What a smart, hard-working, and superbrave woman is Christina Hoff Sommers. Her dispositive article on the substitution of gender equity for merit in science careers is so worth reading, whether you're a feminist, an angry male, or simply someone interested is seeing how America's future is being derailed by gender (and race) victimization politics. I urge you to read it.
While I'm no John McCain fan , (I'll be voting Libertarian although I so wish they had a better candidate than Bob Barr?!) I believe that the election of Obama or Clinton will result in ever more replacement of meritocracy with reverse discrimination.
Wednesday, May 21, 2008
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At its core, there is nothing that is more bias-free than a math or science problem. If you can do it, you can, and if you can't, you can't. Plain and simple.
And to think that there are people out there that want to impose a quota system in university science programs is appalling. What are they going to do, make the problems easier to solve? Dumb it down for the people who just can't get it? Cut science programs altogether to avoid even dealing with this?
My original major in college was chemical engineering. I didn't last one semester. Why? Not because I'm a woman, but because I couldn't cut it. I really wished I could have held my own, but I couldn't. I know I did the right thing by changing my major, even though my advisors told me repeatedly to reconsider. And even at the impressionable age of 18, not once did I think "They should make this easier because I'm a woman."
If this becomes the norm, this will be devastating to American-based research. There's no way in hell that something so silly concerns the Indian and Chinese governments. The best minds in math and science still matter there, not the genders attached to them. Whereas we want everything to look right and everybody to feel good.
I was thinking about something this morning, and this blog post, or rather the article that inspired it, reminded me of it.
How much do people generally consider the long term?
The article reminded me of this because it seems that the women trying to invoke Title IX in science programs (and what a profoundly stupid idea that is; can you imagine if a group of men tried the same thing in the social sciences?) are not considering what may happen to American science and research down the road if this takes hold. They are only focused on what they want to see.
The people implementing and agreeing to this only look at what happened in the past and what they want in the short-term future. But in the long-term future, this will only make things worse.
The same can be said for the lofty programs touted by our presidential nominees and many bills passed by Congress. They often don't consider what this might mean for them and us in years to come. They just want what they want now, paying little regard to the consequences of their actions.
Speaking of which, there's a story floating around now about Laura Richardson, a California congresswoman that let her home in Sacramento go into foreclosure after owning it for less than a year, no money down. She lied to the press, saying that she still owned the property, it wasn't in foreclosure, and she planned to pay. In reality, another person bought the home two weeks ago.
A woman who can't keep her own affairs in order and tells outright lies is representing us. How much you want to bet she gets re-elected?
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