Why Women Do Better in College

Posner discusses gender issues in higher education on the Becker-Posner blog (here). He asks why there are proportionately more women going to college and outperforming male students. He suggests one answer which is that women may get more out of college than men do. "Maybe they gravitate to fields in which college learning is more valuable than it is in the fields that men gravitate to. Suppose that men have a comparative advantage (as they probably do) in jobs that involve danger, disagreeable working conditions, upper-body strength (of course), and financial risk. Those are jobs to which going to college, or in some instances (such as financial risk taking) concentrating once there on academic performance, may not contribute a great deal."