(
)
It was a 1992 Barbie doll who accurately reminded us, “Math class is tough!” So hard that even a man with two Ivy League degrees, President Obama, is stumbling over the basics. The president seems to think that women can hold half the places in some fields of study — and a majority in the rest.
Almost completely unnoticed, the Obama administration announced amid a celebration of the 40th anniversary of Title IX on June 20 that, starting next year (right after November’s victory in the War on Women, of course), Title IX “guidelines,” previously an instrument for punishing male athletes for liking sports more than women, will suddenly and bizarrely be applied to math and science classes.
Reuters reported, in a placid but cheery tone, that the new policy will “include the Department of Education broadening data collection in public schools for more accurate analysis of the gender and minority gaps in enrollment, graduation rates and in science classes.”
The report continued, “New guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges to help institutions comply with Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.”
Such soothing banalities. Such nice-sounding words. Allow me to rewrite them in plain English.
Public schools are hereby ordered to meticulously log and report to a federal officer (in the interest of “broadening data collection”) the gender breakdown of their math and science classes. Virtually all public and private colleges (“grant-receiving universities”) will be held to a new standard.
If federal officials think your classes are too male-dominated, the government will order you to put more women in them (“help you to comply with Title IX rules”) until it likes the ratio.
Punishment for failure to obey will be severe (nice federal funding you have there — it’d be a shame if anything happened to it).
“While we’ve made some progress in closing the gender gap . . . at the higher-level classes,” explained Education Secretary Arne Duncan, “we still see underrepresentation of young girls, and we have to improve upon that going forward.”
Who says “under-representation” is anything to be worried about? Sixty-nine percent of psychologists are women. Do we need to address the psychologists’ gender gap? Sixty-one percent of veterinarians are women. And like their best-known ex-colleague, Michele Bachmann, 74% of tax examiners are women. Not every profession can be at least half-female unless every profession is required to be exactly half-female.
It sometimes seems as if liberals cannot rest until they have fixed things so that every subgroup of Americans, no matter how small or specialized, mirrors the overall demographics of the country. If affirmative action applied to professional sports (the last true meritocracy), the Knicks would have to fire two-thirds of their team and hire six white Christians, a couple of Latinos and a Jew.
Imagine (I know, this is a stretch) a Stanford advanced electrical-engineering class that consists entirely of men. How are you going to get women to turn up at and remain there? Handcuffs? Harvard would turn into “50 Shades of Crimson.”
And what will you do with the men you must bounce to make way for them? Banish them to veterinary school?
There isn’t gender parity in some of these classes because that is what women have chosen. They might be more inclined to study language or journalism or biology or medicine. You can’t put more female students in the engineering classroom unless you take them away from other majors — the ones they like without any “guidelines” from Washington.
Female students often protest they want the government to stay away from their bodies; how about their minds?
“A mountain of published research stretching back a hundred years,” says psychologist and author Susan Pinker, “shows that women are far more likely than men to be deeply interested in organic subjects — people, plants and animals — than they are to be interested in things and inanimate systems, such as electrical engineering, or computer systems.”
Gender politics has no place in the study of math and science. There’s no feminist perspective on pi. (Yet — but I’m sure Oberlin is working on it.) There’s no Old Boy Network guarding the secrets of polynomials. You either get the right answer and advance, or you don’t.
Besides, the “problem” of gender imbalance is already fading without additional federal intervention. In the Lisa Simpson generation, female interest in science has skyrocketed. MIT’s latest entering class was 45% female, 32% in the graduate school. The percentage of Ph.D.s in math and science awarded to women has risen from 11% to about 40% in the last 40 years, reports the National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education.
Moreover, notes Hans Bader of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, several federal courts have ruled that applying quotas or gender ratios to education rather than sports is unconstitutional under the Equal Protection clause of the 14th Amendment.
Most importantly, women already compose 57% of the student body at American universities.
“President Obama celebrated the fact that 25% fewer men than women graduate from college, calling it a ‘great accomplishment’ for America,” notes CEI’s Bader. Yet Obama “lamented the fact that a smaller gender disparity — 17% fewer women attending college than men — had once existed before Title IX was implemented.”
Once in college, what classes women choose to take is no business of President Obama’s. Feminism isn’t supposed to be about being steered to this or that choice by some overseeing (dare I say paternal?) authority.
Nor should women who genuinely excel at math and science, and choose career paths in those fields, welcome gender affirmative action that might forever cast a shadow of doubt on whether they achieved their standing via merit or thanks to the cosseting “help” of a kindly government that placed its overcoat over every puddle in her path and made sure she rode sidesaddle her entire life.