Obama Takes His Wrecking Ball to US Science & Technology

Since its founding, the US has been a fertile ground for scientific and technological innovation. Increasingly over the past century and a half, the US economy has been driven by scientific and technological discoveries and advances. Still, it would be quite easy for bad government policies to change all of that.

Science and technology are male-dominated areas in the US and in virtually any other nation in the world. There is a good reason for the male preponderance in math, the hard sciences, and the technological occupations. But US feminists are unhappy about this "gender imbalance," and they want President Obama to do something about it.

Quotas limiting the number of male students in science may be imposed by the Education Department in 2013. The White House has promised that “new guidelines will also be issued to grant-receiving universities and colleges” spelling out “Title IX rules in the science, technology, engineering and math fields.” These guidelines will likely echo existing Title IX guidelines that restrict men’s percentage of intercollegiate athletes to their percentage in overall student bodies, thus reducing the overall number of intercollegiate athletes.

Obama hinted that Title IX quotas would soon come to engineering and techology, saying that “Title IX isn’t just about sports,” but also about “inequality in math and science education” and “a much broader range of fields, including engineering and technology. _OpenMarket

In American universities, science, math, and technology departments are relatively free of the leftist indoctrination which pervades most other departments and divisions of modern universities. If feminists can get their man Obama to bring those recalcitrant and untamed departments under control, they will have a virtual lock on all areas of the university -- faculty, staff, and students.

The fact that fewer women than men major in science and engineering is the result of their own voluntary choices, not sexism or sex discrimination by schools, notes researcher John Rosenberg, the proud father of a daughter who got a Ph.D. from CalTech. My daughter is bright, and I’d be happy if she got a graduate degree in engineering (or became a physicist, like her grandfather), but I can’t force her to do that if she doesn’t want to, and a college shouldn’t be deemed liable for sex discrimination against women if women like her don’t want to study engineering.

Gender disparities in a major are not the product of sexism, but rather the differing preferences of men and women. The fact that engineering departments are filled mostly with men does not mean they discriminate against women anymore than the fact that English departments are filled mostly with women proves that English departments discriminate against men. The arts and humanities have well over 60 percent female students, yet no one seems to view that gender disparity as a sign of sexism against men. Deep down, the Obama administration knows this, since it is planning to impose its gender-proportionality rules only on the STEM fields (science, technology, engineering, and math), not other fields that have similarly large gender disparities in the opposite direction. _OpenMarket

Such an overwhelming difference in interests between the sexes, statistically, hints at deeper differences within the biology. Social engineers would be wise to show caution when tinkering with deep biological differences which have evolved over many millions of years.

As Susan Pinker notes, “A mountain of published research stretching back a hundred years 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.”

Women are well-represented in scientific fields that involve lots of interaction with people. As The New York Times’ John Tierney noted, “Despite supposed obstacles like “unconscious bias” and a shortage of role models and mentors, women now constitute about half of medical students, 60 percent of biology majors, and 70 percent of psychology Ph.D.’s. They earn the majority of doctorates in both the life sciences and the social sciences.” By contrast, “They remain a minority in the physical sciences and engineering,” which deal more with inanimate objects rather than people.

These gender-based differences are not the product of discrimination, and manifest themselves at a very early age. As a book on the biology of male-female differences notes, “Girl babies in their cribs are especially inclined to stare at images of human faces, whereas infant boys are likely to find inanimate objects every bit as attractive”; “this difference persists into adulthood: when shown images of people as well as things, men tend to remember the things, and women tend to remember the people.” _OpenMarket

Obama intends to enlarge upon his already catastrophic program of experimental social engineering, using US citizens, businesses, and institutions as his experimental mice.

It would be nice if these experimental mice were well informed about Obama's intentions prior to the November US elections.