Customer Reviews

The Gender Gap in College: Maximizing the Developmental Potential of Women and Men (Jossey-Bass Higher and Adult Education)

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Women have earned more college degrees than men since 1982, yet women trail their male counterparts on many important indicators, such as academic self confidence, emotional health, and participation in athletics. Sax carefully documents these and other noteworthy trends using a rich source of data on college freshmen. She also carefully explores the impact of the college experience on young men and women. Sax makes every effort to make this excellent research accessible to the general public, but also provides enough detail to be informative to educators, college advisors, and scholars interested in education and gender. This book deserves of a wide audience for those interested in the experiences of women college students and those interested in understanding how the world is changing. For the complete version of this review, see the journal Gender & Society.

This book provides critical insight into a fascinating piece of the gender puzzle: how postsecondary environments and experiences affect women's and men's development. The data and analyses are impressive, and presented in a helpful and clear format; the beauty of the book is the immediate and direct applicability to policies and practices in education (and even in the workplace - industry would be served well by having a sharper understanding of interaction effects). I am finding that this is my new go-to reference for work on gender and higher education! These data are absolutely key to thinking about ways in which our institutions both reproduce and transform gender inequities.

This book provides important research and insights on issues of gender and education in a way that, while serving up lots of data for researcher and academic types to chew on, is also very accessible for practitioners, campus professionals, and general interest readers.

If you still look back fondly upon the good ol' bra-burning days, you might be a feminist old enough to enjoy this sallow treatment. For those younger than 65, I'd look elsewhere for feminist insight.

With a title like "The Gender Gap in College....", and with 25% to 35% more women than men now enrolled in America's 4-year colleges, one would assume that the author's subtitle, "Maximizing the Developmental Potential of Women and Men" would be focused principally upon maximizing the potential of the new minority gender in higher education. But you would be dead wrong.

Page after page over the course of hundreds of pages, the reader is fed the line that, unlike male undergraduates female undergrads find themselves taking classes which they want to take, in fields which they are actually interested, instead of needing to focus their studies upon boring fields where they can earn a living for a stay-at-home wife after they graduate, so that they may, gulp, be able to appeal to females looking for a mate, by being able to earn enough good money working 40-50-60 hours per week for 30+ years straight without interruption, while their female mates exercise their option of skating in and out of the work world, caring for their 1-2 children for 20+ years, all the while waiting to collect the life insurance proceeds they'll have when their husbands finally retire and die the 6-8 years sooner than their wives do, a disparity which began occurring for the first time in human history a mere century ago.

Yes, women. Let's "fix" that gender gap, bringing male college attendance down to what it had been prior to World War II, when the GI Bill was passed to allow soldiers to get an education after more than 1,000,000 American men and at least 1,000 American women lost their lives defending America's way of life.