Do you remember when Lawrence Summers, the President of Harvard University was drummed off of campus for speculating as to why fewer women than men succeed in math and science careers?   Radical women went apoplectic.  Now, these radical women are saying that it's true that women don't succeed in those careers and that the cause is sexism, and that can only be cured by applying the same Title IX rules to careers as applies to making men and women equal in college sports. 

Read up on it so that you'll understand why, one day, we must have a woman President to balance out the men.  (Oh, wait.)  And, oh yes, you also should be forcing young girls to play with trucks--no kidding. 

Women earn most of America’s Ph.D.’s, but they lag in the physical sciences. Beware of plans to fix the ‘problem. 

By Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. March/April, 2008 Issue of "The American"

(Excerpts) Why, in fact, are there so few women in the high echelons of academic math and in the physi­cal sciences?

Women now earn 57 percent of bachelors degrees and 59 percent of masters degrees. (But, women) comprise just 19 percent of tenure-track professors in math, 11 percent in physics, 10 percent in computer science, and 10 percent in electrical engineering.

Debra Rolison, a physical chemist at the Naval Research Laboratory..., who describes herself as an “uppity woman,” has a solution.  ...(Click on "more" to continue) 

Authored by Woody

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A popular anti–gender bias lecturer, she gives talks with titles like “Isn’t a Millennium of Affirmative Action for White Men Sufficient?” She wants to apply Title IX to science education. Title IX, the celebrated gender equity provision of the Education Amendments Act of 1972, has so far mainly been applied to college sports. But the measure is not limited to sports. It provides, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex...be denied the benefits of...any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.”

While Title IX has been effective in promoting women’s participation in sports, it has also caused serious damage, in part because it has led to the adoption of a quota system. Over the years, judges, Department of Education officials, and college administrators have interpreted Title IX to mean that women are entitled to “statistical proportionality.” That is to say, if a college’s student body is 60 percent female, then 60 percent of the athletes should be female—even if far fewer women than men are interested in playing sports at that college. But many athletic directors have been unable to attract the same proportion of women as men. To avoid government harassment, loss of fund­ing, and lawsuits, they have simply eliminated men’s teams.

On October 17, 2007, a subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Technology convened to learn why women are “underrepresented” in academic professorships of science and engineering and to consider what the federal government should do about it.

As a rule, women tend to gravitate to fields such as education, English, psychology, biol­ogy, and art history, while men are much more numerous in physics, mathematics, computer science, and engineering. Why this is so is an interesting question—and the subject of a sub­stantial empirical literature. The research on gender and vocation is complex, vibrant, and full of reasonable disagreements; there is no single, simple answer.

There were, however, no disagreements at the congressional hearing. All five expert wit­nesses, and all five congressmen, Democrat and Republican, were in complete accord. They attributed the dearth of women in university science to a single cause: sexism.

The first witness was Donna Shalala, president of the University of Miami and secretary of health and human services in the Clinton administration. She had chaired the “Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering”....  At the hearing, Shalala warned that strong measures would be needed to improve the “hostile climate” women face in the academy. This “crisis,” as she called it, “clearly calls for a transformation of academic institutions….Our nation’s future depends on it.” 

Shalala and other speakers called for rigorous application of Title IX and other punitive measures. Witness Freeman Hrabowski, president of the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, stressed the need to threaten obstinate faculties with loss of funding: “People listen to money…. Make the people listen to the money talk!” 

(The) proposed solutions assume a prob­lem that might not exist. During her presidential campaign, Hillary Clinton has noted that “women comprise 43 percent of the workforce but only 23 percent of scientists and engineers” and insists that government take “diversity into account when awarding educa­tion and research grants.”

The research emphasizing the importance of biological differences in determining women’s and men’s career choices is not decisive, but it is serious and credible. So the question arises: How have so many officials at the NSF and NAS and so many legislators been persuaded that we are facing a science cri­sis that Title IX enforcement and gender-bias workshops can resolve?

To achieve a gender-fair society, Valian advocates a concerted attack on conventional gender schemas. This includes altering the way we raise our children. Consider the custom of encouraging girls to play with dolls. ...“Egalitarian parents can bring up their children so that both boys and girls play with dolls and trucks....  From the standpoint of equality, nothing is more important.”

But what if our daughters are not especially interested in trucks, as almost any parent can attest (including me: when my son recently gave his daughter a toy train to play with, she placed it in a baby carriage and covered it with a blanket so it could get some sleep)? a problem, says Valian.

Valian may be a leader in the equity-in-sci­ence movement, but she is not an empirical thinker.

This is a quiet revolution. Its weapons are government reports that are rarely seen; amendments to federal bills that almost no one reads; small, unnoticed, but dramatically con­sequential changes in the regulations regarding government grants; and congressional hearings attended mostly by true believers.

American scientific excellence is a precious national resource. It is the foundation of our economy and of the nation’s health and safety. ...Will an academic science that is quota-driven, gender-balanced, cooperative rather than competitive, and less time-consuming produce anything like these results? So far, no one in Congress has even thought to ask.

I guess we need to start teaching our boys to stop watching sports and spend more time shopping at the malls--in the name of fairness, which actually is nonsense.  We could fix the math and science numbers if only more men would forego those subjects and major in art history.  Thank you, liberals, and thank you, government.

Men and women are different, which confounds the liberals as much as Professor Higgins - "Why Can't a Woman Be More Like a Man?"

Let's accept the differences and leave them like that.

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