I, personally, would probably prefer a co-ed living experience, but I'm sure others' preferences differ, and also I guess there might (??) be substantial effects on rates of sexual assault.
I'm gonna say, for the time being, these seem fine to me. Mostly because the apparent discrimination doesn't really have any negative effects—if I'm going to the University of Michigan, my experience will be of (near)-identical quality whether I live only with men or with men and women. Basically, "who cares," let people do what they want (e.g., choose to live in a same-sex dorm).
(I'm sure you know I think this already, but I'm putting it here just to be extra super-duper clear since I'm often not: the women's college situation is not "who cares"-y! Wellesley is really prestigious, and college admissions are fully zero-sum. If men aren't allowed to apply, their educational outcomes will be worse [on the margin], and, vitally, they'll have [marginally] less access to federal dollars. This is not true of the dorm situation, which has only a much more tenuous connection to federal grant money.)
Two points I'd like to bring up. (Full disclosure, I'm currently unsettled about how I feel about prestigious women's only colleges - I'm pretty sure I'm okay with small and inconsequential ones because they don't really matter. So if you give convincing answers here, you might convert me!)
1) You mention that there's mixed-at-best evidence for the argument that women's only colleges lead to better career outcomes. But career outcomes aren't the only reason to attend a university. In particular, I notice that many prestigious universities have serious problems with not doing anything about sexual assault. Now, I'm not trying to say that men never get sexually assaulted, or that all sexual assault is man-on-woman. But I do think it's very likely that a woman who attends a women's only college is much less likely to get sexually assaulted as a woman who attends, say, Stanford. And, if she does get sexually assaulted, it's much more likely that the university does something about it. Providing spaces where women can feel more safe and comfortable going to college seems like a worthwhile goal - and it helpfully coincides with the traditional motivations of women's only safe spaces (eg. women's only support groups).
2) You mention that women aren't underrepresented in college in general any more. I agree with this. But I think they continue to be underrepresented in specific programs. For example, I searched what percentage of women were in computer science, and most of the numbers I saw were somewhere around the 18-20% range. That seems like pretty horrific underrepresentation, especially when you consider that women are more likely to go to college in general. So, even if you don't support women's only colleges, perhaps there's an argument to make women's only programs.
1) After some cursory Google Scholar searching, I couldn't find a good study supporting this, but I think the mechanisms you mention could plausibly have a decent impact on reducing sexual assault rates. This seems like a strong objection.
However, I'm not sure that it totally justifies the illiberalism of women-only colleges—for a few reasons:
- There are better ways to accomplish these goals. My sense is that a just-as-compelling case could be made for ending the existence of frats (or at least more strictly banning the worst ones), a move that seems waaay more in line with the kinds of control colleges should exert over people. (They tend to give frats money, housing, and tacit approval—taking those away is totally legit, it's not discriminatory.)
- There are other, more repugnant implications of saying things like "discriminatory policy is ok if it reduces sexual assault rates." The percentage of women raped across all college campuses is estimated to be in the range of 0.5-8.4% (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1524838016631129). The percentage of women raped at HBCUs is above the highest estimate, at 8.6% (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7517605/). This isn't totally-convincing evidence, but tells a compelling enough story that we could say something like "women are less safe attending HBCUs"—would that then justify the shuttering of HBCUs?
- I think this comes a little too close to saying "some men rape women, so all men should be discriminated against." Bottom line—there are better, less illiberal ways to reduce the prevalence of sexual assault on campus.
Again, you still might have me here—though I'd really like to see a study that shows a substantial effect on this front (hopefully one that controls for various important confounders like 'proportion of female population which is lesbian').
2) Yes, on the face of it, it looks like women-in-STEM programs are more acceptable. I still view them negatively, though, for two extremely-related reasons:
- Women-in-STEM programs don't work! Often these programs rely on role-model effects. "Beware the man of one study," but after poking around with Perplexity I couldn't find much else—(statistically significant) effect size of 0.03 on entering STEM fields among French high schoolers (https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/133/653/1773/7055938). Compare to: "the odds of married women’s retention in STEM or STEM-related fields are multiplied by 1.591/1.180 (the slash distinguishes the odds for Models 3 and 4, respectively), when a woman’s spouse has a STEM or STEM-related occupation/degree compared to when a woman’s spouse does not" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02692-4).
I mean, like you said, this doesn't totally bear on the women's colleges problem. But it does inform my modest proposal: make all women marry techy nerds.
My partner, Sylvester, is the furthest thing from a techy nerd you could imagine, so I'll have to reject your modest proposal. :P
I'll have a think about your other points (and take time to read through your links), though. They seem at least plausible, and I've been saying universities should get rid of frats for ages.
economic disparity still overwhelmingly favours men over women. thus any action tipping the scales towards women and away from men is fixing this disparity. a pretty big factor for why women do, on average, better in academia is because men have better options elsewhere—the trades and stuff of that nature.
I’d like to challenge and unspoken assumption in your analysis. You clearly assume that segregation on the basis of sex or race is necessarily contrary to egalitarian values. Yet as a practical matter, there are lots of things where men and women are segregated. For example, bathrooms and sports teams where nobody thinks this is the slightest bit objectionable. Now to be fair, it’s of course true that these things tend to matter a lot less then colleges, but the fact that they are not simply seen as less objectionable, but flat out unobjectionable is still indicative. Of course it’s true that it would be unconstitutional for the state to segregate bathrooms on the basis of race, but the fact that it’s okay to do this on the basis of sex according to everybody’s intuitions suggest to me that this is merely an artefact of the fact that actual historical racial segregation was intended as demeaning and seen that way by everybody involved. Of course, it’s also true that often, although not always the black facilities would be inferior in quality to the white facilities, which is not true of sex segregated bathrooms. Of course, bathrooms in particular are slightly unusual, but it’s not like people think that segregation of dormitories on the basis of sex is bad, so that’s not the reason why we consider it unobjectionable. Also intuitively, if men are equally unable to access women only colleges and women are equally incapable of accessing men’s only colleges that sounds pretty equal to me and any concerns that appear to be purely about freedom of association and contract instead of any inequality. Of course, this runs into the actual real world issue that there are far more prestigious women’s colleges, then men’s colleges, but to me, my previous analysis suggest that you could remedy this by increasing the number of men’s colleges or merely reducing rather than eliminating women’s colleges.
> I don't think it's fair to criticize one for wanting to be in a place where they can safely pursue higher education without the heightened threat of violence, victimization, or invalidation.
See the thread with Jessie for more on the object-level about sexual assault, but I'll say this on the meta-level: I'm not criticizing women for wanting to go to women's colleges, I'm criticizing the existence of these institutions as fundamentally illiberal (and probably illegal).
This is analogous to me saying something like: "I get why you would want to pee in an alley—seems pretty fun, and you have to go kinda bad!—but we have laws and principles against that for a reason, and so I can't condone any institution that encourages people to pee in alleys."
> Because so many fields in STEM are largely comprised of men, it is pretty hard for women to find a source of support, community, or innate validation when they are very obviously the outlier in a relatively homogenous group
Gonna quote my reply to Jessie:
"Women-in-STEM programs don't work! Often these programs rely on role-model effects. "Beware the man of one study," but after poking around with Perplexity I couldn't find much else—(statistically significant) effect size of 0.03 on entering STEM fields among French high schoolers (https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/133/653/1773/7055938). Compare to: "the odds of married women’s retention in STEM or STEM-related fields are multiplied by 1.591/1.180 (the slash distinguishes the odds for Models 3 and 4, respectively), when a woman’s spouse has a STEM or STEM-related occupation/degree compared to when a woman’s spouse does not" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02692-4)."
If we're totally cool with violating liberal principles in order to increase involvement of women in STEM, it seems like we should be forcing them to marry techy nerds before creating sex-segregated educational institutions.
> A good majority of women's colleges have robust STEM programs and some, such as Barnard or Wellesley, allow you to take classes at other universities that are seen as more STEM-focused.
We're talking about liberal arts colleges! Even if some have STEM programs, they're simply not gonna be as well-supported as a bigger school's engineering college. The second part of this sentence just totally conflicts with the role-model point you were making—if women at Barnard and Wellesley have to take STEM classes alongside men, how is the exclusion going on at Barnard and Wellesley at all beneficial to their STEMiness?
> I think that for women going into academia, higher self-confidence is more vital than you write it off as.
I think that, if this were true, we would see it in the data! If higher self-confidence helped women from women's colleges get into grad school at higher rates, that would be wonderful. But they're not getting into grad school at higher rates, so either this effect doesn't exist or is neutered by some other aspect of women-only education. Either way, we should care about the total effect of women's colleges on getting into grad school—which is nonexistent.
> I think it's a bit ignorant for a group that's held long-standing systemic power to lament about discrimination at the hands of the marginalized community that they have historically oppressed especially considering that male privilege and the patriarchy are still extremely prevalent to this day.
60% of bachelor's degrees go to women!
60% of master's degrees go to women!
60% of PhDs go to women!
This is simply no longer a marginalized community in higher education. Male privilege and patriarchy might still be around in society (do tell me where, please!), but certainly not in the academy. Conflating past discrimination with present discrimination is soooooo annoying to me, dear god. (Cf. https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/repost-true-talk-i-dont-actually)
> It seems like a good majority of your point is built off of a lack of firsthand knowledge of the female experience which ig I can't wholeheartedly fault you for.
Yeah, no firsthand experience... which is why I spent most of the post discussing hard data and reviewing the literature, and not writing things like "if I were a woman, I would hate women's colleges" over and over again.
> I am curious, however, what your stance would thus be on professional associations and organizations dedicated to certain marginalized communities...
What are your opinions on single-gender dorms in coed colleges?
Good question, haven't thought much about them...
I, personally, would probably prefer a co-ed living experience, but I'm sure others' preferences differ, and also I guess there might (??) be substantial effects on rates of sexual assault.
I'm gonna say, for the time being, these seem fine to me. Mostly because the apparent discrimination doesn't really have any negative effects—if I'm going to the University of Michigan, my experience will be of (near)-identical quality whether I live only with men or with men and women. Basically, "who cares," let people do what they want (e.g., choose to live in a same-sex dorm).
(I'm sure you know I think this already, but I'm putting it here just to be extra super-duper clear since I'm often not: the women's college situation is not "who cares"-y! Wellesley is really prestigious, and college admissions are fully zero-sum. If men aren't allowed to apply, their educational outcomes will be worse [on the margin], and, vitally, they'll have [marginally] less access to federal dollars. This is not true of the dorm situation, which has only a much more tenuous connection to federal grant money.)
Two points I'd like to bring up. (Full disclosure, I'm currently unsettled about how I feel about prestigious women's only colleges - I'm pretty sure I'm okay with small and inconsequential ones because they don't really matter. So if you give convincing answers here, you might convert me!)
1) You mention that there's mixed-at-best evidence for the argument that women's only colleges lead to better career outcomes. But career outcomes aren't the only reason to attend a university. In particular, I notice that many prestigious universities have serious problems with not doing anything about sexual assault. Now, I'm not trying to say that men never get sexually assaulted, or that all sexual assault is man-on-woman. But I do think it's very likely that a woman who attends a women's only college is much less likely to get sexually assaulted as a woman who attends, say, Stanford. And, if she does get sexually assaulted, it's much more likely that the university does something about it. Providing spaces where women can feel more safe and comfortable going to college seems like a worthwhile goal - and it helpfully coincides with the traditional motivations of women's only safe spaces (eg. women's only support groups).
2) You mention that women aren't underrepresented in college in general any more. I agree with this. But I think they continue to be underrepresented in specific programs. For example, I searched what percentage of women were in computer science, and most of the numbers I saw were somewhere around the 18-20% range. That seems like pretty horrific underrepresentation, especially when you consider that women are more likely to go to college in general. So, even if you don't support women's only colleges, perhaps there's an argument to make women's only programs.
Let's see if this does it...
1) After some cursory Google Scholar searching, I couldn't find a good study supporting this, but I think the mechanisms you mention could plausibly have a decent impact on reducing sexual assault rates. This seems like a strong objection.
However, I'm not sure that it totally justifies the illiberalism of women-only colleges—for a few reasons:
- There are better ways to accomplish these goals. My sense is that a just-as-compelling case could be made for ending the existence of frats (or at least more strictly banning the worst ones), a move that seems waaay more in line with the kinds of control colleges should exert over people. (They tend to give frats money, housing, and tacit approval—taking those away is totally legit, it's not discriminatory.)
- There are other, more repugnant implications of saying things like "discriminatory policy is ok if it reduces sexual assault rates." The percentage of women raped across all college campuses is estimated to be in the range of 0.5-8.4% (https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1524838016631129). The percentage of women raped at HBCUs is above the highest estimate, at 8.6% (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7517605/). This isn't totally-convincing evidence, but tells a compelling enough story that we could say something like "women are less safe attending HBCUs"—would that then justify the shuttering of HBCUs?
- I think this comes a little too close to saying "some men rape women, so all men should be discriminated against." Bottom line—there are better, less illiberal ways to reduce the prevalence of sexual assault on campus.
Again, you still might have me here—though I'd really like to see a study that shows a substantial effect on this front (hopefully one that controls for various important confounders like 'proportion of female population which is lesbian').
2) Yes, on the face of it, it looks like women-in-STEM programs are more acceptable. I still view them negatively, though, for two extremely-related reasons:
- The underrepresentation is a result of preferences more than anything else. I think I linked an article about this in the post, but Scott's write-up here is great too: https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/08/07/contra-grant-on-exaggerated-differences/
- Women-in-STEM programs don't work! Often these programs rely on role-model effects. "Beware the man of one study," but after poking around with Perplexity I couldn't find much else—(statistically significant) effect size of 0.03 on entering STEM fields among French high schoolers (https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/133/653/1773/7055938). Compare to: "the odds of married women’s retention in STEM or STEM-related fields are multiplied by 1.591/1.180 (the slash distinguishes the odds for Models 3 and 4, respectively), when a woman’s spouse has a STEM or STEM-related occupation/degree compared to when a woman’s spouse does not" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02692-4).
I mean, like you said, this doesn't totally bear on the women's colleges problem. But it does inform my modest proposal: make all women marry techy nerds.
My partner, Sylvester, is the furthest thing from a techy nerd you could imagine, so I'll have to reject your modest proposal. :P
I'll have a think about your other points (and take time to read through your links), though. They seem at least plausible, and I've been saying universities should get rid of frats for ages.
economic disparity still overwhelmingly favours men over women. thus any action tipping the scales towards women and away from men is fixing this disparity. a pretty big factor for why women do, on average, better in academia is because men have better options elsewhere—the trades and stuff of that nature.
I’d like to challenge and unspoken assumption in your analysis. You clearly assume that segregation on the basis of sex or race is necessarily contrary to egalitarian values. Yet as a practical matter, there are lots of things where men and women are segregated. For example, bathrooms and sports teams where nobody thinks this is the slightest bit objectionable. Now to be fair, it’s of course true that these things tend to matter a lot less then colleges, but the fact that they are not simply seen as less objectionable, but flat out unobjectionable is still indicative. Of course it’s true that it would be unconstitutional for the state to segregate bathrooms on the basis of race, but the fact that it’s okay to do this on the basis of sex according to everybody’s intuitions suggest to me that this is merely an artefact of the fact that actual historical racial segregation was intended as demeaning and seen that way by everybody involved. Of course, it’s also true that often, although not always the black facilities would be inferior in quality to the white facilities, which is not true of sex segregated bathrooms. Of course, bathrooms in particular are slightly unusual, but it’s not like people think that segregation of dormitories on the basis of sex is bad, so that’s not the reason why we consider it unobjectionable. Also intuitively, if men are equally unable to access women only colleges and women are equally incapable of accessing men’s only colleges that sounds pretty equal to me and any concerns that appear to be purely about freedom of association and contract instead of any inequality. Of course, this runs into the actual real world issue that there are far more prestigious women’s colleges, then men’s colleges, but to me, my previous analysis suggest that you could remedy this by increasing the number of men’s colleges or merely reducing rather than eliminating women’s colleges.
> I don't think it's fair to criticize one for wanting to be in a place where they can safely pursue higher education without the heightened threat of violence, victimization, or invalidation.
See the thread with Jessie for more on the object-level about sexual assault, but I'll say this on the meta-level: I'm not criticizing women for wanting to go to women's colleges, I'm criticizing the existence of these institutions as fundamentally illiberal (and probably illegal).
This is analogous to me saying something like: "I get why you would want to pee in an alley—seems pretty fun, and you have to go kinda bad!—but we have laws and principles against that for a reason, and so I can't condone any institution that encourages people to pee in alleys."
> Because so many fields in STEM are largely comprised of men, it is pretty hard for women to find a source of support, community, or innate validation when they are very obviously the outlier in a relatively homogenous group
Gonna quote my reply to Jessie:
"Women-in-STEM programs don't work! Often these programs rely on role-model effects. "Beware the man of one study," but after poking around with Perplexity I couldn't find much else—(statistically significant) effect size of 0.03 on entering STEM fields among French high schoolers (https://academic.oup.com/ej/article/133/653/1773/7055938). Compare to: "the odds of married women’s retention in STEM or STEM-related fields are multiplied by 1.591/1.180 (the slash distinguishes the odds for Models 3 and 4, respectively), when a woman’s spouse has a STEM or STEM-related occupation/degree compared to when a woman’s spouse does not" (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41599-024-02692-4)."
If we're totally cool with violating liberal principles in order to increase involvement of women in STEM, it seems like we should be forcing them to marry techy nerds before creating sex-segregated educational institutions.
> A good majority of women's colleges have robust STEM programs and some, such as Barnard or Wellesley, allow you to take classes at other universities that are seen as more STEM-focused.
We're talking about liberal arts colleges! Even if some have STEM programs, they're simply not gonna be as well-supported as a bigger school's engineering college. The second part of this sentence just totally conflicts with the role-model point you were making—if women at Barnard and Wellesley have to take STEM classes alongside men, how is the exclusion going on at Barnard and Wellesley at all beneficial to their STEMiness?
> I think that for women going into academia, higher self-confidence is more vital than you write it off as.
I think that, if this were true, we would see it in the data! If higher self-confidence helped women from women's colleges get into grad school at higher rates, that would be wonderful. But they're not getting into grad school at higher rates, so either this effect doesn't exist or is neutered by some other aspect of women-only education. Either way, we should care about the total effect of women's colleges on getting into grad school—which is nonexistent.
> I think it's a bit ignorant for a group that's held long-standing systemic power to lament about discrimination at the hands of the marginalized community that they have historically oppressed especially considering that male privilege and the patriarchy are still extremely prevalent to this day.
60% of bachelor's degrees go to women!
60% of master's degrees go to women!
60% of PhDs go to women!
This is simply no longer a marginalized community in higher education. Male privilege and patriarchy might still be around in society (do tell me where, please!), but certainly not in the academy. Conflating past discrimination with present discrimination is soooooo annoying to me, dear god. (Cf. https://www.imightbewrong.org/p/repost-true-talk-i-dont-actually)
> It seems like a good majority of your point is built off of a lack of firsthand knowledge of the female experience which ig I can't wholeheartedly fault you for.
Yeah, no firsthand experience... which is why I spent most of the post discussing hard data and reviewing the literature, and not writing things like "if I were a woman, I would hate women's colleges" over and over again.
> I am curious, however, what your stance would thus be on professional associations and organizations dedicated to certain marginalized communities...
Heh, post coming soon...? No promises.