A small federally funded industry now devotes itself to hectoring and badgering math, engineering and the hard sciences over supposed gender bias, but the evidence to back its contentions is thin [John Tierney, New York Times] Earlier here, here, here, etc.
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Yes we need the government to make us all equal. Harrison Bergeron lives!
Latest figures show that there is a larger percentage of women entering college than men. If all must be equal, should not acceptances be set at 50% each?
If all must be equal, should not acceptances be set at 50% each?
Of course not. Don’t you know that some are more equal than others?
To the progressive, equality doesn’t mean equality, and it doesn’t mean egalitarianism either. The progressive sees the world in terms of groups, not individuals, and sees some groups as being historically disadvantaged and others as over-privileged. “Equality”, to the progressive, is taking action to help historically disadvantaged groups, and to strip away the advantages of the over-privileged.
If, as a result of that action, the historically disadvantaged come to predominate numerically over the group that formerly was dominant, it doesn’t change the fact that the historically disadvantaged group still has a “history”, a “legacy” of victimhood to deal with and therefore is still seen by the progressive as being the underdog.
So, in education for example, the progressive doesn’t see any contradiction between believing that female college students face discrimination at the hands of the male elite, and the fact that females actually now make up the majority of the student body in almost every faculty. And that’s why they see the lack of women in science and technology as being a problem of discrimination, but don’t see the lack of men in history or English as a problem.
I find it hard to picture the government badgering math. It’s like fighting “terror”.
OK, I’ll try:
Fedzilla Agent: “You piss-ant parabola! You’re nothing but a two-bit, penny-ante 2nd-order function! You’re anti-derivative mother has only 2 zeros, and she wears combat boots. Your lazy, good for nothing, derivative daughter has has no curves, yet still hangs out near Times Square after midnight. Your welfare-supported 2nd-derivative grand-daughter is flat as a board and has no Daddy.!”
“Get a job. You think life is just a bowl of cherries and he can keep on rising as the square of your x-value? Gimme a break!”
OOPS:
WAS: “… and he can keep….”
S/B” ” … and you can keep …”
OOPS:
WAS: “You’re anti-derivative mother …”
S/B: ” Your anti-derivative mother …”
They’ll just take the Title IX approach to “fixing” this “problem”:
Sorry guys, since there are only 5 qualified and interested ladies who wish to study aerospace engineering at Big University this year, there will be only 5 gentlemen allowed to study said topic as well.
There…..”problem” fixed.
Civilization thrived when women stayed home and raised the kids. So I would rather see taxpayer money spent to restoring that natural, sustainable and superior arrangement.
In essence, this is a liberal war on science — a real one, not like the bogus and contrived Republican war on science made up by left-wing capitalism haters and junk-science advocates.
By the way, I used to handle Title IX enforcement at the Office for Civil Rights. It’s stupid to take regulatory standards designed for athletic teams, which are gender-segregated and thus sui generis, and apply them to co-ed science classes. (The Title IX athletics regulations are just that — regulations — not something mandated by the Title IX statute itself, much less commanded for all situations).
Liberal War on Science? Read around science blogs. See what actual scientists think rather than speculating. I’d say that if women are under represented in the sciences for cultural reasons, the problem is more likely the culture at large than the culture of the sciences, which limits their ability to do anything about it. I do agree that we rarely see this sort of concern about men being underrepresented in elementary education, for instance.
If they want to fix gender equality in science and engineering, they’re looking to the wrong example from sports. Instead they should be looking at the NFL and the Rooney rule. In brief, the NFL has many minority players, but very few minority head coaches. Since coaches are almost always former players, it looked pretty much like racism. So the NFL implemented a simple rule: whenever you hire a new head coach, you must interview at least one minority candidate. Simple enough and it seems to have raised the number of minority head coaches.
For science and engineering, it seems like it wouldn’t be to difficult to simply require that each university interview at least one woman candidate for any tenure track position. Not sure that would solve the problem, but it seems like a good start.
It would be nice to interview at least one female candidate, but what if none apply that have the minimum qualifications (such as phd and 2 years teaching experience)? It does happen.
I think as long as they can show they made a good faith active search for women candidates, it would be OK if they didn’t find any qualified to interview. That still serves the purpose of the rule which is to increase demand and make the increased demand public knowledge. Supply should follow shortly thereafter.
For “Ace of Sevens”:
I taught mathematics at Geneseo State in New York State around 1970. Geneseo was up to that time a school dedicated to the training of Elementary School teachers, a career dominated by women. In an effort to get more men into elementary school classrooms, entrance requirements were eased for male applicants. The dummies in my classes were the boys.
But when you got up to topology and advanced calculus, the boy – girl ratio was a bit higher than one to one and the girls were not quite as good as the boys. None was very good actually.