07.21.09 | Why do women outnumber men 3:1 in Scholarship Points?
A completely serious question. When we look at the demographics data of Scholarship Points – especially in the Facebook group – women seriously outnumber men, 75% to 25%. Why? Does anyone have any ideas?
Please leave your serious, thoughtful responses below in the comments.
Bonus code: TTMYGH for 10 points, expires August 21, 2009.
I think it is an attempt at social reparations for societal oppression. In much the same way that African Americans and other minorities (should) see more monetary opportunities, so too have women due tot eh somewhat cryptic nature of their oppression during the earlier parts of the last century.
I suppose there is also the fact that women are being encouraged to join the hard sciences because their enrollment was "low." Given that fact its possible that scholarship opportunities were funneled into hard science scholarships specifically for women in order to attract them to those disciplines.
Women are more into the "social" aspect of surfing the web whereas men are more into being active.
I hate to sound sexist but I think females are just more organized and proactive especially in high school. On average, male applicants to LACs have lower GPAs and SATs. There are many more female class presidents, SGA reps, vals, sals, etc than there are males in those positions. I am not surprised that there are more females registered on this site. Again, simply a matter of being proactive andlooking at the long-term vs living in the moment.
I think, in general, women are more likely to spend time sitting down, doing research. Most of the guys I know (and I'm aware that I'm making a lot of generalizations, sorry) usually don't want to take the time to read through a million things to get to the good stuff (i.e. they don't want to read all the blogs and do all the projects to get the points.) They want it quick and easy.
There are females like this too, though.
Maybe more girls are needing the money, and therefore willing to spend the time to chance getting the help?
I remember my scholarship search like it was yesterday. Search after search after search, being a man seemed to exclude me from a great many scholarships. Being white didn't seem to help me either. I think D has a very valid point in this regard.
Amanda, however, makes another decent point, although I don't think any of her reasoning actually identifies the issue. I remember reading this article in Esquire a few years back: http://bit.ly/jevFC.
Essentially, it talks about how the women's movement focused intensely on girls and women, how they develop and how to help them prosper. Men had traditionally just been successful because we lived in a patriarchal society.
As gender barriers have decreased over the years, women have become more successful and have had the developmental support to back them. Men, on the other hand, have begun to share the stage of success with less focus on their development. The result is a generation of boys turning into men without great ambition or support. We were never told that we could do it. We were never told to try.
Of course, the article was written much better than my paraphrasing abilities, but I do believe that the truth lies somewhere in it.