There's a WaPo article going around titled "Trump’s attack on DEI may hurt college men, particularly White men" The basic thrust of it is that women are considerably more likely to apply to (elite) colleges than men, and moreover women have for some time now outperformed men on the "traditional" metrics of collegiate qualification (grades and standardized test scores). Anybody in the know knows that colleges seeking to maintain some measure of gender parity in their admitted classes have put their thumbs on the scale in pursuit of qualified men. But the Trump anti-DEI initiatives nominally prohibit such behavior, meaning that if "meritocratic" admissions policies yield overwhelmingly female classes, well, that's the way it'll have to be.
This headline, unsurprisingly, has yielded no small amount of schadenfreude among liberal observers -- once again, Trump's leopards eat the faces of his loyal supporters. But to that there's been another response from more conservative voices challenging the framing: if Trump's anti-DEI measures "hurt men", then it must mean that the prior pro-DEI measures "hurt women". As a colleague at another school put it after making this point: "Everyone fine with that?"
That was a rhetorical question, of course. But I think answering it earnestly might yield some insight.
Assume we buy the basic premise here: DEI helps men and hurts women; anti-DEI hurts men and helps women. The punch of the Post's article stems, I think, from two following observations:
- Many conservative initiatives aimed at propping up men who are underperforming on traditional metrics do not, on face, comport with "anti-DEI" principles (and their conservative proponents don't seem to realize this); and
- Many feminists and women who support DEI initiatives do so notwithstanding the fact that men may be among their primary beneficiaries.
Both of these observations deserve a deeper dive.
Start with the first. Again, it is an open secret that colleges have been putting their thumbs on the scale to help bring in more male applicants and matriculants. Sometimes their rationales are pure sexism -- Chris Rufo, for instance, admitted that many of his "reforms" at the New College were expressly designed to reduce the number of women who enrolled (comments which, I'll repeat, really should be smoking gun evidence of sex discrimination in the event of a lawsuit). More broadly, there is a cottage industry of conservative pundits pushing the line that society discriminates against men, is structured to disadvantage men, does not adequately value the contributions of men, and these injustices are what explains men's seeming underperformance. The "thumb on the scale" is actually a mechanism to compensate for these deeper inequalities.
Now, sometimes these accounts are, as in the Rufo case, simple misogyny. But I don't want to say it's always wrong to look at gendered barriers men might face and think of ways to counteract or ameliorate them. The problem, though, is that these narratives of male disenfranchisement and the earnest efforts to reverse them are no different in form from the "DEI" logic conservatives claim to abhor -- problematizing disparities in outcomes that, on a superficial level, appear explainable by "merit" and instead treating the disparity itself as a problem needing remediation. A few weeks ago, I saw a Facebook post where the University of Chicago announced that all the EiCs of its law journals were women. An alum replied angrily that this outcome must be the product of DEI and "wokeness", because statistically what are the odds that women would occupy all the top journal roles? I snickered at this, because her jeremiad was actually a cry for proportional representation; the hitherto conservative boogeyman roundly mocked when it is used to demonstrate bias against women or minorities. But of course when it's men who fall on the wrong side of the line, then statistical underrepresentation is smoking gun proof of a Capital-P Problem. The inconsistency is glaring.
So the first observation really does just boil down to sexism -- though sometimes with a few extra steps. What of the second? The logic that, if you're giving a leg up to men for scarce admissions slots there are some marginal women who would be admitted but now will not be, certainly has purchase. And so one could understand if women, or feminist advocates, reacted strongly against such programs as tantamount to sex discrimination against women. Yet observationally, this doesn't seem to be the case. Some women, no doubt, oppose these initiatives, but it does not seem like women or feminists by and large are opposed to collegiate initiatives aimed at propping up the number of male students in attendance. What do we derive from that?
It seems that, contra the bald assertion that DEI programs must inherently be understood as injuring the class that is not the direct beneficiary, in at least some cases the overrepresented group does not perceive such programs as harmful or injurious to their interests. Perhaps they, too, take on a broader view of how colleges ought to assess "merit" than just grades and test scores. Perhaps they think the various programs targeted at men genuinely are ameliorating gendered blind spots in who and what we value as a society. Or perhaps they simply don't prefer to attend colleges that are overwhelmingly homogenous, even (or especially) when they're the in-group (one can certainly understand why at least some women -- at least those enrolling in coeducational institutions -- might not prefer a university student body that's 66%+ female). Whatever the reason, it seems that many women do not see the issue the way conservatives believe they should (or must).
Here, I'm reminded of a post I wrote in 2018 about Gail Heriot, who was arguing that feminists should oppose the ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. Heriot's contention was that feminists support many sex-conscious programs, but the ERA -- if interpreted in parallel with the Fourteenth Amendment's Equal Protection Clause to demand a "sex-blind" constitution -- would strike most of these programs down. From this, she saw only two possibilities: either feminists don't actually support the ERA, or they don't actually care if these sex-conscious programs survive. I pointed out that Heriot seemed to entirely miss Door #3: feminists don't understand the meaning of "equality" in the ERA's text to preclude all sex-conscious programs. If the same people who support the ERA also support sex-conscious initiatives, that's strong evidence that the apparent public meaning of the ERA's "equality" language is not sex-blindness. Yet Heriot seemingly just could not process that the people might understand "equality" different from the prevailing conservative ideological predilections -- a pretty searing indictment of originalism in practice, when you think about it.
So to answer my colleague's question earnestly: while no, not everyone is "fine" with colleges making conscious efforts to try and bring in more men, many people are, including many women and many feminist advocates. They are fine with it for many reasons, ranging from their own desire to attend schools that are relatively sex-balanced, to an earnest belief that there might be certain gendered barriers to men (or certain men) pursuing higher education that a college can justly try to mitigate. I'm not saying this view is necessarily correct, but we have to take seriously that it seems to be one many people hold, even if it doesn't comport with a particular, conservative vision of how we all "should" understand equality, meritocracy, and the virtues or vices of "DEI" programs.
