It’s official: women are too dumb to make it into “hard” subjects unless we lower the bar for them. That’s the tacit implication of a gushing Sydney Morning Herald piece about a Sydney university and its Very Special Program for women who didn’t do well enough in high school to get into Engineering on normal merit.
A Sydney university has significantly boosted the share of women in engineering and other male-dominated courses three years after instituting a controversial program to lower entry scores for female school-leavers.
If you were having a bridge built, would you want it designed by a male who made it into engineering on merit, or a woman who got in on a quota?
Almost 500 engineering, IT and construction students at the University of Technology Sydney have been granted 10 extra ATAR points since 2020, when the institution lowered the bar for females under a plan to boost the number of women in the field.
Figures obtained by the Herald show that across all 20 courses that offer the extra ATAR points to women, there was a 109 per cent increase in female enrolments between 2019 and 2022 […]
In some courses – including the bachelor of science in games development – almost half of all female students were given adjustment points last year.
This is just the sexist equivalent of the racist “adjustment points” that Ivy League universities in the US hand out to “minority” (i.e. black) students. With the result that the highest-achieving Asian applicants are likely to lose out to a low-achieving black student.
Does this make any of you confident in the academic rigor of the course?
UTS fifth- and sixth-year engineering students Amelia Giugni and Jannat Gohar said they supported the ATAR adjustment scheme, but it had reinforced already deeply embedded prejudices that women faced in the classroom and workplace.
“It is a great initiative and I’m very for it, but it’s encouraging a lot of those biases where females are iced out in classrooms because, oh, ‘you only got in because you’re a girl’,” Gohar said.
Well? It’s a simple fact — if the ATAR hadn’t been lowered because you’re a girl, you wouldn’t have got in.
If you don’t like it, then maybe you ought to consider that quotas aren’t such a great idea.
And how is it all panning out?
Oddly enough, three years later — in other words, long enough for the first cohort of quota hires to graduate (or not) — they conveniently omit to tell us what the pass or retention rate for their Very Special Girls actually is.
“But the bigger problem is not getting them into undergraduate degrees but keeping them in the profession.”
Sydney Morning Herald
I wonder why that could be?
Could it be that the course really was too hard for them?
Nah, just blame it on men. That’s what feminists always do when their pet theories crash into the real world.