The societal pressure placed on men to earn enough to be a provider or at least earn more than their partners causes men to assign a higher weight to ROI when evaluating pursuing higher education.
Anecdata: I have no degree, my company will pay for me to get anything up to the PhD level - I have little interest in this because I don't see it increasing my earning potential vs investing the same amount of time in progressing my career or looking for a new job.
EDIT: I have a second conjecture too now that I think of it - increased levels of education and career progression for women puts a sort of "floor" on whether getting an education is worth it all for some men since even after investing the effort they're at or below the income levels of their potential partners. I don't know enough about the effect income disparity has on partner selection to put much stock in this but maybe it's a thing?
>The societal pressure placed on men to earn enough to be a provider or at least earn more than their partners causes men to assign a higher weight to ROI when evaluating pursuing higher education.
It's biological to some degree. Female sexual selection prefers status, so any sort of signaling of status in society will encourage competition and put pressure to select for the ability to signal said traits. Sure it's 'society' that makes status == money, but I think any society that uses money will defer to that.
Due to various complex reasons, on average more men than women treat income as a strong "hygiene factor" and are more eager to abandon fields that are nice in other aspects but have weak pay in favor of less respected jobs with larger pay. For example, if some high-skill/high-education profession starts earning less than taxi drivers or construction workers, then a larger proportion of men than women would abandon that respected high-education career and start driving taxis or painting walls to ensure better pay, causing or increasing a gender imbalance in that job. So I would expect that the decision to abandon their studies just because PhDs become less useful for generating income would be (on average) somewhat correlated with gender.
I know two stay-at-home moms working on PhDs. If your family earns enough money it’s a way to be a stay-at-home parent (of sorts) without the giant resume gap. Or at least with a “justifiable” resume gap.
