We blinded science with she

Please, Thomas Dolby, forgive the excruciating pun in the subject line.

This, from John Tierney's NYTimes science blog, is doubleplus bad news:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven't had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview "a complete waste of time.") But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women.

The members of Congress and women's groups who have pushed for science to be "Title Nined" say there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, but the quality of that evidence is disputed. Critics say there is far better research showing that on average, women's interest in some fields isn't the same as men's.

In this debate, neither side doubts that women can excel in all fields of science. In fact, their growing presence in former male bastions of science is a chief argument against the need for federal intervention.

Read the whole thing. Tierney goes on to quote research showing that the kind of people drawn to science and engineering pursuits are those who enjoy tinkering with inanimate objects. More often than not, those happen to be men. I believe that we have a moral obligation to create equal opportunity, and a moral obligation to prevent a scheme that mandates equality of outcome. As the clinical psychologist Dr. Susan Pinker told Tierney:

"Creating equal opportunities for women does not mean that they'll choose what men choose in equal numbers," Ms. Pinker says. "The freedom to act on one's preferences can create a more exaggerated gender split in some fields."

By nature, I am disinclined to be attracted to jobs and tasks that involve tinkering with inanimate objects or concepts. I am emotionally oriented. I took Cambridge University's online autism quotient diagnostic, and scored a 9 out of 50 (most adult men score 17, adult women 15). This helps explain why I've been far more drawn to writing, the arts and humanities, and not to math, science and engineering. I could not develop my natural gifts and fulfill my own creative and vocational purpose had I been forced into fields that are traditionally male. Similarly, a woman who is drawn to science and math is done an injustice when barriers to her opportunities are erected.

But it is also an injustice when, for reasons of social engineering, quotas are set up to fulfill some ideologue's idea of the proper outcome in this or that field. Someone, somewhere, will be denied a position to which they are entitled, to meet a quota that has nothing to do with the broader purpose of the field of academic or professional endeavor. A first-rate male scientist may be denied a research position because the government mandates that a research institution hire a less-qualified female scientist. This helps advance science how, exactly?

Activists and diversocrats have to justify their own perverse ideology, so they would rather see science levelled in the cause of egalitarianism than help science do what it is supposed to do. Science as social therapy, in other words.