DSpar wants you – to live in a non-sexist society!

Bwog’s favorite strong, bold, and beautiful president (sorry Prezbo) published an opinion piece in the Washington Post on Thursday regarding the experience of women in higher education and in its effects on their experience in the work place–specifically the lingering pay-gap between them and their male counterparts. President Spar reminds us that, even though it might be easy to imagine the university as a beautiful world of gender equality, this is generally 1) not the case once we pull back the curtain of safe spaces, PGPs, and co-educational mystique and 2) certainly not how things are beyond our big iron gates.

Out there the reality is pay gaps and glass ceilings, which Spar argues take root in the  the approach to education of our very own elite institutions of higher education. DSpar credits The Athena Center (obvs) and the program Mentor it Forward as being steps in the right direction, but when things like this are lying just beneath the surface you’ve got to wonder whether or not it’s enough. Her take on it?

We don’t need to become trade schools, or demand that every undergraduate take courses in accounting or marketing. But we should offer our students more exposure to the real skills they will eventually need. We should make practical courses in areas such as finance or negotiation more widely available, even if not for academic credit. And we should be urging more young women who continue to shy away from math, engineering and computer science to go into these high-growth, high-paying fields of study.

Read the article for yourself, put it in the context of her other recent writings, and sound off in the comments below.