Transcription
[music] We do live in a sexist, patriarchal [music] society that privileges and benefits men systemically.
Well, it's really hard and uncomfortable to call out microaggressions. [music] So, having men who are allies, particularly men who are in positions of privilege or power, to call these out, that can be really helpful.
Title N [music] is the law that mandated gender equity in schools. [music] [singing] >> Men are hurting >> because they live in a patriarchal sexist society that benefits [music] them.
>> Anyone entering higher education for that matter to not define yourself by the work you do, but allow the work you do to support what defines your life. For women of color [music] especially, this is important because we're often trying to get um recognition [music] in an environment and a society that wasn't built for us. [music] In fact, it was designed to keep us out.
Gentlemen, we've been hearing and reciting for years that colleges and universities have become hostile toward men. And that those institutions are having a profoundly negative effect on men in society. We all feel it, we all say it, and we hear it several times a week. But why don't some people actually believe it? And when has anyone ever told you solid evidence to actually prove it? Today, I'm here to give that evidence. We're going to count women's and gender studies programs nationwide and then ask whether parallel structures exist for men. Because when someone challenges you about the patriarchy in education and how it's ruining everything, you can use what's on deck to stand your ground with confidence.
So, this is going to be a different kind of video. It's intentionally longer than what I usually make. For some of you, it may feel like a mini seminar or a lecture. Again, that's intentional because I want to really break everything down. So, give it some time. Please feel free to take it all in at once or come back to get it bits at a time because no one is breaking down the extent and influence of our education's gender studies programs from federal study classifications to degree uh granting departments including faculty scholarship and national enrollment and the ultimate social influence at scale. This is a structural walkthrough of how gender studies programs in United States colleges and universities are structured, staffed, and taken to the streets across the nation. So, if you're the kind of guy that likes information while driving, working out, walking, or just having something substantial in the background, do your favor yourself a favor and stick around here until the end. I'll add detailed video chapters for this though, for those of you who like to skip around to specific topics. And I'll also be posting a lot of overlay images throughout today's chat that will support everything I cover. And of course, as always, links will be in the video description because the only way to understand the depth of social influence that today's gendered education plays in our current climate is to understand the whole structure from the ground up.
This morning in our school matters series, we are looking at why fewer men are going to college than [music] women. Only about four in 10 college students are men, and that is a record low. According to the Wall Street Journal, colleges and universities have lost 1 and a half million students over the past 5 years, and men make up 71% of that decline.
>> Local college presidents revealed their concerns in higher education. The Professional Women's Chamber of Western Massachusetts holds events throughout the year to increase leadership development and provide more networking opportunities for women. For years, you've heard two competing narratives. We're told that the patriarchy dominates institutions, that men hold power, that men shape campus culture and create unsafe environments. And at the same time, we're told that men are disappearing from higher education. They're enrolling less, graduating less and falling behind women academically. So, which is it? Are men controlling higher education, or disengaging from it?
As we begin, let's make it clear that power and influence in academia are measured in outcomes. It's the degree programs, the federal reporting categories, faculty research, even things like published scholarship and student outcomes. Here's how today's content unfolds from the ground up as I mentioned. First, I'll go over the US Department of Education and look at how academic programs are officially classified. Then we examine how many gender focused programs like feminist studies and gender studies exist nationwide. After that, I'll zoom into one public research university. that is its program, its courses, its events, its research, and its faculty scholarship. And then I'll dive into the work both on and off campus of just one faculty person from that one program at one university. And then I'll zoom back out so we can take a look at scale. How many students graduate from these programs? And how does it influence society and culture today? So, let's break this down and finally give you the evidence of what we all already know, but no one has outright confirmed for you.
>> It's time [singing] to choose your [music] timeline [singing] on the roll out coaster of life.
>> Before we get into this scale of programs offered to study the genders, let me explain how programs of study are officially classified in the United States. Every accredited institution, there's about 6,000 of them in the United States, all of those that participate in federal financial aid report detailed data to the US Department of Education through a system called iPads. That's the integrated postsecary education data system. iPads is the federal government's standardized database reporting things like programs and degrees by areas of study that nearly every college and university in the country have within iPads. Academic programs are categorized using something called SIP codes. That's SIP CIP for classification of instructional programs. A zip code is essentially a federally recognized category of a field of study as shown on the screen here. They are numeric codes. When a college awards students a degree, it must assign that degree to one of those standardized codes. That means SIP codes determine how enrollment and degrees are counted and awarded, how they're tracked over time, and how they're compared across universities throughout the nation. So when we talk about whether an academic field literally exists in higher education, we're not relying on marketing language or course titles, we're looking at whether it has an official federal classification code and how many institutions award degrees under those codes.
So I pulled actual iPads data and this is actually publicly available. The link will be in the description and anybody can go in if you know how to navigate their system and pull official data from iPads. For the 2023 to 2024 academic year, 21 institutions awarded some type of degree in gay and lesbian studies and 413 awarded some type of degree in women's studies. Now I realize that may seem low because it represents only.3 and 6.9% of all US institutions respectively but keep in mind that this includes all colleges even trade and tech schools and all the the local community colleges. That number comes again directly from official iPads data and reflects degree granting institutions and units not just individual courses.
If we widen the lens from formal departments to academic programs reported in federal completions data, the footprint can shift depending on how institutions code their programs in iPads. When we look at iPads style reporting across sectors, programs appear much more frequently across public and private institutions that offer bachelor's degrees and above. Right? So, those two-year institutions, those two-year colleges are not likely going to have these types of programs. It's going to be in the four four-year and above. And we're not even including other degrees from psychology or sociology that are in totally different zip codes that still offer those degrees with concentrations relative to simply gendered uh women, feminism, or gay and lesbian. Note that there is a zip code for gender studies, but I did not include it here because it also includes other areas like ethnic studies and cultural minority studies. So, the 413 institutions awarding degrees in women's studies serves as an absolute floor for degree granting programs, not a ceiling. If we could parse out just the gender studies from that zip code, the number of institutions would likely increase substantially.
So among those 21 and 413 institutions as shown in this table, how many degrees did they award in the 2023 to 2024 academic year? They awarded 2,178 degrees in women's studies and 75 degrees in gay gay and lesbian gay and lesbian studies. And again, this is not including gender studies degrees or other fields such as psychology that have those concentrations. If we were to add gender studies, I would estimate that the number of degrees awarded would increase five or sixfold. So, I'm being extremely conservative here.
Now, let's turn to men's or masculinity programs, and you may have been sharp enough to notice it when I shared this image of zip codes earlier. If you didn't, I'll pause here for just a few seconds so you can see it again and tell me what you notice. There is no standard center for education statistics or iPads SIP category for men's studies that parallels women's studies under SIP code 05.0207. That means there is no federally recognized instructional code that institutions use to report degrees specifically in men's studies. That means that standalone men's or masculinity studies simply do not exist. They do not offer degrees and credentials. There may be a handful of minors or specialized tracks available throughout the country, but they are exceptions rather than a nationally recognized category. If you're able to find any at all, masculinity related content in higher education will appear only in individual courses such as classes like men and masculinities. And many times those are housed within sociology, psychology, literature or other related departments. In other cases, masculinity is treated as a sub area or subsection, a subtopic within broader women's gender and gender and sexuality studies programs. But masculinity as a federally classified degree reporting instructional field does not appear on its own in a standardized category in the SIP system.
So here's the the practical takeaway. On the women's and feminist studies side, we have 413 US institutions with degree granting departments or programs as of fall 2023. That number reflects formal units awarding credentials, not just scattered courses. And depending on how we count minors, certificates, and crosslisted programs in iPads, the broader footprint is even likely much larger. And on the men's and masculinity side, there is no national count tied to a standardized federal classification code. Standalone degree programs explicitly labeled men's studies or masculinity studies don't exist. Masculinity focused coursework, however, does appear within other departments and interdisciplinary programs.
So, we've established scale of gendered programs at the f federal level. Now, we're going to zoom in on one real campus. Let's move from the national infrastructure to one institution that includes a feminist studies program. Again, I'm getting more and more narrow in this dive to show what happens in these programs before stepping back again to have a discussion about their larger impact. This is the feminist studies program at University of California at Santa Barbara USCB with images coming directly from their website. UC Santa Barbara's feminist studies program began in 1988 as a women's studies program and later became a formal academic department in 2008. In 2001, the department established the whole chair in women and social justice. described as the first endowed chair of its kind in the field. In 2004, it added a lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer studies minor. Today, the department includes approximately 10 core faculty members and more than 50 affiliated faculty across the university. At the undergraduate level, it offers a major in feminist studies along with minors in feminist studies and LGBTQ studies. At the graduate level, it maintains a PhD program with more than 15 doctoral students as well as a doctoral emphasis on programs connected to other disciplines. According to the department, roughly 45 to 50 students graduate each year from the feminist studies program and related minors combined. The program describes itself as interdisciplinary and rooted in social justice with research and teaching centered on gender, sexuality, race, class, nation, and systems of power and inequality.
Here's just a small look at the program's instructional staff from their online directory. I didn't count to be precise, but I would estimate that more than 80% of them are women. And I won't even comment here about the ones who appear to be men. Looking at the course offerings that I'll rotate on the screen here, it's not a small or occasional set of electives. They offer large lower level gateway courses like feminist studies 40 women representation cultural production which enrolls over 140 students and women of color approaching 150 students. Their intro to LGBTQ studies alone enrolls more than 200 students in a single lecture section with multiple discussions um discussion sections filled to capacity. Many upper division courses including structuring sexuality, feminist analysis, queer theory, gender and society in fat studies are either at or near enrollment capacity. There are also applied and experiential components such as internships, seminars, and action labs alongside independent studies and research courses. At the graduate level, the program includes advanced seminars, directed readings, everything including uh teaching apprenticeships, thesis preparation, and dissertation prep courses. Taken together, this is a vertically integrated curriculum that runs from large introductory lectures through upper level and upper division theory to into doctoral training.
The program's research page organizes its scholarship into several thematic clusters as shown here that reflect its social and uh justiceoriented framework. One major area centers on sexuality, trans studies, and queer of color critique indicating sustained engagement with the LGBTQ theory and intersectional analysis of race and gender. Another cluster focuses on transsexual feminism and migration, highlighting research that examines borders, displacement, global labor, and the movement of people across nations. The department also foregrounds feminist media, culture, and performance studies, suggesting attention to representation, popular culture, art, and embodiment as sites of political meaning. Taken together, the research profile presents a department structured around overlapping themes of gender, race, labor, sexuality, migration, embodiment, and global systems of power rather than around a single disciplinary approach.
Now, let's have a look at their public solidarity statements. The USCB Department of Feminist Studies has issued multiple public solidarity statements related to campus labor actions and the Israeli Israel Palestine conflict. In May 2024, the department formally expressed solidarity with UAW Union Local 4188 graduate student workers who voted to authorize a strike, citing that they describe what they describe as unfair labor practices by the University of California, including changes to working conditions, disciplinary actions related to protest activity, and concerns about academic freedom and uh campus safety. The department pledged not to retaliate against strikers or to take on uh struck work and called for an amnesty for academic employees and students who were facing disciplinary action tied to protest activity. In separate statements following the October 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel and is Israel's military response in Gaza, the department publicly aligned itself with Palestinian liberation efforts with campus organizations advocating for uh divestment and ceasefire. Faculty members identified themselves with collectives such as academics for justice in Palestine and described the conflict through frameworks of settler colonialism, apartheid, militarization, and genocide. The statements also emphasized opposition to anti-semitism while distinguishing that from critiques of Zionism and Israeli government policy. In addition, the department referenced campus conflicts over academic freedom, protests, doxing of students and faculty, and the temporary closure of the campus's mult multicultural center. Overall, these statements position the department not only as an academic unit but as an academic unit that is actively participating in contemporary political debates and linking its teaching and research to broader movements around labor rights, anti-militarization, and Palestinian liberation.
And here's an overview of just >> [clears throat] >> uh recent events that the program has either hosted or sponsored over the past few years. The department's public programming has centered on speaker series, panels, film events, and research presentations tied to gender, sexuality, race, labor, migration, and social justice. Recent events include large public lectures such as care, the highest stage of capitalism, and discussions on feminist political e economy and panels examining sex, labor, and pleasure beyond neoliberal frameworks. It's a lot of words to go through here. Thanks for being patient with me. Several events explicitly connect scholarship to activism with themes of anti-racism, decolonization, reproductive politics, labor struggles, and global uh liberation movements. And across the listings, the pattern is consistent. interdisciplinary feminist scholarship presented through public lectures, teachins, film screenings, and speaker series that link academic research to contemporary political and cultural debates.
So, if you're still with me here, I appreciate it. So far, we've gone from federal degree classification to the number of women's and lesbian programs offered to the number of annual degrees awarded. And then we started to have a look inside what one of those programs offers and how they operate. Now let's have a look at the professional work and public impact of just one professor in UCSB's feminist studies program. That's Jane Ward. Jane is an openly gay and very politically vocal woman. and she's professor and chair of the feminist studies program at UC Santa Barbara with a PhD in sociology from USCB. Trained as a sociologist, her work centers on queer studies, feminist theory, and critical heterosexuality studies. I know, right? She previously held multiple leadership roles at UC Riverside, including chair of their gender and sexuality studies program. Her website lists 44 distinct academic publications which include four books that she's authored or co-authored, several edited special issues, and multiple journal articles, chapters, and essays. Ward's scholarship examines gender and sexual cultures with a f focus on heterosexuality, masculinity, whiteness, and sexual identity. Almost entirely everything that she is not. And I want you to take a look and take a note of the titles of her work and services that I'll be overlaying here. Have a good look at the discussions she's having and the ideologies that she's promoting. She has written on topics such as online misogyny, the anti-gender movement, lesbian feminism, queer parenting, the marriage self-help industry, and sex between straight identified men. Her books include titles like The Tragedy of Heterosexuality and Not Gay: The Sex Between Straight White Men. Oh, and there's also Respectably Queer. In addition to extensive publications in academic journals such as Gender and Society and Sexualities, Ward's work has been featured in major mainstream media. She's delivered in invited lectures nationally and internationally and engages in public facing scholarship workshops and activism including work related to children's gender self-determination.
Now that we've zoomed all the way in from how many programs there are and how many are classified with the federal government all the way into one institution, one program, one faculty member. Let's zoom out a little bit. Okay, so we've zoomed in on Dr. Jane Ward. So, let's start to broaden this discussion again and contextualize the presence and impact of women and feminist programs to broader society. In this instance, we'll situate Ward and her work properly within the larger institutional structure at UC Santa Barbara. And remember, this is just one professor at one of more than 400 programs across the country. She is not an adjunct. She's not an outlier scholar operating on the margins. And she's not a visiting lecturer. She is professor and chair of feminist studies at a flagship public research university. Her areas of specialization queer theory, critical heterosexuality studies, gender labor, children's gender self-determination, masculinity studies, and feminist cultural analyses. They all sit squarely within the department's stated research clusters and curricular offerings. The themes running through her scholarship mirror what we already saw in the program are overview in their course catalog. Courses on LGBTQ studies, feminist analysis, queer theory, gender and society, reproductive politics, bodies and disability, and women of color feminists. Her books are published by major academic presses like NYU Press, Duke University Press, and Vanderbilt University Press. Her work appears in top journals such as genders in uh gender and society, science, sexualities, and feminist review. She's delivered invited lectures across major universities in the US and internationally. And this is mainstream institutionally embedded information and academic production. To be clear, Ward's work is not an anomaly inside the department. It exemplifies the academic and public orientation of the field. The department trains undergraduates and graduate students within these frameworks. It publishes within these theoretical traditions and produces scholarship that circulates nationally through academic presses, conferences, and media appearances. When we examine just one single faculty member in depth, what we really see is how a feminist studies department operationalizes its intellectual mission through research, teaching, publication, and public engagement. And USCB is just one example of 413 across the country.
So, let's continue zooming out even a little bit more with a reminder again that UCSB is just one of more than 400 institutions that awards degrees under the relevant SIP codes that started our discussion earlier. And remember, we're not even talking about the gender studies programs. I'm not including those here. The implicit message here is scale. This isn't just one campus. It's a national academic machine across the country. These programs exist at public research universities, private institutions, regional campuses, and liberal liberal arts colleges. They offer majors, minors, master's degrees, doctoral programs, and graduate emphases and concentrations. They employ full-time faculty. They host conferences and speaker series. They publish scholarship through major academic journals and presses and enroll hundreds of students, thousands at a time in large introductory courses. When we multiply what we just learned at one institution across hundreds of campuses, we begin to fully understand the footprint of the national academic infrastructure. And this is not just one single department within a handful of faculty members or with a handful of faculty members. is a distributed degree degree producing research generating network embedded across American higher education.
And here's the larger magnitude of the issue. Once we recognize, as we just have, that this infrastructure consists of hundreds of institutions, the next question becomes impact. How many students move through these programs each year? Whether it's earning their full degrees, simply majoring in, or maybe getting a concentration in one of those degrees, or taking a few classes. How many do you think it is? We already know that well over 2,000 degrees in women's studies alone are awarded each year. At a single campus like UC Santa Barbara, dozens of students graduate annually from the major and related minors. Multiply that across 413 institutions and we're looking at thousands of degree recipients entering the workforce every year with formal training in feminist theory. They could also have their degrees of course in sexuality studies and any other related background. Those graduates, listen to me, they do not remain inside the department. They move into education, nonprofit leadership, and other areas such as social services, even media, publishing. Some of them will become attorneys. They work in public policy, corporate and human resources, diversity and inclusion roles, and graduate programs, maybe even in other disciplines. Some will remain in academia and become full faculty members themselves, thereby reproducing and expanding the field even more. At the graduate level, doctoral students complete dissertations, publish peer-reviewed research, secure faculty appointments, receive federal grant money, and contribute to national scholarly associations and conferences. And over time this produces not only students but scholars, administrators, policy analysts, consultants and institutional leaders in all industries shaped by the intellectual traditions of the field that they entered in their academics. So what we're looking at is not simply a set of courses or a collection of books. It's a credentiing pipeline. It's a professional training structure. Fields shape industries not just through products and service, but through the personnel that they hire. What we're seeing is a research network that generates publications, hosts events, mentors graduate students, and feeds ideas back into other sectors of society.
So now we come back full circle. There is no equivalent CIP. There is no equivalent zip code for men's studies. No parallel work or network of departments. There's no comparable degree granting infrastructure. You cannot get a degree in men and masculinity. When we return to the structural level, the contrast becomes clear. There is a federally recognized zip code for women's studies. There are hundreds of institutions reporting degrees and issuing them under that classification. There are departments, chairs, endowed positions, doctoral programs, conferences, journals, edited volumes, and a steady stream of graduates entering professional life each year. All of them having degrees in women's studies. There is a national academic infrastructure that trains students. It produces scholarship and shapes institutional cultural across multiple sectors. When we look for a parallel federal classification for men's studies or masculinity studies, there is, as I mentioned, no equivalent. It does not exist. There is no standardized reporting category under which institutions collectively produce and track degrees in men's studies. And there are individual courses, as I mentioned, on masculinity. And there may be scholars who study men and masculinities often within sociology or gender study uh type departments. But there is no comparable nationwide network, nothing official, of degree granting male studies programs embedded across hundreds of institutions under a federally recognized classification.
And this is where the tension we started with comes back into focus. We're told that the patriarchy dominates higher education, that men structurally run academia, that institutions are designed around male power. And at the same time, we're told that campuses are equitable, neutral, even hostile to women unless corrected by sustained feminist intervention. But when we step back from the rhetoric and the ideology and look at the real infrastructure as we just have federal degree classifications, degree production, departmental staffing, institutional scale, [snorts] the architecture all tells a more complicated story. If patriarchy is structured or structurally embedded in higher education, it is not, I tell you, embedded through a parallel national system of men's studies programs. What we can clearly document, however, is the existence of a federally recognized credential producing women's studies infrastructure operating across hundreds of institutions. So, the issue is no longer abstract, and I hope that you can use this information to dismantle anyone that tries to tell you that women are the victims in higher education or society at large. Thanks for being here. Leave me a comment and I'll see y'all