The United States needs every talented hard science graduate it can get. It needs graduates in history, literature and music too, but superior science is what will determine whether we continue to be an affluent society. That is, a society that can easily encourage historians, writers and composers.
How does one go about encouraging the most capable to consider scientific study? Do you start by providing equal pathways for any brain of merit, or do you actively seek out the disinterested? For Liberals, of course, the latter is the answer if the demographic profile of current enrollees fails to conform with a leftist world-view.
Therefore, since relatively few females are attracted to the hard sciences, Liberals see the problem as social injustice, where the solution is getting more females into hard science programs. This, of course, is not the same problem we were trying to solve a paragraph ago.
As with other “affirmative action” programs, it is necessary to define and institutionalize discrimination. Only then it can be administered “fairly” by the government.
A nascent foray into such social engineering is the lobbying to apply Title IX rules to hard science funding in our universities. The short version is that federal funding is to be based on what’s between your legs rather than what’s between your ears.
Hey, it seems like it maybe 10-percent worked for making women professional athletes rich with the WNBA; so let’s apply it to physics, chemistry, computer and nanotechnology research on behalf of our nation’s competitive future.
It’s too bad Larry Summers had the temerity to suggest that maybe there is a reason, unconnected to a patriarchal conspiracy, for the fact that only a small percentage of women are interested in hard science. He woke Leviathan.
For further enlightenment see The Vagina Monologue at Protein Wisdom.