I knew there was (what I thought a marginal) female majority in young people going up to university. I hadn't appreciated just how big this margin is these days:
‘Of all the A-level entries that were reported today, 55 per cent of them were female, and therefore 45 per cent of them male. That means that there were 81,000 more A-level entries from girls than there were from boys. And if you divide by three, figuring that most people do three A-levels, that’s 27,000 fewer males. That’s almost exactly the gap that we see today in the 18-year-old young men placed in universities compared to young women.’This is from Mary Curnock Cook, educationalist and former head of UCAS and comes from a Spectator podcast. The report also comments that nobody is really interested in asking whether this gender gap is something requiring some attention. It may be that the young men are doing well-paid vocations like plastering, bricklaying and dicking about on computers but it could also be the case that our education system, having rightly adjusted itself to give greater opportunity to girls, has in the manner of Thurber's bear ended up leaning over too far backwards.
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