Recently, while searching for research grants to support my own projects, I came across a call for grant applications advertised by the National Centre for Student Equity in Higher Education (NCSEHE). This is an organisation housed within Curtin University in Perth, Western Australia.
The call for grants was termed the Small Grants Research Program. A total of 13 grants valued at $30,000 to $50,000 Australian dollars could be applied for. According to the advertisement, the program “fund[s] proposals that address equity issues across the entire higher education student lifecycle.”
The organization listed six groups that their funds could be used to target in terms addressing equity issues in higher education. The groups were as follows:
1. First Nations Australian students
2. Low socioeconomic students
3. Students with disabilities
4. Students from regional and remote Australia
5. Students from non-English speaking backgrounds
6. Women in non-traditional areas
On one hand, it was refreshing to see that most of the groups listed were not sex- or gender-specific but were based on characteristics associated with low educational outcomes and could be applied equally to men and women. This is how it should be. However, here, my aim is to highlight the gender bias against men exhibited by this call for grants. It is a bias via omission.
Given that the grant is focused on equity, this implies that the overriding purpose, as misguided as it might be, is to create equal educational outcomes between groups. However, we know that the organization’s professed interest in equity is disingenuous because, as of 2021, men comprised 43% of university graduates in Australia, according to the Department of Education. In fact, men have comprised a significantly lower number of university graduates in Australia for over two decades. And just imagine if these data were reversed. Imagine if it was women, who comprised 43% of graduates. Such a statistic would cause a national outrage. It would result in significant resources being poured into community programs and university research to try to get the ratio up to 50/50. Moreover, the county would probably also declare some sort of day, week, or month of observance for the cause of women’s education. And we know that this would be the case because currently, although women earn more university degrees than do men, there are relentless efforts to increase numbers of female graduates in specific higher education fields, such as science, technology, engineering, and mathematics – i.e., the STEM fields. In fact, the call for grants includes a target group called “women in non-traditional areas.” This likely refers to women in STEM fields. Thus, not only were men not included as a target group, when the professed philosophy of equity should warrant them as a target group, but the organization still found a way to make a specific call for more research into women’s education. And to the extent that such research does lead to more women completing degrees in STEM fields, the existing difference in total degrees earned between men and women would be exacerbated.
Here, my point has not been so much to advocate for targeted approaches for increasing educational outcomes in men, although this would not be the worst idea in the world. Instead, I am simply pointing out the unrelenting gender bias that exists against boys and men, such that even when the data are undeniably clear, such as the consistently lower proportion of men than women completing university degrees, men are still ignored as a cohort of humans who might need some attention. This is the same bias that exists when public health researchers conveniently ignore the life expectancy difference that exists between men and women.
One reason why I am not so keen on equity approaches is because we do not necessarily know the full details behind why there are fewer male than female university graduates. For example, one contributing factor might be that men are giving the middle finger to the ivory tower of academia, which tries to tell men how “privileged” and “toxic” they are. Thus, men may be consciously walking away from or never entering universities because they have weighed up their options and determined that their lives will be better off if they do not hang around university campuses. If this is the case, and these men are correct in their cost-benefit analyses, then they should be commended for reading the room, and getting the hell out of dodge. However, at this stage, we do not have a complete understanding of why, over the past couple of decades, there have been significantly fewer men than women graduating from universities in both Australia and the United States. But we could find out more quickly, if there were research grants available to study such things.
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