Education and culture

Education applies a simple double standard. When girls underperform, institutions look for barriers, bias, and missing support. When boys underperform, the explanation quickly becomes personal: lazy, incapable, unmotivated, unwilling to learn.

The girl faces a system. The boy is the problem.

In Russia, that rhetorical asymmetry becomes a legal one. The state places an extra obstacle in front of men, produces a female majority in universities, and continues to build targeted support for women.

When education turns into research, the work becomes male-majority again.

A man must first avoid conscription

Russia imposes compulsory military service on men. Article 24 of Federal Law No. 53-FZ grants a deferment to qualifying full-time students. Education is therefore not only education for a man. It is also legal protection from the draft.

Fail to enter immediately. Lose a place. Interrupt study for too long. Lose the deferment. For a woman, this is an educational delay. For a man, it can mean a compulsory year away and no return to university.

The effect is measurable. A peer-reviewed study of Russia’s 2007–2008 conscription reform found that affected men were approximately 12% less likely to graduate from higher education.

The state removes some men from the education pipeline and then treats the resulting female majority as uncomplicated progress.

Women are already the university majority

Official Russian data shows women with higher educational attainment and a female majority among university students in many regions. Women were 54.4% of university students in Karelia and 52.5% in Novosibirsk Oblast. In some fields, the female share exceeds 60%.

Higher education is no longer a male domain. Men are a minority in the overall student population while women remain underrepresented only in particular technical fields.

Yet through 2024, Russia’s Ministry of Science and Higher Education ran a federal Women: Mentoring School for female students, postgraduate students, and young researchers. Men were included only when the programme was opened to both sexes in 2025.

A female majority did not end female-targeted support. A male minority did not immediately qualify men for equal access.

Then those men are called unsuitable

Educational failure has an adult price. Women move up through education and work while an old expectation survives: a husband should at least not drag her down.

Daniel Lichter and colleagues compared men resembling the husbands actually chosen by demographically similar women with the unmarried men those women could realistically meet. The “synthetic husbands” were markedly stronger on income, employment, and education than the available male pool.¹

That creates an ugly loop. First male underperformance is treated as the boys’ own failure. Later the same men are called undereducated, unsuccessful, or poor marriage material. Then falling couple formation is discussed as if the men simply vanished.

They did not vanish. Many were written off earlier.

Universities are female-majority. Research is male-majority

The paradox continues after graduation.

According to the ministry, women were 58% of university teaching staff but only about 40% of researchers. Women were 42% of Candidates of Sciences and 27% of Doctors of Sciences.

The structure is clear:

• students and teaching staff are already female-majority;
• research remains male-majority;
• the highest academic degree is even more heavily male.

The claim that women simply do not work in their field is too broad and is not supported by the available sex-specific data. The documented paradox is cleaner: a female majority earns degrees and occupies teaching posts, but does not become a female majority among researchers.

Men perform most research work. Their majority at the end of the pipeline is described as a problem for women, while their minority at the entrance is barely treated as a problem at all.

The system’s paradox

A man receives:

• underperformance explained as his own defect;
• a sex-specific military duty capable of interrupting education;
• dependence on an uninterrupted deferment;
• minority status among university students;
• little targeted support when that minority appears.

A woman receives:

• underperformance explained through systemic barriers;
• majority status among students;
• majority status among teaching staff;
• dedicated mentoring and advancement programmes;
• protected-group status where men perform most research work.

Institutions search for barriers when women fall behind and character flaws when men do. The state then creates a real male barrier at entry, overlooks the male deficit in universities, relies on male work in research, and still describes education as a system of male privilege.

Notes

1. Daniel T. Lichter, Joseph P. Price, Jeffrey M. Swigert, Mismatches in the Marriage Market, Journal of Marriage and Family, 2020. The authors construct “synthetic husbands” for unmarried women from the characteristics of husbands of comparable married women and compare them with actually available unmarried men. The paper documents a marriage-market mismatch; the link to male educational outcomes is this project’s editorial inference, not the authors’ causal claim.