Academia: Is It Too Female?
by Christine Marlet | Jun 4, 2026 | All, Female identity, Gender Equality, Male identity
By Connor Patrick Wood
Academia was once a man’s game. Most early American universities were founded as training academies for clergy and other professional men. Women were flat-out barred from studying at most Ivy League colleges until the 1960s; even on campuses such as Stanford that admitted women earlier, female students were a distinct minority until recently.
But the tide turned quickly. Women have received the majority of American undergraduate degrees every year since 1982, master’s degrees since 1987, and doctorates since 2006. Women now make up nearly 60% of all undergraduate students, the same proportion that were men in 1972, when Title IX was enacted to end sex discrimination against females. Around 80% of all psychology majors and veterinary students today are female.
Clutching hard-earned degrees, women are now more equipped than ever to become high achievers in business and the professions. For ambitious and talented young women, or those who provide for a family, this opportunity can be a godsend. (And if you’re a straight man with halfway decent social skills, a psychology or English major can be a great way to meet a girlfriend.)
But the female skew also comes with downsides. The Hechinger Report calls any gender ratio over 60% a tipping point. At this level of female predominance, a field, a profession, or a university starts to actively repel men.
For example, high school education became female-majority in the 1970s. Today, high school teachers are about 60% women, and women earn about 80% of education degrees. Would-be male teachers now have to accept a pink-coded professional identity, which many are unwilling to do. Unless recent efforts to encourage men to enter teaching are successful, the percentage of high school teachers who are women likely won’t come to rest at 60%, but will continue to grow to 70%, 80%, maybe more.
(Don’t shoot the messenger!)
With colleges now tipping toward that same 60% threshold, higher education risks entering the same spiral. Already, some of the most “high-agency” (read: wealthy, disagreeable, and assertive) men in American society are dismissing college as un-masculine. In a 2025 Business Insider article on Silicon Valley’s “anti-college movement,” one college-skipping tech founder, Shawn Schneider, complained that
“You cannot truly be fulfilled as a man and be in education for long”…Schneider says the women from his high school in Idaho were “so much better at doing what the teacher asks, and that was just not what I was good at or what the other masculine guys I knew were good at.”
Academia at large is starting to code as feminine, then. But is this really what’s driving men away?
The Feminization Debate
It’s worth acknowledging that “feminization” probably is changing academia in important ways. Cory Clark points out that, compared with men, women on average are focused more on harm avoidance, egalitarianism, and ostracizing perceived enemies rather than confronting them directly. For Clark, these traits have advantages and disadvantages. More women in higher education and public life might be helpful for advancing justice, but it might also contribute to the rise of unhelpful “coddling” in these institutions.1
Yet as divergent as they are, these views all share a focus on how feminization affects progress and discovery. Female-dominated institutions might expand justice and equality, or they might hamper vigorous debate and innovation. The question is all about movement forward.
But what if the more interesting questions are about cultural continuity and formation? Picking up from my last post, I think we’re missing something terribly important if we overlook the initiatory aspect of learning. The question then becomes, what helps or hurts colleges’ ability to induct students into a coherent, civilizational conversation?
Academia as Initiation
This might seems like a frivolous ambition today. But shared common knowledge did a lot to smooth communication between members of the elite — an advantage whose loss our leaderless era might be starting to notice.
More importantly, though, broad cultural literacy created a coherent world within which educated people as individuals lived, moved, and had their being. As I’ve been writing recently, adolescents in countless societies must pass through initiatory rites to achieve adulthood. This initiation often means being inducted into a cosmos of symbols and meanings that more or less hang together. The new adult status coincides with subjective mastery of the symbolic universe.
How to Turn Boys Into Men
In English, this just means that an adult man is one who knows the lore and symbols of his tribe. He doesn’t have to be a shaman or priest or scholar — expertise isn’t necessarily the goal. But he does need to be at home in his own cultural conversation. He can’t feel lost in the web of meanings his society has woven.
My argument is that academia could, and should, be something like this initiatory rite in the modern world. You should come out of it basically culturally literate.3 The references and allusions in highbrow magazine articles should mostly be familiar to you; you should be able to speak intelligently, if not expertly, about Dante or the Bible or Darwin with other graduates without embarrassing yourself.
As I wrote last time, this sense of mastery grounds you psychologically. Rather than feeling adrift in a sea of half-understood references and arcane symbols, the initiate knows he inhabits a landscape he can navigate. His own culture, previously a soup of esoteric secrets, lies open to him.
But with its refusal to transmit a canon, with its relentless emphasis on technical education and narrow specialization, the modern academy was already failing at this initiatory experience decades ago, when men still dominated its hallways and quads.
So maybe women aren’t causing the problem after all.
Initiation and the Cultural Brain
Humans live in much more complex environments than birds, both physical and cultural, but the same basic principle applies. Human childhood and adolescence are therefore devoted to mastering symbols, meanings, stories, roles, and values. As developmental psychologist Erik Erikson argued, maturity comes when you get rooted in those soils. This means that growing up can’t be all about innovation and self-creation. You also need cultural continuity. The French mystic and philosopher Simone Weil observed that
the supreme mission of society towards the individual human being (is) maintaining throughout the present the links with the past and the future.
Ironically, though, some of the biggest critics of college today are people — men — who have practically no rooting in these soils of culture, and are completely ignorant of the past. Twenty-year-old dropout tech founders might know a lot about coding and app creation, but they’re not famous for being cultured or dropping apropos references to The Iliad at parties.
Obviously, this is a generalization; some anti-college alpha males are very well read, Peter Thiel first among them. But to be crass, it seems that there’s a bit of a correlation between men who reject university for being too feminine and men who are philistines.
My broad-brush conclusion, then, is that these are men who feel deeply alienated from their own cultural surroundings, rootless in dry soil. What they secretly longed for — an initiation into the mysteries of culture — turned out to be unavailable in schools and classrooms, so they soured on formal education.
Initiation for Women, Too
Of course, Shawn Schneider was right that modern education is optimized more for girls than for boys. Sitting in rows, coloring in the lines, being obedient to the teacher, developing fluent language skills: these are all things that girls, on average, are better at and master earlier than boys.4
As a result, guys like Schneider learn to associate girls and women with initiation failure. To a reasonably masculine guy, school (and, increasingly, college) is like this: you arrive unconsciously primed to receive transmission of arcane cultural memory and life-and-death responsibility. Instead, you get neat little rows of desks and pastel vibes. It’s infuriating.
So perhaps we do need to face the real, though politically very uncomfortable, possibility that a university system dominated by women is one that has a harder time providing the initiation-like experience that university once offered. Maybe “The Future is Female” has become a self-fulfilling prophecy in academia because what men and women need from education are different things.
But I wouldn’t be so quick. As I mentioned, the university system was already failing at initiation long before women came to dominate it. More importantly, though, there’s every reason to believe that women need the same thing from academia that men do. Erika Bachiochi describes this simply as an “education that…facilitate(s) their full human maturation.”
The biggest statistical difference between men and women is just upper body strength. That doesn’t have a lot to do with mastering a cultural environment. Women inhabit the same societies that men do, swimming in the same seas of myth, symbol, and memory. And women suffer just as deeply as men — maybe more deeply — from cultural unrootedness. (Simone Weil was a woman, after all.)
So there’s every reason to think that women would benefit just as greatly as men from a more initiatory education, one that inducted students into a great civilizational conversation. Both women and men often act pridefully and suffer the falls from grace and humiliation that result. And both men and women who know the story of Niobe, who boasted that she was better than the gods and lost all 14 of her children in punishment, will be better equipped to grapple with that embarrassment.
Both male and female robin chicks have to learn to forage and build good nests. That’s the environment they have to master. By the same token, both boys and girls need to master a symbolic universe, a cultural environment of stories and references that draw an ordered cosmos out of the chaos of potential.
The fact that schools and universities have flunked this initiatory mission injures both sexes. And it’s a double injustice that women now take the blame for a breakdown that was well underway before they showed up. What men need in college isn’t fewer women, any more than women need a “female” future. What men and women both need is an initiation into the culture that birthed them and surrounds them.
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