Women, it turns out, still prefer smart guys over jocks, according to this article in Insidehighered:

Lonely men ought to flaunt their copies of New Scientist. Women looking for both one-night stands and long-term relationships go for geniuses over dumb jocks, according to a new study of hundreds of university students.

“Women want the best of both worlds. Not only a physically attractive man, but somebody in the long term who can provide for them,” says Mark Prokosch, an evolutionary psychologist at Elon University in North Carolina, who led the study.

To many women, a smart man will appeal because he is likely to be clever enough to keep his family afloat. But he may also pass on “good” genes to his children, say Prokosch and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis.

Rather than ask women to rate qualities they seek in men, as other studies had done, Prokosch’s team asked 15 college men to perform a series of tasks on camera.

The volunteers read news reports, explained why they would be a good date, and what would be the ramifications of the discovery of life on Mars. They also threw and caught a Frisbee to parade their physical appeal. Each potential suitor also took a quantitative test of verbal intelligence.

Smart is sexy
More than 200 women watched a series of these videos before rating each man’s intelligence, attractiveness, creativity and appeal for a short-term or long-term relationship.

While the difference between short- and long-term mates may amount to a boozy decision students face each weekend, it has some evolutionary significance, Prokosch says. In potential husbands, women look for signs that a man might be a good provider and father. In one-night stands, women are on the prowl for little more than good genes, not to mention a good time.

Women proved to be decent judges of intelligence, with their scores generally matching each man’s intelligence test results.

As for picking a bed-mate, the men’s actual smartness proved a reliable indicator of their appeal for both brief hook-ups and serious relationships - which came as something of a surprise. Other studies have suggested that, for women anticipating short-term relationships, a man’s braininess isn’t foremost in their minds.

The disparate results may be due to women’s lack of awareness that intelligence also affects the attractiveness of candidates for quick flings - how intelligent women perceived a man to be influenced his desirability as a long-term mate much more than his appeal for a one-night stand.

In case you missed it, here’s the insightful op-ed that ran in Saturday’s WSJ by ABC News correspondent Claire Shipman (seen here) and BBC anchor Katty Kay. They’re tying the Palin job juggling challenge to their new book, “Womenomics: The Workplace Revolution that will change your life.”

 What makes this revolution possible is that it’s grounded in hard-core economics. Women are the hottest commodity in the hunt for talent.
We’re 58% of college graduates, we get graduate degrees in greater numbers than men. Companies are waking up to the fact that women are more than a politically correct nod to diversity. We help the bottom line. A recent 19-year study of 215 Fortune 500 firms found that companies that have more women in executive positions make more money. Companies with more women in senior management get higher valuations on the American Stock Exchange.
Overwhelmingly, women are using this professional clout to redefine work, not chain themselves to it. And companies, eager to keep us and terrified of the cost of replacing us, are responding. They’ve discovered that offering work-life balance actually increases productivity. There are accountants who get home at 3 p.m. every day but remain on the fast track. Top New York Law firms have part-time partners who are still players. Can investment banks be far behind?
This isn’t really about whether Mrs. Palin can do the job with five children. Will she do it all well? That depends on your yardstick, at least on the home front. How much time is “enough” with your children, or at work, is an extremely personal decision. The point is we now have reasonable options — it’s not all or nothing. Our mother’s generation may bemoan the fact that there is still a dearth of female CEOs, but our generation knows a big part of the reason why isn’t that we can’t get there, but that most of us don’t want to make the sacrifices necessary, as the jobs are now defined, to get there.

I can’t argue with their logic. In fact, I’d take it a bit farther. This is just one of the many changes that will play out as a result of women earning far more college degrees than men. The biggest change I see on the horizon is the “marriageable mate” dilemma black women have suffered with for years: Will women agree to marry a less educated man? For the most part, I’d say no, which will trigger changes far more dramatic than anything you’ll see unfolding in the workplace. 

…the 14,127 visitors (as of yesterday) to my humble blog who downloaded this  commentary I wrote for the Chronicle of Higher Education about what happens when campus gender imbalances push past the 60/40 mark. From what l can tell, the visitors have ranged from fathers worried about sending their daughters to gender imbalanced colleges to male college students wondering why they haven’t been able to capitalize on the “operational sex ratio.”

The interest in this confirms my long-held hunch that the “boy troubles” issue is moving beyond the K-12 years and into college and beyond. In future years, the key question will be whether women will adjust their well documented preference for marrying “above” them and instead settle for a mate of lesser education background. The key indicator will be the number of highly educated women who opt to remain childless or have children absent a husband.

We already know how that dilemma has played out among African American women, and we’re starting to get some clues about white women. This recent NYTimes article includes some intriguing numbers and observations, including this:

Women with advanced degrees are more likely to be childless, the study found. Of women 40 to 44 with graduate or professional degrees, 27 percent are childless, compared with 18 percent of women who did not continue their education beyond high school, the data show.

 So, to those visitors new to the topic, I welcome you and suggest you peruse the library to the right. For a good overall picture of where things are headed you might want to start with Jonathan Rauch’s “The Coming American Matriarchy.”

 This Sunday’s Outlook section of the WPost carried a commentary by black female attorney Sophia A. Nelson, pictured here, who also heads an organization for African American professional women. Pointing to recent travails undergone by Michelle Obama, Nelson writes:

Welcome to our world.

We’ve watched with a mixture of pride and trepidation as the wife of the first serious African American presidential contender has weathered recent campaign travails — being called unpatriotic for a single offhand remark, dubbed a black radical because of something she wrote more than 20 years ago and plastered with the crowning stereotype: “angry black woman.” And then being forced to undergo a politically mandated “makeover” to soften her image and make her more palatable to mainstream America.

In some ways, writes Nelson, black professional women have it rougher than the men:

A 2007 American Bar Association report titled “Visible Invisibility” describes how black women in the legal profession face the “double burden” of being both black and female, meaning that they enjoy none of the advantages that black men gain from being male, or that white women gain from being white.

Interesting argument. But near the end of the piece, Nelson trips over her own logic:

For all our success in the professional world, we have paid a significant price in our private and emotional lives. A life of preordained singleness (by chance, not by choice) is fast becoming the plight of alarming numbers of professional black women in America. The fact is that the more money and education a black woman has, the less likely she is to marry and have a family.

Consider these stunning statistics: As of 2007, according to the New York Times, 70 percent of professional black women were unmarried. Black women are five times more likely than white women to be single at age 40. In 2003, Newsweek reported that there are more black women than black men (24 percent to 17 percent) in the professional-managerial class. According to Department of Education statistics cited by the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, black women earn 67 percent of all bachelor’s degrees awarded to blacks, as well as 71 percent of all master’s degrees and 65 percent of all doctoral degrees.

 Please do consider those stunning statistics. What those numbers reveal is that when compared to black men, black women are hugely successful, which is why so many find themselves single — they have no “marriageable mate,” someone of comparable education and career attainment to marry.

In my previous post, I wrote about the sometimes-twisted social relationships at a (mostly white) university where the gender imbalances had pushed past 60% female. To date, the evidence of a marriageable mate issue among white women is anecdotal, but given the rising gender imbalances in college there’s every reason to assume that at some point the marriageable mate dilemma — exactly what Nelson and other black professional women know all too well – will reach measurable levels among whites.

For more on this issue, visit the “social consequences” category in the library on the right column.

My commentary running today on the back cover of the Chronicle of Higher Education takes an unvarnished look at what can happen to the campus social scene when the female/male imbalance passes 60% female. That’s the gender imbalance campus admissions officers fear most, the threshold where you can feel a palpable difference on campus. What this means to the campus social scene is guaranteed to make parents of college-bound girls cringe a bit

Moving past 60% at some point triggers what biologists refer to as the operational sex ratio, which in the animal kingdom refers to the changes in mating habits that occur when one sex outnumbers the other. Humans are not immune, including college campuses.

Fyi: By the year 2015, the average graduating class from four-year colleges will be 60%. Trying to maintain healthy relationships between the sexes is one reason so many college admissions officers quietly grant admissions preferences to men (not that they would call them preferences. Rather, they draw large, overlapping circles to explain an admission policy that, in the end, favors men and discriminates against women). See my previous Chronicle commentary on that subject.

To date, this blog has focused mostly on what I see as the drivers behind this trend, boys falling behind in elementary school, never making up the lost ground and going to college at lower rates than girls. Gradually, however, I see the posts shifting more to the social impact of an education gap in the adult world — the search for “marriageable mates.”

(For more on that issue, sift through the “social consequences” and “college years” categories in the right column.)