Why skipping college can be feminist

Another way to think about the motherhood wage gap in greedy careers

Recently Palantir tweeted the announcement in the picture below, which got a lot of people mad. The post has clear political undertones, inflammatory language and it’s quite hyperbolic, so I will not pretend I agree with everything it says. I think college admissions are still mostly meritocratic, for example. But, overall, I think the idea of exploring alternative ways of getting into high-end careers for talented teens is a very good one — and dare I say, a feminist one? Now, this might sound strange at first, but please bear with me! This is not a long post and I hope that by the end of it, the logic of why allowing access to high-end careers to non-college graduates might be beneficial to everyone, but especially for women, will become more clear.

I would also like to add I do not know if *this specific internship* is perfectly designed, but the good thing about it is that it widens the Overton window of what is currently possible. More companies could offer schemes that would allow access to what one might consider “high-end, prestigious jobs” to exceptional high school students without college degrees. And the companies in question do not have to be Palantir — they can be NVIDIA or Microsoft or Facebook. The ideal scenario would be one where different companies would try variations on the theme: for example, for those who got a job offer, one could imagine the company paying for some necessary training in parallel to doing the job (e.g. it’s probably hard to learn advanced Math entirely “on the go”). The point is that such experimentation is welcome and relatively low cost — it’s not like an internship at 18 will set back anyone forever and it’s probably going to be at the very least an interesting experience.

Ok… but how is this feminist?

---

I have been spending the past month going on about how we need to invest more in science that would extend women’s fertility window and how this should be a central tenet of modern feminism. This would allow more women to achieve two things that are currently at odds to some extent: success in “greedy careers” and motherhood. I have written about this originally at Works in Progress and then had follow-up articles on the topic here and here. The core of the argument, which many who have read my pieces already know, is that one’s 30s are at the moment decisive in a lot of prestigious careers that are demanding of one’s time, including business, law, medicine or science. At the same time, this is also the period when women’s fertility starts to decline, putting them in a race against time when it comes to achieving their goals.

Allowing women freedom to choose to have kids later with a high degree of certainty is one way of going around this. But there is another way, which could be done in parallel, and would benefit both women *and* men. That is working from the other end and wasting less of young people’s time, such that by their mid-30s, women (and men) are more advanced in their careers. It’s something I mentioned in a previous article:

Anyway, why do one’s 30s matter so much? Some of it might be societal, or the way we set up our institutions. Indeed, Dr. Arpit Gupta made the clever observation that we should do the following things as a society:

1. early graduation from high school

2. 3 rather than 4 year BA degrees

3. major in law or medicine up front; rather than in professional school

4. social shift to promote the young

A worrying trend in society has been that of credentialism and what many call “elite overproduction”. This has naturally been accompanied by a general increase in the age at which young people can expect to get promoted and reach various career milestones. For example, the age of getting a first R01 grant (which signals independence in a biomedical science career) in the NIH has been steadily increasing for the last decades:

Apart from a bunch of other negative social impacts, including on the science itself (which I discuss here), this also affects women in particular, because timelines to promotion clash even more starkly with their fertility windows! This is something almost nobody talks about, but as I also highlight in a previous post:

I wish I would have graduated much earlier from high school. I wish I would have started doing research instead of just going to uni courses much earlier. And so on. In fact, if I were to complain about how society “has wronged me as a woman”, it would be that it has treated my limited “fertility time” with extreme disregard. At each step of the way I was encouraged to “be patient”, do more training, told that “things will figure themselves out”, even when I wanted and could have speedrun through things. So I fully support Arpit Gupta’s proposals (which would be good for men too, not just women)!

Internships schemes like those proposed by Palantir play into Dr Gupta’s agenda. To be clear: they would not work for everyone. I am talking here about very talented high school graduates. But these are already the kind of graduates most likely to choose greedy careers anyway, so my argument is consistent. Imagine a precocious girl who gets to work on actual science at the age of 18 instead of 24! This would give her a 6 year advance that could prove quite valuable later on, when she decides to start a family.

This isn’t an outlandish proposition, and we already have real-world examples to prove it. Take Laura Deming and my friend, Lada Nuzhna, for instance—both left college thanks to Thiel Fellowships and have gone on to become prominent figures in the aging field. Laura Deming is a founder of one of the first Venture Capital firms that focuses on aging, The Longevity Fund, has done a lot in general for the field and now has her own company focused on cryopreservation! Meanwhile, Lada spearheaded and led Impetus Grants, distributing $34 million to aging-related research projects with an impressively fast turnaround—decisions in under three weeks—while prioritizing innovative ideas over credentials. In other words, funding high-risk high-reward projects and taking bets on relatively unknown researchers. Some of the projects funded have already demonstrated remarkable success. Lada herself has also started a stealth-mode company in the aging space.

This is not for everyone — and not all women will benefit from these. But I think it is worth taking young people’s time more seriously as a society and allowing those who are very talented to exploit their talents in unconventional ways! This would benefit everyone and women in particular.

As a side-note, this is not at all in my interest to say. I graduated with a degree from Oxford and also have just submitted a PhD thesis: it is in my direct interest to defend credentialism, not criticize it.