An article in The New York Times yesterday pointed out that Congress has chosen a new target for Title IX: science. The members of Congress and women’s groups that are pushing for this say that there is evidence that women face discrimination in certain sciences, and the National Science Foundation, NASA, and the Dept. of Energy have responded by setting up programs looking for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants.
As a woman with an advanced degree in science (MS Physics), I believe that if science is “Title Nined,” it will lead to the continued academic and scientific decline in the U.S. that we are seeing today. If a quota system is introduced such that there must be an equal number of female and male students in the sciences, programs will be forced to be unselective about the women they choose for their programs due to the fact that there are fewer women interested in the sciences in the first place. The quality of research will suffer. Accordingly, if institutions don’t meet their quotas, they won’t receive federal funding, again leading to academic and scientific decline.
If we want to stay number one in the world in science and technology, we need to be encouraging all students, male and female, to enter the sciences, not turning some of them away simply to meet a quota.
