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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

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2 things can be true at the same time.

  1. Women's health needs to be studied more because their hormones show large fluctuations every month and over a lifetime. More women take a daily dose of drugs (birth control) than men, and the higher potential for damage requires higher funding for women's health.

  2. In an equal world, women and men are assumed to have the same expected lifespan. The worse outcomes for men suggests that theyre the ones being discriminated against.

For the longest time, our understanding of medicine came from the outcomes on American college students. They tended to be young, male and white. So it is reasonable to expect every other cohort to be less understood. Women are the largest of that cohort that felt left behind, and raising funding for them makes sense. Ofc, the make up of colleges since the 2000s means that this is more so an act of 'correcting the past', than fixing the present.

Women's health needs to be studied more because

men suffer 53% of burden of disease.

In an equal world, women and men are assumed to have the same expected lifespan.

In a slightly less equal world men will still be victim of majority of accidents and suicides. That is why the Burden of Disease is calculated with the expected lifespan 82 for women and 80 for men.

the make up of colleges since the 2000s

Women outnumbered men in college since the early 80s. I bet most people posting here never lived in an era in which men outnumbered women in college.

Women outnumbered men in enrollment in the late 80s, but didn't outnumber men in degrees until around 2010, as far as I can tell.

Also, a lot of medical knowledge was established before most of us were born, the timeframe doesn't matter if it's treated as established knowledge and hasn't been updated since.

  • -15

Women outnumbered men in degrees around 2010 if you count everyone over age 25 rather than just recently awarded degrees.

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/young-men-college-decline-gender-gap-higher-education/620066/

The statistics are stunning. But education experts and historians aren’t remotely surprised. Women in the United States have earned more bachelor’s degrees than men every year since the mid-1980s

Women outnumbered men in degrees awarded per year since the 80s and as older people die off women had most degrees for all adults including elderly retirees in 2010 or so.

So regarding the "makeup of colleges": that's mostly women since the 80s.