Women in Engineering
We’re all familiar with Title IX. We see its effects in school sports programs. What we don’t often realize is how wide-ranging Title IX really is. Its scope includes all educational and government organizations. That includes mathematics, physics, computer science, engineering, etc. While sports programs have come a long way towards equal numbers of male and female participants, engineering (especially computing) is still predominantly male. There are many people who see the vast disparity between the numbers of men and women graduating in computing and assume that means discrimination. What such people don’t realize is that there are other possible causes. I know very few females actually interested in computing. Now, don’t misunderstand: discrimination is a serious problem and needs to be stopped. But what we often call discrimination is simply a manifestation of the fact that different people have different interests. There isn’t much interest among women for playing football, for example. I’m sure there are women who enjoy the sport, but not nearly enough to create women’s football teams in our schools. Efforts at enforcing Title IX are misguided. Instead of assuming that ‘unequal numbers’ equals ‘discrimination’ we need to look fro the real causes of the inequality and seek to correct any causes that are caused by social or organizational discrimination, while understanding and accounting for the others.