Steve Sailer has a post up about the trials and tribulations of girls in science. His post is commentary on this very long article by a woman calling herself Eileen Pollack. The general thrust of that piece that girls don’t go into STEM field in great numbers, because there is some invisible force filed that repels them. This invisible force field cannot be seen, because it is invisible, but it can be described by women with the right credentials from the women’s studies department. They call this force field “male privilege.’
Of course, as Sailer points out, Mx. Pollack started out in life as an undergrad in physics, but lost interest and moved onto creative writing. It turns out that women are not as good at math, on average, as boys, but they are also less interested in it. That means the number of girls in the STEM fields is going to much lower than expected, just using test scores for mathematical aptitude. Feminism, ironically, can not tolerate women choosing to be women, so they insist women are being tricked in some way.
Feminism stopped being a serious topic long before anyone reading this was alive and now it is quite silly. A century ago, changing the law to better serve women in the industrial age was a worthy topic. In the agrarian age, divorce, for example, was not an issue for most people. Property rights and legal rights were also far less important. As cities grew and social relationships changed, the law needed to change to address the needs of both men and women, so feminism made some sense.
Today it is just the stereotypical “feminists” grousing about men. In college, feminism is where the low self-esteem gals go when they don’t want to become lesbians. Some thing that has been true for a long time is the easiest women to get are the ones hanging around the women’s studies department. Despite all the man-hating and sisterhood talk, they will jump in the sack with the first guy showing interest. All their talk about independence and not needing a man is just an act.
Now, it is worth mentioning that the scrambling of the sex roles has made sorting these things more difficult. Men are far less manly, especially at elite universities where feminism is rampant. They are also far less worldly. From the female perspective, being out-competed in these cognitive fields by wimps and socially awkward losers could very well look like a conspiracy. The girls are atop the status system on campus and more aggressive than these males, but they can’t compete.
Even so, the main driver of the gender equity delusions is a studied and rampant ignorance of biological reality. The starting point is always the assumption that some mysterious force or perhaps a hidden conspiracy is preventing the egalitarian paradise from emerging. The default is the dream, rather than observable reality. Even the basic relationship between the sexes is excluded. The fact that boys like pretty girls and girls like high status males is not a mystery.
The new study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against women in the sciences. Only one-fifth of physics Ph.D.’s in this country are awarded to women, and only about half of those women are American; of all the physics professors in the United States, only 14 percent are women. The numbers of black and Hispanic scientists are even lower; in a typical year, 13 African-Americans and 20 Latinos of either sex receive Ph.D.’s in physics. The reasons for those shortages are hardly mysterious — many minority students attend secondary schools that leave them too far behind to catch up in science, and the effects of prejudice at every stage of their education are well documented. But what could still be keeping women out of the STEM fields (“STEM” being the current shorthand for “science, technology, engineering and mathematics”), which offer so much in the way of job prospects, prestige, intellectual stimulation and income?
Imagine if someone said, “Our study goes a long way toward providing hard evidence of a continuing bias against whites in the National Basketball Association…” Everyone gets that blacks are, on average, better equipped by nature to excel at some sports. No one thinks this is odd, but in the cognitive fields, it is blasphemy to suggest there are differences between the sexes and races. It suggests the problem of gender equity is really just a problem with women accepting reality.