I’m Not Sure What to Make of This

Monday 14 June 2010 - Filed under Dumbassery + Education + Government + Legislation

Wow.  John Tierney of The New York Times on proposed legislation to close the gender gap in the sciences:

The gap in science seems due mainly to another difference between the sexes: men are more interested in working with things, while women are more interested in working with people. There’s ample evidence — most recently in an analysis of surveys of more than 500,000 people — that boys and men, on average, are more interested in inanimate objects and “inorganic” subjects like math and physics and engineering, while girls and women are more drawn to life sciences, social sciences and other “organic” careers that involve people and seem to have direct social usefulness.

You can argue how much of this difference is due to biology and how much to society, but could you really affect it by sending scientists and engineers off to the workshops mandated by the bill now in Congress? Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and the editor of a recent book “The Science on Women and Science” (AEI Press), says the workshops’ main effect would be to provide jobs for researchers and advocates promoting a myth of gender bias.

Now government thinks that it can legislate personal preference.  Great.

2010-06-14  »  madlibertarianguy