Remember the told-you-so hilarity that swept the internet last year, when it was claimed that a “female-led construction company” was responsible for a bridge collapse in Florida? Although the meme was wrong in many respects, there was a core of relevance to the story: companies responsible for critical public works seemed more committed to scoring ‘diversity’ brownie points than actually hiring the best of the best talent.
In which case, we can look forward to a lot more collapsed bridges, as university engineering courses give an unearned leg-up to female underachievers. All in the name of ‘diversity’, of course.
A Sydney university is attempting to sort out what it calls the “woman problem” in engineering, information technology and construction by offering a 10 point entry bonus to female applicants in the hope of boosting numbers in those areas of study.
The University of Technology Sydney will add 10 points to the Australian tertiary admission ranks (ATARs) of women who want to study in the three areas from next year.
This is similar to ‘diversity’ programs in U.S. elite universities, which artificially boost the scores of blacks and Hispanics, while marking down whites, Asians and Jews. Not only is it blatantly discriminatory, as Charles Murray argues, it actually disadvantages these minorities: middle-weight blacks thrust into elite colleges full of over-achieving Asian and Jewish kids quickly become discouraged and quit. The same students, if sent to less prestigious universities, have a much higher graduation rate.
The ‘progressive’ delusion that gender differences in society are solely the result of oppressive ‘patriarchy’ simply doesn’t match the facts.
“A generation of initiatives to support greater participation by women in these key industries of the future has seen minor progress,” director of UTS Women in Engineering and IT Arti Agarwal said. “In order to step-change gender diversity in these professions the gender mix at undergraduate entry level needs to change.” […] While 84 per cent of the nation’s engineering graduates are men, the professional body Engineers Australia says only 13 per cent of the engineering workforce is female. In the case of computing degrees, women account for only 19 per cent of enrolments.
theaustralian.com.au/higher-education/uts-offers-bonus-atar-points-to-women-applying-to-engineering-information-technology-and-construction-courses
Which suggest two things that the ‘progressives’ simply can’t bring themselves to admit. Firstly, men and women generally have different interests and make choices accordingly. Secondly, that artificially inflating the numbers of women with “a generation of initiatives” has merely resulted in more mediocre female graduates.
(It should go without saying that this doesn’t mean that no woman can be interested in engineering or computing, or graduate at the top of their field. But, as Murray says regarding racial quotas, boosting less able people into career paths they might not otherwise have bothered with is more likely to prime them for failure than anything else.)
Promoting and recruiting people on the basis of their gender rather than their achievements is discriminatory and insulting to everyone.
It must also be asked: would the university dare give male students an arbitrary leg-up into female-dominated courses? Remember the outrage when Milo established a scholarship program for white male students?
