Men Miss Top Jobs?

This story from the Times raises a question about research in HE.

The basics are that analysis of the grades obtained by graduates from Russell Group universities show quite strongly that more 1sts and 2:1s are handed out in subjects that are largely done by women compared to those largely done by men (although it's hard to tell from the print edition, which is full of typos and mislabels an entire table).

This falls into the category of 'things the sector is sure it knew already', and that therefore seems to be a statement of the obvious. But the thing is that I hadn't actually seen in demonstrated so starkly before. That makes the research potentially useful - although it is badly undermined by choosing only the Russell Group. And that's the point of a lot of HE research that is missed by critics. There are an awful lot of things about the sector that 'everyone knows'. But, in fact, many of them have never been proven, and sometimes it turns out that they were never true in the first place.

The report (which we can't get at currently, because it's a commercial thing done by Real World) goes a bit too far, though, by claiming that it's leading to a clear disadvantage in the job market. I would suggest that's it's a bit more complex than that - there aren't many graduate shortages in the mainly female areas of arts and social sciences, but there certainly are in areas of engineering, dominated by men. And I suspect that the lower grades in sciences are partly because there are a lot of situations where there is an objectively right and wrong answer.

There are some pretty sensible quotes, with Darius Norell of RealWorld pointing out that grades don't measure the skills you need for employability, and Carl Gilleard of the AGR advising recruiters to look beyond the 2:1.

The point that's being missed, though, is that those employers who confine themselves solely to the Russell Group for their employees are not filtering by degree grade anyway. No - they're using A-level results, I'm afraid.

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