Yes, it's all a conspiracy against non-white males, this whole notion of 'rigor'. Some of these university administrators/professors have way too much time on their hands that they spend it conjuring up these bizarre notions. This is all actually very insulting and demeaning to those of us with a genuine interest in engineering...whilst I was at university, I was involved with an engineering student group (and being electrical, all of us were males, not that we ever made it a point), but the dean of our school saw it as his mission to sit us down and literally say "You guys have done a lot of great work...but when I see that photo of you all on your website, I can only think of one problem: where are all the female students?! Too many males!" No kidding...then we had another university administrator try to convince us to take some "diversity course" on how to deal with other people from different backgrounds, as if we were actively making it our mission to deter females from joining the student group, nevermind that our classes were something like 90% male. Reminds me of people complaining on Twitter of that live stream video of the SpaceX employees cheering on the Falcon launch, that there were too many "white males" and not enough females...it's amazing that they even managed to get the rocket to launch with so many males involved...
This whole politicisation, or the notion of injecting social issues into science/engineering is so dangerous and detrimental to the disciplines because eventually it will gut them out of any quality, and any semblance of competent engineering students. It's a very dangerous road to take...just look at what's happened to the humanities; it's a total farce and perversion of what it once stood for.
This and this exactly.
The one thing that gets my blood to boil is when people, who try to ham fist equality despite it often not being fair treatment, telling someone to force a gender quota.
Almost ALWAYS the reason there aren't women in a STEM field is because the population of women interested in the fields is significantly smaller than that of men.
It's similar, maybe in fact worse with more traditionally female dominated careers like child/elder care or design, liberal arts, etc, where men can be considered as inferior to women because they lake innate motherly, or creative, maybe even to be considered "girly" qualities. Nobody in this modern age would say a woman shouldn't enter a STEM field, and many people would encourage it intensely, but there aren't so many people trying to get men interested in being actors, or stage makeup artists, or nannies, etc. In fact, I know some people who, just because of some statistics alone, would refuse to hire a male babysitter. If someone refused to hire a woman based on a statistic they could not control, they would be labeled sexist, discriminatory, and not willing to give someone a chance because of their gender.
Don't take this to mean I do not want women to participate in STEM fields because other people don't want men to participate in other fields, in fact, quite the opposite. I think if people consider gender equality in industries to be an important goal, (and I can see how it could be for regulatory and power control reasons), that we should try to encourage men to enter more traditionally feminine fields, as much as we are trying to get women to engage STEM fields.
The one thing that really annoys me, is when this "problem" is taken on at the college level, at which point students have had (normally) 18 years of their life to make solid choices about their careers, and most people don't want to change just because someone says that they have to. I HATE it when colleges introduce gender quotas, as it just ends up turning into waiting for the one, rare female interested into the career before you can let in equally capable and interested men in.
Nobody, or at least very few, at least in my nation, tries to get girls interested in STEM fields at the elementary or highschool level. I do think that it would be a really cool idea to advertise the field to women specifically in pre-adult education, and I think if we want to get women in STEM fields, that's the only way to do it.
Now onto this topic. If you're going to come on here and make a massive generalization, and call out an entire group of people based on one asshole, or even a group of assholes that said or did stupid shit under the banner, piss off. Generalizations annoy me to no end, and I hate it when I look at something that blindly calls everybody in my political category something that most of us, or even some of us are not.