Via instapundit A short depressing article about getting more women into engineering by downplaying the role of math in building stuff.
The article has a link to a super article in the WSJ by Charles Murray. It's long, but worth the time to read it.
It made me laugh because when I was in school, the concept of intelligence being anything but random was ridiculed. Even though we were taught that everything else like hair and eye color, body type, etc. was inherited from one's forebearers, we were expected to believe that intelligence/IQ was definitely not inherited and was completely due to other factors.
Below are some excerpts:
- What good can come of raising this divisive topic? The honest answer is that no one knows for sure. What we do know is that the taboo has crippled our ability to explore almost any topic that involves the different ways in which groups of people respond to the world around them--which means almost every political, social or economic topic of any complexity.The obvious and undeniable conclusion:
- Besides liberating that conversation, an open and undefensive discussion would puncture the irrational fear of the male-female and black-white differences I have surveyed here.
- ... the ideal of equality that Thomas Jefferson had in mind when he wrote as a self-evident truth that all men are created equal. Steven Pinker put that ideal in today's language in "The Blank Slate," writing that "equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of humans are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group."
- Creating double standards for physically demanding jobs so that women can qualify ensures that men in those jobs will never see women as their equals. In universities, affirmative action ensures that the black-white difference in IQ in the population at large is brought onto the campus and made visible to every student. The intentions of their designers notwithstanding, today's policies are perfectly fashioned to create separation, condescension and resentment--and so they have done.Mr. Murray is W.H. Brady Scholar in Freedom and Culture at the American Enterprise Institute. This article appears in the September issue of Commentary. A fully annotated version, which includes extensive supplementary material, is available here.
- The world need not be that way. Any university or employer that genuinely applied a single set of standards for hiring, firing, admitting and promoting would find that performance really is distributed indistinguishably across different groups. But getting to that point nationwide will require us to jettison an apparatus of laws, regulations and bureaucracies that has been 40 years in the making. That will not happen until the conversation has opened up. So let us take one step at a time. Let us stop being afraid of data that tell us a story we do not want to hear, stop the name-calling, stop the denial and start facing reality.
4 comments:
Peter, I think the comment above was meant for this post, so I'll reply here.
Ethics in engineering: My brother one of the smartest and most moral people I know, is an engineer who worked on a famous glamorous project in NYC. He resigned rather than allow work that he thought dangerous to continue, Unfortunately, his replacement was either clueless or had no qualms about following orders, and there was an accident. Luckily no life was lost, but it was expensive and caused many delays.
Designing bras? Hmm. I didn't know engineers were involved in this important work. Perhaps Project Runway can add an episode filmed at a CalTech class in structural engineering.
Probably be a lot easier to get husbands to watch the show.
erp:
Quite right, my post above should be here. Apologies.
No, I'm not buying that the engineering curriculum needs to be amended (diverted) to tell students it really isn't right to design and build dangerous structures or to to steal and lie to get ahead. I seem to vaguely recall a tough, honourable senior officer in the U.S. military who, when asked if he would include ethics in formal military officer training, said something like: "No, that's what Church is for."
Actually, erp, I believe engineers really do design bras. 'Nuff said.
Are you sure this article wasn't in The Onion?
Skipper, no, but it was in the next best thing, the Chronicle of High Education.
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