Of an American service member in Afghanistan 4 other troops were injured during what officials describe as combat engagement and then Gar province eastern Afghanistan has been the most dangerous region for American troops with u.s. And Afghan operations conducted in the area against ISIS 8 service members were killed and 2017 all but one by hostile fire Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali home in Ace's the enemies of Iran are stirring unrest in his country it's the 1st time he has commented publicly since economic protests began 6 days ago the b.b.c. Sebastian Usher reports the comments were posted on the ayatollah is website you I mean that's all you can chant. Because under your Virgil the enemies of the Islamic Republic of Iran Ayatollah Khomeini's says have united to cause trouble with that money their weapons and their intelligence agents he said he would soon address the nation on what was going on but the fact is he may not have much more idea of where the protests to heading than anyone else that's a b.b.c. Sebastian. More than 300 women in the entertainment industry have launched an anti sexual harassment initiative called time's up they're hoping to address workplace inequality and injustices across all fields N.P.R.'s Andrea Limbaugh has details in an open letter the group says that they stand by housekeepers farm workers janitors health aides and more Anyone who has been affected by sexual harassment in the workplace to that end they set up a legal defense fund which offers subsidized legal help for women and men who are victims of sexual harassment and assault they're aiming to raise $15000000.00 for it through donations so in the bigger names involved include Shonda Rhimes Reese Witherspoon Rashida Jones the open letter says they were spurred to take action after the national farmworker Women's Alliance sent a message of solidarity to the women of Hollywood following the Harvey Weinstein story. N.p.r. News the Dow is up 58 points at 24778 this is n.p.r. . Senator Al Franken has formally stepped down nearly a month after the Minnesota Democrat announced his resignation this following sexual Harris Mintz charges against him German authorities are investigating whether to formally charge a German member of parliament with incitement for posting an anti muslim tweet N.P.R.'s Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson reports from Berlin the criminal complaint was filed the day Germany began enforcing a law banning hate speech on social media bad looks fun story who is a deputy leader of the Alternative for Germany party was also barred for 12 hours by Twitter after her controversial post she was responding to a New Year's Eve message that cologne police tweeted in several languages including Arabic from storage tweeted what the hell is going on in this country why is an official police site tweeting in Arabic is it to soothe the barbaric Muslim gang raping male horde she tried replacing the same message on Facebook which blocked it authorities in Cologne filed a criminal complaint against her alleging incitement Meanwhile the far right party defended the m.p. And says removing her remarks amounts to censorship Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson n.p.r. News Berlin a popular American bloggers apologizing today after encountering major online backlash for sharing on You Tube what appeared to be the remains of someone who had taken their life Logan Paul says he didn't expect the negative reaction to a video that was posted Sunday in which he and friends were seen trekking in a Japanese forest near Mt Fuji the areas widely known as one where people have got to take their own lives critics of Paul's post say he was deeply disrespectful this is n.p.r. News support for n.p.r. Comes from n.p.r. Stations other contributors include the Arcus Foundation dedicated to the idea that people can live in harmony with one another and the natural world learn more about Arcus and its partners at Arcus Foundation dot org and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. And then fast forward a few years my oldest child graduated from high school and this is the story that opens the book and so were at graduation and the valedictorian and the salutatorian were girls young women and then Andrea's friend gets up and says well the smartest people in the class may be women but I'm the class president look and I'm a man. And that really just knocked me backwards. That knocked me backwards to although in today's climate it could be the next. That was Nancy Mimi talking she's the director of faculty teaching initiatives that yeah it's the very scholarly way to say she thinks a lot about how we teach and burn and the role of education in society I read her new book degrees of difference and was. Also knocked backwards it seems that this academic was suggesting that college for women was not going to help you at all not only do we need to get a college degree we need to get more college degrees just to be equal in pay to men who don't have college degrees. That makes me. Of disbelief and frustration but she's been doing this research a long time I went back to school went back to get a Ph d. And started seeing research that said wait a minute women have an advantage women are now advantaged and boys are disadvantaged and I thought I'm not seeing that and so I looked a little further and my dissertation research now 15 or so years ago was in a middle school and I looked for a whole year I spent a whole year back in middle school observing students and seeing how boys and girls interacted how teachers interacted and I could sum that work up by one sentence which one young woman said she said I could do all the boys do but being smart isn't going to make me a man. Being smart isn't going to make me a man I think it might be time for a beer well a metaphorical one anyway here just Nancy you tell them. One of the ways that helped me see how that happened was a woman in history who looked at the beer brewing industry of the Middle Ages this is so cool and she discovered that through her research of the Middle Ages that women were brewers for a long time and they just did it at home beer brewing was something that you did you know all around the village and everybody just made their own and that was great and then over the course of several centuries different forces start to shift so in in the beer making industry it became more centralized over time it became more factory oriented it became regulated and so as those things started to shift then the laws that govern who could make beer started to shift and the cultural norms about women going out of the house became stronger so it wasn't the case that women said Ok I'll pick up my brewing equipment and I'll go off and I'll be your beer maker in the factory their worst it was then and still are now norms that say no women belong in the home so we're not going to let you become to our factory and brew our beer and so over time these forces shifted to take beer brewing out of the hands of women bring them into factories and then it became the province of men and so there's no one thing to point out I often say I wish there were this group of people in a back room you know even in vision them like they're playing poker and they've got these green shades on and it's all smoky and I wish there were this group of people I could blame everything on and that that if I could just find. Then we're going to stop that equal so but the shifts in power and the shifts in the cultural norms work in tandem too to change the value of whatever it is that we're talking about so we brew beer brewing or veterinary medicine and so it's much more subtle and therefore much harder to combat. So that leads me to the question about the value that is placed on the jobs that women do take and this phenomenon that I've read about that the more women enter a field let the less that field is valued or the lower the pay for that field is that something that has come up then in what you've looked at yes yes in a couple of different ways and that feels like when I start to examine that feels like a hopeless situation because that phenomenon is true it has happened in family medicine in clinical work in many fields particularly in law in veterinary medicine. Those are the ones that come to mind at the moment but whenever women come to dominate a field the field is diminished in value by pay and status. Psychology is a huge one the only it is now in 40 years gone from majority male to majority female in colleges and then in the practice of psychology in all of its different forms with the exception of neuropsychology a neurocognitive work the more scientific e you get the more male something stays as a profession so for example nursing is 90 percent women still but that little 10 percent that's men a lot of it is in. Oh now I'm going to go out of my. Knowledge Base here but in anesthesiology so nurse and c.z. Ologists are much more men so they have a higher pay status they have a higher status in general because it's in the operating room all the time so yes that phenomenon that you've heard about is real and it bears true across many professions. I'm getting depressed. So you get this idea that education equals equity that's what is hammered in to our into our consciousness all the time I mean even through all the political campaigning. This idea of free and reduced education cost of education for everyone has been just a drum that's just been beaten over and over again is the solution to our society's ills So you're saying hold on a 2nd that's actually not true. Absolutely it's not true and if we step back and think about that why would it be because we don't all come into higher education if we just make higher education cheaper so everybody can come in and so all of us will have an associate's degree a bachelor's degree of some kind we don't come in as blank slates in kindergarten we don't come in in high school we certainly don't come in in a college with an absolutely clean and equal background so why would we come in and think that our college education was going to make us equal and anyway and certainly gender and race and social class and $100.00 other things those are the big 3 influence how we got to where we are and how what we do in college manifests itself out of college and certainly there's power sitting above it all saying yeah you can you can have your college degree but cultural power is going to shape shift that and make it something different and so it's We'd like to believe it people have called and I agree that we have this almost sacred belief in formal education in this country and I think if you just ask people directly do you believe in that everybody should have an education they did honestly answer yes and we try to live that out we at least at the moment we still have public education although I worry tremendously about that but if you go below the surface be a bit below that belief in equity in education what you get are people's beliefs that education gets manifested in very very different ways and in fact it should be manifested in different ways for men and women and people of different colors and so on so there's a lot going on there. It is so much to take in I have to say. And even just you know thinking about talking with you and reading through the the book and chatting with friends. About this before we started recording when I said you know there's this woman at Yale who is questioning the value of a higher education. And the looks that people would give a were like. And what's the alternative and what about that you know that enormous pay gap that we hear about between people who only have a high school education and people who have a need to have a college degree and you know the big dip in between those 2 levels of education like what about that like are so I mean are you saying hey you know what ladies not worth your time don't don't bother going to college or or is it something that needs to be happening on the other side of getting that degree. I know I am not saying that what I am saying is that we not the only one saying it that not only do we need to get a college degree we need to get more college degrees just to be equal in pay you mentioned the pay gap just to be equal in pay to men who don't have college degrees there's a lot of sad and hair pulling data that show that women who have a bachelor's degree often make less than men who have high school degrees because of the jobs that men with high school diplomas and just a little bit of on the job training or maybe a 6 week certificate for example in refrigerator repair which is a legit when I need my refrigerator fixed I want someone who can fix that so I'm not at all saying that those things are necessary but if I can make as a male as much money getting a refrigerator repair certificate that I could if I went more than I could if I went back to school and then had to spend many years so there's an opportunity cost for going back to school and getting a degree that I'm not sure I'm going to do what I'm going to do with I might as a male go logically go get that through to fit and go fix bridges because we he also we also live in a culture that says men need to make money and that's how males are success. It's full particularly middle and working class men but women need to get that college degree because if they want any chance at all of making even equivalent to or somewhat the same as the man who has a bachelor's degree and of course I'm talking in generalizations but not too far out that that statement that I just made is true in many many cases and the data bear that out. So women become disadvantaged because we need more and more credentials just to stay status quo I mean while we're paying for college degrees and of course not working as we are being very good students and going to college and getting all those letters after our names. Where where are they going I mean is that aside from refrigerator repair where are these guys going and where and why can't we go with them. Well we could go with them we can do nothing but our own cultural norms stop us most of the time because it's now illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender of basis of sex and all other many other kinds of things which is wonderful but that doesn't stop us so for example it is we can no longer say no men need apply if men want to become a nurse. But that number of 90 percent in roughly in the nursing profession hasn't changed even though the law has changed likewise teaching almost 87 percent of the nation's teachers k. 12 teachers are women why hasn't that changed and so but I will go back to that part in a 2nd where men are going instead are Silicon Valley a place where they can have control and power this is going to depress you some more so. Silicon Valley places like Goober Google lift all the others had a bit of an issue right now and I'm happy with that. Seek and I'm not hiding anything here. So places where they can create things where a lot of money might be possible that's one place to go and in a lot of the place I just named particular places like Google and places that need coding for example I even heard about this through Target the other day at a many times they will the company will pay you to go to coding bootcamp so that you get part of an education and you can go to work it's a very functional way of giving people part of an education and make a whole lot more money right away than you could if you worked at Donald's or something like that so so Silicon Valley like places are one place that men are going. Places that give people status if not also money so really crime is still one place where many many more men go than women it gives them a sense of belonging it gives them a potential for more money and it's a place where women don't go nearly so often gangs organized crime and then you've got hands on things like as I said refrigerator repair construction. Anything that you can build is apprenticeships that are paid sports. And there's a really vast network of sports jobs that aren't you know very very few men or women are going to make it into the major leagues into the n.f.l. And to the n.b.a. But there's a whole network of sports leagues as I was researching for the book I had no idea how many places you could go to be involved in sports and make a very good salary without having much education all of the support of those networks of sports after it happened from somebody and it's more often than not men who do that. So those are some of the places that they're headed any place where there is an independence a lot of men gravitate that that ethos. I want to be successful I want to be rich I want to own my own business that's another place still owning one's own business being an entrepreneur those places men are gravitating in equal or larger numbers than they used to be and women by cultural understanding don't go they don't go into trucking they don't go into. Any of the places I just mentioned and it's not that they can't not that we can't but this goes back to college then one of the really interesting set of studies that have come out of the last decade are that when you go into colleges and you ask young men and women why did you choose the major you did what what drove you to this. People will say is just but I liked I didn't particularly most people will say that I just was something I just love to do I knew I wanted to do it and that's great except that it falls out in gender lines and so what people tend to like are the things that the cultural messages tell them they tend to like so it's it just gets frustrating because you think well where then so novels that will high school should do it differently well elementary school should do it differently well parents should do it differently seriously we should go back in utero and and try to do it and even there I'm really not joking more than a little bit because there are a quarterly a fine is a wonderful writer who talks about neuro nonsense where in people attribute near used neuroscience to attribute gendered qualities to fetuses and that even before we're born people when we know it's a girl oh isn't isn't she going to be sweet oh she's kicking she must be you know she's going to be a gymnast or he's a really strong and so generous such a salient character. Stic of us as humans that we attribute things meaning to things that that don't really have a gendered meeting but we make it so so that argument of cult of nature and nurture that nurture is extraordinarily powerful and that's I think how we get to a lot of well why can't I be a trucker well because I'm not supposed to be a trucker or fill in the blank this is inflection point I'm learning shell Air My guest is Nancy Mimi her book is called degrees of difference if you're enjoying what you hear an inflection point subscribe to our podcast that way all our new episodes will automatically appear in your feed and all you have to do is push play you can find us on your favorite Pod catch or search for inflection point will be right back k s j d is supported by the destination Grill at the Holiday Inn inviting you to taste their happy hour menu including pork sliders and sub Rosso chili fries and their selection of cocktails beers and wine every day from 4 to 6 pm the destination grill on Facebook and 2121 East Main Street in Cortez. I'm Lauren Schiller and this is inflection point I'm talking with Nancy Mimi the director of faculty teaching initiatives at Yale so when what is your experience been with that you know you've got a number of degrees under your belt do you feel like you would wish you could have done something differently or needed to get less educated took a stand before you attain the position that you have now and I mean I'm curious about some of your personal experiences with these frustrating facts Well yeah that's interesting nobody wants to talk about to well you what you do thank you we want to talk about gender but it's so do I wish I had less education no I loved and still love school and all my life I've worked in and better part of school and because I think it's worth saving I love teaching I love research about schools and it's just where else do you get to go and learn and help other people learn that's your job to me it's dream work so I don't regret any of it and for me I needed the credentials in order to to be able to say something I could do you know now we have lots of open publishing and certainly I could have said the things I said in the book and the things I'm saying now I could say them in many different forms now but people pay attention when you have a book by an academic publisher they pay attention to you differently when you have a Ph d. . Which is that we all we stratify college credentials of course and so the ph d. Wins and the status of educational institutions matters and we parse those out as well I work at Yale but I don't have a degree from Yale and in some circles that matters but nonetheless I went to research university so I could learn to research and that buys me some credibility which. I'm now really glad I have so at least when I start to talk about these things and research and write about these things it's with the hope that somebody will find this credible in a way that if I didn't have these these credentials that they would be less likely I think to pay attention although. I have to say the devaluing of schooling in general which is similar to what we're talking about but yet also another conversation I do worry that that as we devalue college we also start to devalue knowledge and just decry intellectual curiosity so who knows whether or not my credentials or yours will be or anybody else's will be valuable in the future but that that is something that with the devaluing of college education as I wrote about and as I'm thinking about it it's if it's the case that fewer and fewer men in general are going to college does that mean that this whole enterprise will eventually just go up in smoke and will find men will find power elsewhere and people will find intellectual pursuits elsewhere or not at all and I think there's a list a lot to be gained by learning how to think learning how to listen to others thoughts learning how to reason. Learning what you don't know what that brings up for me though is the proliferation of schools as opposed to going to school for the intellectual pursuit and satisfying your curiosity about the world and how to think . That thinking of college as a means to an end and as a way to make you know is going to help me make more money at the end of the day or is it going to be the great equalizer and it's going to help me get from you know one version of life to another and if the migration is over to there's more functional you know just get the degree type college and away from the more liberal arts you know. Let's let's ponder every minute question. You know what does that mean for our society Wow. You know you know but you've hit a really important point and I don't think it has to be a 0 sum game an either or question at all but it's made out to be right now and that tension has gone has always existed. Last couple 100 years we've gone back and forth about whether education is for the greater good of humanity and of the mind or whether it's functional and it really can and is both in the best of circumstances but what I'm really worried about and what I see the development of online education and for profit colleges and often those 2 go hand in hand what I'm really concerned about is that the cheap degree the for profit degree the degree gets given to or pushed on people who can least afford to have education that way because there's lots of research that shows that there's are some good things about education but people learn better face to face 1st of all no matter who you are and then the people who need more help learning are the people you don't want taking on line courses because they need to have people helping them think helping them use just they need to think deeper they need to be challenge they need to work together and that happens most of the time face to face it happens better that way we all get distracted I get distracted I'm sitting in front of my computer I'm not going to learn the same way as learning is dynamic and conversational and iterative it's not front of the computer learn a fact take a test go on next and we've got message boards and we've got. Synchronous and ways of having education but it's still not the same as being face to face so if that kind. Of of Distance Education gets given to or that's the way that many people go particularly those who can't afford something different or they're going later in life then I think we're going to give them a much poorer version so they're going to give them a poor version of education a credential that may or may not be able to be used to particularly with for profit degrees they're just not as good and probably will get in terrible trouble for saying that but I don't mind because it's true so we they're in debt they have a credit chill they may or may not be able to use very well and that's not very good on top of that meanwhile the elite schools then can and do offer a lot of really important liberal arts a lot of opportunities for thinking and critical thinking they get lots of opportunities to learn how to write better they get lots of connections the resources that are involved in coming to a school where you can meet people who have the kinds of jobs who have the internships you want to where you've got some some money to be able to go abroad I think those kinds of degrees are going to be further offered to and taken by people who can afford that and so the bifurcation that the separation of that I think is getting worse and so and on line and for profit degrees only proliferate that but we really don't want to talk about that right now in the country because just college for all without thinking about that critically seems like a really good idea until you start digging below the surface a little bit this is inflection point I learned my guest is Nancy Mimi her book is called degrees of difference. Programming on kids j.d. Is supported by Southwest Colorado community college reminding the 4 corners region of its academic commitment to quality serve occasions and degrees in industrial trade skills and liberal arts education with 2 locations one near make is and one in Durango Southwest Colorado community college is ready to help with your career change find out more at public c.c. Dot edu. I'm Lauren Schiller and this is inflection point if you like hearing my guest story and want to hear more stories of women who rise up and how they do what they do use the podcast app of your choice to subscribe to inflection point right now I'm talking with Nancy Mimi the director of faculty teaching initiatives at Yeah. So just thinking about something you said earlier and that I have heard a lot about which is the boy crisis coming in conjunction with the head I think more women are graduating from college now than men and that there are concerns about what this means tell me what your thoughts are on that and what you have seen . Where do I start there have been several boy crises in the United States so-called throughout the last the 20th century and then the beginning of the 21st century and none of them were it was the case where all of a sudden boys started doing less well in school and somehow the teaching changed and we started giving girls exactly what they needed and ignoring boys that simply isn't true at all and all 3 boys crises are boy problem times. It becomes boy crisis time when girls start to do as well or better than boys but there is no fundamental biological difference in the way that boys and girls learn . And people have made a great deal of money saying otherwise but it's when you claim that there's a boy crisis it's easy to see why people will say well we can just fix this if only you would do for boys. Just make things so that these crazy wild boys that their culture tells us they're supposed to be if they would just settle down sitting down to learn is no better for girls than it is for boys. And so we should be active learning for everybody so that that makes me crazy almost faster than anything else because once I start claiming that that education is different by gender then we're really taking the worst of cultural stereotypes and cultural norms and making it almost impossible for anybody boy or girl to succeed Well there's I mean there's also the phenomenon in the classroom of who gets called on more. And who takes that more air. And anecdotally from what I've heard when and then what I have experienced that it tends to be the guys who are speaking out more and who are getting called on more in the classroom and oh yeah it's the research will back you or your anecdotes up said Kurz. Research that in the seventy's and subsequent research bears that out the noisier people in a classroom whether in a k. 12 classroom in a college classroom gets the attention more and it's more often than not males and that studies been replicated many times and that's not usually through any nefarious work of the teacher partly it's seen as a way to keep the classroom calm pay attention to the noisy one but also girls are taught from very early on to sit down be quiet raise their hand and follow the rules and they're rewarded for that whereas boys are taught that they're allowed to go call on me or or the grown up version of that which is to start taking up all the air space with how much they know or how much they want to pontificate in a college classroom and they're culturally encouraged to do that again I'm speaking with broad strokes and it does differ somewhat bike by socio economic status and by race and ethnicity but for the most part these gender differences bear out across those those differences so yes it's a reality that in in classrooms boys often get and young men often get more attention which then turns into intellectual play and Internet into intellectual development Meanwhile women are where we're sitting there taking good notes and we're doing all the things we think good students are supposed to do or we know good students are supposed to do but we're not getting in there and getting messy if you will and playing with our intellect which turns out to be even worse then there's a really interesting study about women in. College classroom and I can't remember where it was done but pre-med classroom organic chemistry and it's a notorious course for being a weed out course for going further and whether or not you want to be a physician and. Women at the end of the that study at the end of the course women who didn't get an a in the course thought oh I'm not going to be a physician I'm not good enough so more women dropped that course than men and men who sees Ok I passed the course so fewer of them dropped that course and continued on because they did sufficiently well to go on and so they read what their performance as different because of how they're brought up to think about schooling . So is there anything that can be done about that. That seems like something that would start at home I mean I'm just even thinking about I've got I've got 2 daughters they're in middle school and now high school. Great students you know of course I'm expecting them to go out to college and I'm sitting here thinking you know. What if I told them about being a good student Yeah. I damaged them for life I don't know I'm sure you have not it what what is to be done as we've got we have will need I don't know how long to talk about. It's I think awareness has got to be a 1st step but we're in this by you by your daughter's by the people I work with by every college professor by every k. 12 teacher and so on and this by every principal by every college president. So awareness to start but then looking at what we know which is a great deal some of which we've been talking about and then not letting up on seeing how the cultural expectations that we have of men and women in so many different ways in jobs in performance in dress in leadership in power and we can't let up in the way all those differences in gender and. How they impact school performance in this case and then what you do with that schooling as you move forward it's nothing less than really shifting the cultural expectations of men and women and then including race and social class and gender orientation and sexual orientation but really it's we just can't let up think you talking about this and thinking about somehow that all of our gender work is done we're not we're not post gender we're not post racial So I give you an example from my own child rearing I joked that my children grew up with a me and they I think they wonder sometimes about how I damaged them because I would do things like when I lead them to watch t.v. Which wasn't often and they they can complain to you about that if you ask them but I would turn off the sound on the commercial and I would ask them to tell me what the message was that was being conveyed so I was teaching them to be critical thinkers and critical consumers but I was also teaching them about gender because I've seen t.v. Commercials and how gendered they are and sometimes I'd ask them about race but I was still me then so it was often gender when we read stories I would have them tell me about the message particularly if somebody else gave them a book that wasn't one that was as empowering to women as I wanted and I have 2 sons and a daughter so they all got lots of these messages as they were growing up I was probably growing up as well with them and so they certainly get buffeted by by all the gender expectations in the world now that they're adults but I'm hoping that those messages stuck with them and so at least they question the things that they're going through and. At least talk about it even if they can't change everything about their worlds as well so that's the frustrating part it is kind of overwhelming or very overwhelming but the alternative is not to talk about it and not to keep thinking about and then pressing on the various changes in Wa in politics Good lord and politics. In education in business and leadership they they all tie together you have made all of these observations and you've you know investigated this subject thoroughly from an academic point of view but you yourself have also gone through a number of schools and so. Have you had or did you have an eye opening experience where you were sitting in a classroom and listening to a teacher or watching something go on where you were like. This is I'm watching this very you know this phenomenon at work is the might have led you on this path to begin with. Oh. Well I've had the opportunity to observe. Hundreds and hundreds of classrooms because I ran a school of education for a long time so I observed teachers I was and am a teacher. Serve lots of students so I frequently see a lot of the phenomenon we've been talking about at play and one thing I have learned the hard way is that I cannot just walk into a classroom particularly when I have a position of power if I'm watching a student teacher or if I'm working with a colleague I cannot come in and say Did you know that you just violated all these gender norms I can gently and sometimes in my current role when I'm working with faculty I can point out that did you know you called on. 16 boys and 3 girls or did she have you considered adding an author to your syllabus that focuses on women's work and so on but I can't do it unbidden I have to be asked to serve the classroom currently and I also have learned really that if I just come in full barrel like like we're doing right now thank you for the effort to. Me right now that's right if if I come in that way I'm going to scare people so much I'm going to overwhelm them so much that none of the message is going to get through and nothing not even the smallest thing is going to change so I'm not sure I had one moment in a classroom. But I am hyper aware now and just trying to figure out how best to keep helping to change the situation which I suppose one of the the best blessings of having published a book is that I get to talk about all of these things that have been City. With me for the last decade the book is about a decade's worth of thought and work and at least allows me to begin or continue the conversation because it's a radical notion we haven't gotten there yet about what might be happening where where some men and boys might be going instead of college and so that part's pretty provocative as well and so it allows me to begin these conversations and thank goodness because otherwise I'd probably be driving everybody around me crazy Yeah well what were the conversations in your house like growing up. Well they were they weren't like this I mean in the sense that we didn't you know we didn't have conversations about being a feminist or about. Doing something radical but we did. My dad has the best work ethic I've ever seen he too was a college professor and so I saw him do every day go to work he was out of the door before 7 o'clock in the morning and he was in the department and just retired after 50 some odd years but he taught all of us that you worked hard and you were self-motivated then because being a college professor nobody's going to push you to do very much you have to do it yourself and so that lesson was was always there for us to look at it's fascinating because we really never had conversations about gender at all. I'm trying to think back and we didn't and so you know I'm a child of the sixty's and seventy's so I know Mary Tyler Moore died relatively recently and and I've seen so I've seen more episodes of her work on t.v. And I remember thinking that she was a great role model that she was independent and lived independently and had a job and I probably responded to a lot of very sort of upbringing by the media messages I got that it was a time when women could question things and so I sure I was listening to that carefully this is inflection point and learn share my guest is Nancy Mimi her book is called degrees of different. Your friends at k s j t want you to know the sunflower theater is a great space to hold your event from wanting receptions and business trainings to recitals and concerts the sunflower and its staff will work with you to make your event a success began your event booking at Sunflower theatre dot org. I learned Schiller and this is inflection point I'm talking with Nancy Mimi the director of faculty teaching initiatives at Yale So back to this question about what college can do for women and how and how and I just think of it in these terms like that the goalposts are shifting somehow that that by going to college we're not going to get as much out of having done that as we thought we would by virtue of the fact that men are finding other places to go get work but I still can't reconcile that with the fact that there are so many different kinds of jobs out there and college isn't for everyone so I mean is it really is it it's not really a problem that women are continuing to grow in numbers to him going to college and graduating from college that part's fine great is it is it really. Is absolutely yes so so where where is the pride is the problem it just once they get out who is actually being hired will have its I liken it to something I call an unfunded mandate for women that women. Have to go to college and have to pay for college in order to get to almost any place professionally not every place but almost any place professionally and that's great that we all I still I love college and love education but we as women almost have to do that to succeed and so that's happening even as not as many men of my hypothesis is correct. They don't have to do that not all of them they can succeed in other ways and other places and so as that is happening if the same pattern holds true college degrees may be coming less valuable because women are taking on more of them and so we have to keep having these to. In order just to make it as far as. Men who have little to no college education in terms of salary and in terms of status and in terms of impact and power so I really don't want to come away with and have anybody come away with a message that women should just stop going to college I just want us to question what's what we're doing when we get when we get the degree we need to be wide eyed I think and realistic that that alone isn't going to gain women the power that we think it will that we've got to still look at the other messages the other places like law and politics and all of the power that comes from those and other and the economy that we need to also take that education and then manifest it in making changes in those places too because they all work in tandem to create equity . So what kind of pushback are you getting from this book have you had some naysayers. I think more naysayers. Before I published the book it took a long time to get it published in part because I had to make the case that the hypothesis that I'm advocating might well be true so I had to come up with lots of data I spent years researching in order to convince a publisher that I would that it was worth publishing and I finally did but it took a lot of work to get there so that pushback came earlier on and I'm hoping now that that we're talking now that the book is out that I'm going to regret saying this but that I do get more pushback because the only way that this and other ideas is going to help us think is if we start talking about it more so I haven't gotten a lot of pushback yet. Has the book has been published but. I'm hoping to yeah. I love that way of thinking I'm trying to remember I'm just I'm chuckling a little bit that you were getting pushback in terms of getting it published and you know and push back on your hypothesis because I feel like since the time I was growing up also a child of the seventy's that there was a bumper sticker that said something like you know women have to work twice as hard to get to make half the pay so some of the ring any bells you. Know it's in the same line as Ginger did it backwards and high hand I also like why is this a shocker like. Thing that is hard to is hard to believe it's just been the safe with everything because I know I think I think it goes back to what I was saying earlier about this this belief that education is sacred and that exists in tandem with the well yes women are with their different roles for men and women in society so so we can have it both what we think we can have it both ways we really can't but I think that's why this comes as a shocker to a lot of people that wait a minute you're telling me that this isn't really true and how why course it's of course we all love education we should all just go to college. And we I think we many of us should not everybody you said you are right not everybody wants to needs to wish apprenticeships were much stronger I myself should not be trusted with more than a hammer for example but I think that they're great apprentice programs should be available to lots of people but. We need to keep talking about it because this is going to keep happening I think whether or not we talk about it and meanwhile more women are getting more degrees and going more into debt and fewer men are going to college and finding other ways to gain a lot of power and. I want men to have power but not more than we have power well maybe in the end this is how we actually get to the matriarchy. I'm there with you Yeah well what's this what's the best advice that you've ever been given about how to level the playing field. Well. I keep asking I'm the one who keeps asking for that advice I as we started the conversation I thought it how to level the playing field was going to be education that the and and I was wrong so I my my advice to myself has been to keep raising the issue to keep talking to keep questioning to keep being the voice of gender equity needs to be an issue and I did have I love this quote It's attributed to Catherine Aird who writes I think that's her pen name Katharine ared and she her real name is Kim Mackintosh but she said if I if you can't be a good example then you'll just have to be a horrible warning and I like that not because I want to be horrible but if I'm not going to create this perfect educational system that is great and will and will create equity like I thought I could and thought I was going to design then what I'll have to be continue to be is somebody who says think about gender think about the ways in which gender is valued and education is valued and that seems to be what I'm doing is to keep questioning to keep pushing and to to. Who was it in might have been Susan b. Anthony who has said that will not rest until all of us on the earth have equal rights and that's what I keep doing. Thank you so much for talking with me today thank you for asking it's been a pleasure. After talking with Nancy I found this quote from Charlotte with a Canadian. She said whatever women do they must do twice as well as men he thought half is dead. Clearly not much has changed. Here. But. You've got me thinking about what I can say when people. Look at the work you're. Passionate about. Thanks for that. Even though on the outside it looks like things are changing just look at the insidious ways in which society. How will this change we have to become aware of the. Institution. And show how it can be different. Like. This is inflection. Point for today is there. To hear from. Contribution. 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