On the Phenomenon of Male Flight

Martin van Creveld has pointed out the phenomenon of male flight from education and entire professions, repeatedly, for decades. But only now that the higher education system is on the point of complete collapse is anyone else beginning to recognize that it poses a very real and serious problem:

  • In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
  • By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.1
  • By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%

A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.

But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”

Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.

“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools… So a young male student says he’s going to visit a school and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate…. what’s really driving feminization of the field is ‘preemptive flight’—men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment.” – Dr. Anne Lincoln

For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied. One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition!

This points to the underlying flaw in feminism and sexual equality. Men and women are not the same, they do not possess the same average strengths and weaknesses to the same degree, and most importantly, their preferences are different.

Every society faces a fundamental choice. Either deny men what they observably and actually prefer or deny women what they think they prefer in theory. Across the West, the last 60 years have been an experiment in the latter. Women have been given the red carpet treatment in the corporations, in the universities, and even in the men’s locker rooms. Divorces and custodies have been granted on demand. Pregnancies have been prevented. Babies have been aborted. Obesity and ugliness have been celebrated. The churches have been de-doctrinated and literally neutered. Refugees have been welcomed. The insane have been liberated from their asylums.

And yet, not only are women unhappier than they were before being granted their collective societal bucket list, men are increasingly opting out of every form of participation in society. So, unless women are both as willing and as capable as men of performing most of what historically had been male duties, or men are forcibly denied the right to exercise their preferences and conscripted to perform the tasks that women won’t, the choice is between a) societal collapse and b) denying women the right to fully exercise their preferences.

It appears what passes for society in the West has uniformly opted for (a). It’s a bold move, historically speaking. And we can already see how it’s working out for us.

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