be no mystery to anyone who has taught undergrads:

Young women simply study harder and take classes more seriously than young men.

Jimbino calls this "following rules and kissing ass," which, in my experience, is typical of the attitude of many male college students.

As a former professor, I would rephrase this as "following instructions and doing the assigned work."

Prof Drake,

And what do you call "sleeping with the prof"? Or just saying "hell with it" as did Einstein, Gates and Dell?

When I remember back to my college daze, the biggest fight was keeping out of the taverns and staying away from the constant parties-social events that interfered with course work. Needless too say, large numbers of my compatriots succumbed to the temptations and weren't around in the following semesters. Most Coed's just don't seem to be confronted with that type of temptation. So it leaves them with more time to hit the books, get the course work done and in on time. Which will translate into higher grades.

The rise of the "feminist movement" may very well have something to do with it as well and the development of overt and covert feminist policy agendas within and without the government and academia. Gender wars anyone?

NE/Drake
No one's disputing that girls do better in school, and largely for the reasons you cite: women work harder, and guys slack off. We know that. The question is, if a college truly cares about academic performance when it admits students, why wouldn't it simply admit many more women than it already does, since they do better in school? Why not simply replace all those low-performing guys in your admission class with higher-performing girls?
There are various potential answers, some of which are offered in Judge Posner's post. But there are some other explanations. It could be that colleges don't care just about academic performance, and want to maintain some sort of gender-balance in their classes for other reasons - incoming students probably want a social life, and that tends to involve the opposite sex. As a result, even though a school could improve its academics by admitting many more women, it would lose its appeal to too many students if its gender ratio were too extreme.

Haris, It all depends on where you go to college, whether it's public or private institution and the criteria for admission. Now take the public land grant college for example, admissions criteria was as follows:

1. graduate of an accredited state high school
2. have a minimum criteria GPA. in the appropriate classes
3. have a minimum criteria test score on both the ACT & SAT

If you fulfilled the criteria, you were admitted and the State had fulfilled its obligations to provide universal public education. But as I was told by my academic advisor in the first days on campus, "Yeah, your a graduate of an accredited state high school and we have to accept you, but that doesn't mean we have to keep you, NEH57605987" So much for maintaining academic performance and standards. The issue is really all about maintaining universal public access to higher education irrespective of gender, class, race, or affiliation.

jimbino--

"Sleeping with the professor" is not a course assignment, at least not where I taught. A professor would and should be fired for it.

In my experience, co-eds on the verge of failing would "suggest" this as a way to raise a grade a half step or so so that they could stay in school. The best students didn't and wouldn't need to.

Also, I suspect that males and females use this method if they suspect the professor is susceptible--students in that situation use every other ploy (except for studying hard.)

if colleges admitted blindly on the basis of academic prowess, they would keep admitting women until male and female grades were equal at the margin.

But equal at the margin does not imply equal on average.

Wrong again, Mr Drake. A professor and student should be free to relate any way they want to, just as insider trading should be legal (Check out Milton Friedman).

You say the "best students didn't and wouldn't need to." That is a circular argument if I ever saw one. The best students in Law (as opposed to, say, Math) are those who have mastered kissing ass and sleeping with professors! There is no objective criterion.

Furthermore, even students among the "best" in terms of merit need that little extra to get on law review, no?

癌症 肺癌 胃癌 肝癌 食管癌 肿瘤 直肠癌 结肠癌 宫颈癌 乳腺癌 脑瘤 甲状腺肿瘤 胆囊癌 胆管癌 前列腺癌 白血病 鼻咽癌 肾癌 恶性淋巴瘤 皮肤癌 喉癌 舌癌 胰腺癌 膀胱癌

Perhaps men are just getting the "consideration" for admission due to the generosities of wealthy men like "Rockefeller" and "Kennedy" for giving millions to prestigious colleges.

aizheng,

Don't list various medical illnesses in a foreign language - be nice!

Sleeping/Kissing around + Jim Beam = He/She and vice versa + Drunk all day

Perhaps the "Monica Lewinsk and Bill Clinton" real life event will give some insight to the above debacle.

Several commentators noted the contradiction between Posner's initial assertion of discrimination AGAINST men and his later description of factors indicating discrimination in FAVOR of men.

It seems Posner ought to either clarify, or leave readers to conclude that his personal bias has led to a Freudian slip with interesting implications. Maybe Posner's brain refuses to accept that his logic leads to a conclusion of discrimination against women?

jimbino, Sounds like "Sour Grapes" to me. Get passed over for Law Review did you? As for the "discrimination complaint", it's amazing how often it comes up during discussions of achievement coupled with gender, class, race, or affliation. Too me, it always seems to cloud the true issues of cause and effect. No wonder we never seem to be able to move forward.

jimbino,

Your mysogyny is showing. I suspect you need some excuse for why your "objective merit" didn't get you everything you think it should, but from our point of view, you don't sound like a meritorious person. People of character do not make such accusations about classes of people. It is NOT OK to trash the credibility of the female members of your school or law review like that. Your non-specific accusation will hurt them in some people's eyes and you should be ashamed.

You have no one to blame your failures on but yourself. Getting into UT law, based I am sure on what you feel were objective tests, does not entitle you to continued success.

Also, you are sadly deluded if you think that dressing well and getting along with others are "extraneous factors" to job performance. There are few jobs, even in engineering where I used to work, where "objective merit" will protect the career of someone with whom no one can stand to work. Even if one finds a hole to be a meritorious ass in, no one will ever promote them out of it. If you think that the CEOs of successful companies get there through "objective merit," then you need to spend more time talking with CEOs.

Of course it does not suprise me to see a young male law student overrelying on a narrow concept of meritocracy. Your worldview is merely common, we had guys that sound like you at my own (lower ranked) law school as well.

"alumni in the upper tail are likely to be disproportionately generous donors."

Because they have more money, not because of their gender. Maybe if women were the ones overrepresented in the upper tail they would be more generous than the men are now?

The effects of past discrimination cannot render current discrimination "rational." If men are overrepresented among the wealthiest graduates, it makes sense to presume that past gender discrimination in higher education -- which we know about and needn't dispute -- has contributed to the imbalance. But as both Becker and Posner admit, things have changed now in terms of numbers and performance of women in college. In 20 years, rich alumni are more likely to be women. If Harvard only admitted women for a century, then all of Harvard's donations would come from women.

Admissions decisions control who gets access to the opportunities to become rich alumni. To say that it is rational to discriminate in admission in order to favor rich male alumni misses the connection and assumes that the current imbalance is somehow natural or inevitable. Schools make their own alumni.

I think Prof. Becker and most commenters miss an important point. Men are surely more competitive than women; after all, they are competing against each other for female favors. And women judge men, in part, by the size of their wallet, so for men earnings are much more important than for women. On the other hand, grades probably don't matter much in the getting laid sweepstakes. This explains two phenomena: why men earn more, and why their grades tend to be lower.

Here is another issue that Becker has ignored. It may be that a college education is less economically important than it used to be. Quoting statistics that correlates earnings with education misses the point, for no cause and effect relationship follows. It may be that richer people prefer to get educated.

To illustrate my point, look at the advertising that liberal arts colleges put out to recruit students: Bennington College is an excellent example. Study in Castles in Europe; be part of the Drama Club; Make Friends -- this is all stuff for the future princesses of America. No wonder the guys aren't interested.

Bottom line: colleges today serve a recreational purpose as much as an economic one. And since women have more time for recreation, and wish to get more out of it, it is no surprise that they both dominate and excel.

I have to agree with Haris. I've seen several articles about just how important the gender ratio is in forming an undergraduate admission class. Once a school gets beyond a certain point -- for some reason I recall about 55% female to 45% male -- men tend to flee, and then, in turn, women will flee as well.

Great, this comment thread is drawing out the arm-chair social-darwinists. Men should earn more because they are from Mars, and women are from Venus. They don't need schools on Venus because it is too hot there.

Corey, If you want a female perspective on the subject, You might want to check out the American Association of University Women (AAUW)or the Womens Center at Wellesley College under the subject "Gender Wars". It will give you a much more rational perspective than the "pop-culture" view espoused in "Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus".

Corey
I didn't notice anyone trying to justify paying men more simply because they're men. I think most people are okay with the idea of paying men more when it's merited. Given the biological realities, most employers are willing to pay men more because, all other things being equal, men can't get pregnant and will never miss time for that reason. As a result, men are less risky to employ. My favorite example of this is in sports. Most major sports leagues have no rule barring women, but there still are no women in those sports. Imagine for a moment a woman who in a particular sport at a particular position had identical qualifications as a man - identical workout results, identical college statistics against identical competition, identical injury history. A team would be foolish to pay identical money to these two players, because, other risks being identical, the male player is at no risk of missing any portion of a season due to pregnancy. I don't think it's discrimination to pay these two people differently, and that seems to be what people on this board are advocating.

(1) the motivation for women to perform better in school is due to the unfair treatment at the work place. You have to be 3X better in order to compete with men. Let's be realistic, no fairness in the world. Bias always exist.
(2) On the otherhand, the high score at school may not translate to the real capability. Especially, hands on experiences.
(3) Men, born with short attention span, may exhibit broader interests of the subject. Many of the real "top students" are not No. 1, but top 3-5 in the ranking with many OTHER interests. I did observe a MIT student focus on a demo product for 10 min. and try to pull it apart.. with questions range from software, hardware, control, material, electrical, chemical, etc. very broad range of questions, you will almost hardly get them from a women student.
(4) Women, by the nature of good manager, do have different view point compare to Men. Some good points outlined in "Pacifism as a Map" by U. Franklin, "will women change technology, or will technology change women?'

Since men engineered the tools and instituions establishing societies -- not to mention all the public "dirty jobs" that need to be done daily -- it's only befitting that men get paid more.

Women would and could earn more than men if they too would create new jobs and industries fit for women, thereby advancing societies by not having to compete in jobs fit for men.

Prof. Drake:

Jimbino is insane and a libertarian. He's impervious to reason. You'll have better luck reasoning with a baboon.

I definitely have to agree that female college students take college much more seriously than male. From my own limited experience, I knew almost no male college students who took college as seriously as the average female student I knew. At the same time, there was no such male deficiency in intellectual ability, curiosity, or creativity. They just lacked the bullheadedness to show up every single day at 9 am to classes that they hated. If these studies could be controlled for attendance, I doubt there would be any gap. I think it had something to do with the fact that the guys took longer to adjust to the freedoms of college life, and they also became very impatient and bored with school and seemed to have more problems with depression. In fairness, my experiences tended to be with the best and the brightest at a top 50 school. I don't know how much this relates to other groups. As to schools discriminating against women, my experience was that the falling down of men's grades in college did not correlate to diminished grades in high school. Top of their class, industrious kids got to college, got bored, lost direction, and slacked off.

Jimbino ~

My goodness you have a lot of resentment. I have to agree with a previous comment that you probably didn't make Law Review and rather than accepting your own failure, it's easier to accuse your female classmates of sleeping with their professors. Regardless, you must have a difficult time getting lucky with women. Perhaps you should buy yourself one of those life-size rubber dolls with a lubricated vagina.

Jimbino ~

I understand your jealousy. There are of course a number of advantages to being female: We obtain Ivy League educations but we quit our jobs once the children arrive; Our husbands provide material comforts through hard-work and long hours at the office; When we get a flat tire, we wait in our cars for a friendly police officer to come along and change it for us; We can have ten orgasms for every one that a man has. I wonder if gender reassignment is an option for you? "I always felt like I was a woman trapped in a man's body," you'll say at your weekly support group.

In this blog, Judge Posner correctly notes that "alumni children are favored by college admissions officers (largely for financial reasons -- admitting alumni children increases expected donations by alumni)." In other words, universities that favor alumni children in admissions do so out of a belief that this will result in kickbacks being paid to the universities by the alumni whose children are admitted.

Indeed, according to the book "Admissions Confidential" written by former Duke Univ. admissions officer Rachael Toor, this quid pro quo is often stated explicitly. For example, Ms. Toor explains that, after Duke enrolls otherwise academically-unqualified students from wealthy families (whether alumni or not), Duke then informs the parents of the favortism that had been given their children in admissions and specifically solicits a financial donation from them in return. Although the parents have no legal obligation, of course, most feel a moral one and donate accordingly.

Like all forms of corruption, these kickbacks benefit only the parties involved and are otherwise economically inefficient for society as a whole. This is especially true given that graduates of prestige universities are granted preferences in employment and graduate-school admissions (where legacy admissions also exist). Thus, just as selling high grades would distort the market, so too does selling elite-college admissions. So, why then does Judge Posner defend the right of private universities to sell university admissions?

In his July 15, 2006 comment titled "Women's Academic Performance," Judge Posner stated: "Like Becker, I view affirmative action as a matter of choice for colleges and universities, at least when the institutions are private rather than public. Higher education is highly competitive, and I am reluctant to have the government tell its institutions what policies are best. Academic freedom implies a high degree of academic autonomy, including autonomy in the administration of the institutions of higher education."

The only qualification Judge Posner gave was a personal one. He said: "Personally, however, I would like to see a few of the top colleges abolish all preferences unrelated to academic merit -- no athletic scholarships, no affirmative action, no favoritism for the children of professors or of major donors, and no legacy admissions. That would be a useful experiment in the benefits and perhaps costs of meritocracy. It would have the incidental effect of giving us a better idea of the extent of real differences across race and gender in academic capability."

The distinction that Judge Posner draws between public and private universities is not a valid one, especially given that all elite private universities rely on tens of millions of dollars of government grants and their students rely on millions of dollars of government-sponsored financial aid. For example, should a private university that accepts huge amounts of federal funds be legally allowed to sell or give otherwise unearned high grades to the children of wealthy donors or alumni just because it is not a wholly government-funded institution? This is not a facetious question. Universities that give preference to the wealthy in admissions probably also do so (albeit to a lesser degree) in awarding grades and other academic honors.

Similarly, Judge Posner's separating of his personal policy preferences from what he thinks the law is or should be is another specious distinction.

So, yes or no, Judge Posner: Do you favor the economic analysis of the law only when it benefits the politically-powerful in society? If not, are you willing to denounce the selling of undergraduate and graduate-school admissions at private universities?