Grad school for boys and girls

The manifestos against going to humanities grad school (which, like those against the skinny-models, are eternal) are often guilty of not differentiating between funded programs and non-, well-ranked ones and less so. But another angle they leave out, and that I hadn't really thought about until reading Matt Feeney's recent post and its comments, is gender. What difference does it make if the 22-year-old choosing between doctoral programs and whatever else is a man or a woman?

The 'plus' of being around undergrads that Feeney alludes to, then explains outright, is obviously somewhat gender-specific, as in, the presence of 19-year-old boys is of no particular advantage to most mid-20s straight women. Feeney writes of meeting his wife "when my dissertation was already finished... when she was a senior." This is not a situation I could imagine any of my female classmates finding themselves in. That said, the drawback of "'being poor through your late twenties'" (Feeney quoting a commenter) is probably a lot less pronounced for women than men. The market for well-read women who can make intelligent cocktail party chit-chat but who don't do anything that sounds too intimidating career-wise (and when I tell anyone what I study, and what my boyfriend does, take a guess whether it's French or astrophysics that gets the stunned silence) is surely greater than for our male equivalents. If the argument against humanities grad school is that it's basically a type of finishing-school, then that's in a sense an argument for grad school for women in urban areas looking to meet rich, possibly older, men.

Then there's the question of fertility, which for women we've decided ends at 21. Or, even if we're going with 35, grad school is reputed to keep women hostage till that age. Does being a grad student make marriage/kids in one's mid-20s less of an option? Or (as I suspect) is it just that the sort of people who go to grad school are the types who go to PhD programs are not typically the sort interested in either that young, or at all? Because plenty of couples are starting families on household incomes the same as mine without this being even a tiny bit tragic. If we the childless 26-year-old humanities grad students list income among the reasons we don't have kids, it's mainly because the people we know with kids make more than we do, either because they're already profs or because they work in a different field, and we associate having kids with already having a particular standard of living. And... if you're a girl grad-student who's parlayed your sophisticated non-intimidatingness into a hedge-fund beau, problem solved, assuming you're not dead set on taking that tenure-track job half a country away from Wall Street and are OK with teaching high school on the Upper East Side.

Then there's the question of ego. In my limited experience of the world, those who enter grad school imagining a future of tenure, wood-paneling, and nubile acolytes, those who enter grad school because It Is Their Calling, because they are Intellectuals, these are in virtually all cases men. On the one hand, having this attitude towards grad school makes you an annoyance to fellow grad students, and leads to severe disappointment when The Job they are owed isn't there. But! It probably helps in terms of getting through grad school not to dwell too much on the Plan Bs. But! It helps, if you're not actually a genius, not to go through life convinced you are one, and since most of us, male and female alike, are nothing of the sort, here, women may have the advantage.