- Enhance leadership diversity in academic and scientific institutions.
- Recognize the importance of role models and increase the diversity of faculties
- Take the responsibility to speak out against discrimination.
- Boost the self-confidence of girls.
That can be translated into a more honest language:
- Further cripple the intellectual diversity of the Academia and make the life for those who are irritated by dumb feminist speeches and articles such as JoAnne's article really unbearable. Fire as many male officials as possible, especially male officials who don't accept feminism.
- Eliminate the remaining independence of thinking in the Academia and educate a new generation of scholars who will be just parroting other scholars, especially older female scholars - the “role models”.
- Proliferate lies about discrimination that has been working against men at least for 30 years, and criminalize all those who realize that the hypotheses about remaining substantial discrimination against women are malicious lies. Only one kind of comments may be allowed.
- Further cripple the self-confidence of boys and more generally the self-confidence of all those who would normally matter in scholarship, and make radical feminists who prefer their political agenda over science even more vocal and more obnoxious.
I think that all of these items are outrageous and the ideology behind them is irrational and hyenic. In a recent incident, the president of Harvard University was forced to resign primarily by the defenders of the feminist ideology above and closely related ideologies. So far, Harvard has lost about $390 million in donations although the moral and intellectual consequences are far more serious.
People like JoAnne Hewett have been effectively controlling the Academia at least for 30 years and their power goes far enough so that they can indirectly fire a famous university president for saying inconvenient comments behind the closed door. But they still have the stomach to paint themselves as victims.
Clearly, firing presidents and wasting of hundreds of millions of dollars on programs to discriminate against boys is not enough for them. What can be done to really satisfy them? Maybe those who think that the ideology about the equal aptitudes of men and women is crap should be sent to gas chambers? Perhaps those who don't want to codify 50% quota for women should join them, too?
It's a rather solid result of neurobiology and other fields - disciplines that Hewett and others would immediately ban if they could - that both the anatomy as well as physiology of female and male brains differ substantially and these differences are magnified if extreme abilities of certain sorts are required. These differences can be observed by a rich variety of methods and they can also be theoretically justified in the framework of evolution.
Women in average are very good and perhaps better with emotions, language, and two-dimensional organization of items. Men are better in three-dimensional visualization and math and engineering skills, among other things. Moreover, men have a measurably higher variance of a diverse list of quantities. The average IQ, the average number of children, and so on are all quantities that are more fluctuating in men than in women. The higher variance implies that it is easier to find more extreme men than more extreme women, regardless of the exact quantity that defines the extremality.
These facts combine in such a way that it can be predicted that for example, the number of male winners of the Fields medal exceeds the number of female winners roughly by two orders of magnitude.
JoAnne Hewett enumerates 21 female physicists who are automatically heroes because they are still discriminated against, she argues. If I wrote so many untrue assertions, I could not sleep. JoAnne Hewett has clearly no problems with her conscience.
Imagine that we would be talking about the rightwingers in physics rather than women in physics. I could not enumerate 21 rightwingers even though their proportion would "normally" be expected to be 50%, just like for women and there have existed societies in which the percentage exceeded 50 percent (unlike the case of women). Most optimistically, I could mention 2 or 3 people who are rightwingers according to some rumors or very private communication but I would not have the courage to write their names here because these guys care about their careers which makes it necessary for them to hide their political opinions.
Is there a woman who has to hide that she is a woman in order to do physics?
The political diversity is where the real discrimination lies, and people who continue to argue that women are systematically discriminated against in the Academia are not telling you the truth. On the contrary. I could also inform you about several stories how the positive discrimination works in a plethora of various committees in which I have served. It has become a substantial bias and I already know names of boys - including a gold medalist from the International Physics Olympiad - for whom the positive discrimination became an ordinary discrimination.
It's completely clear that men are already discriminated against in physical sciences. We could perhaps justify such an approach because of some social reasons unrelated to science itself. If I were justifying such policies, the first justification would be to assure that both the girls as well as the boys in physics are surrounded by some girls because it may be a psychologically healthier environment. However, no one can justify lies about the actual situation. Lies can never be expected to lead to good results.
The Jews were also painted as a group discriminating against others - or spoiling the life of others - in Germany of the 1930s, much like the capitalists were those who were painted as universally discriminating against the workers in the Eastern Europe after the Second World War. We know where these ideologies have led, and I don't see any truly qualitative differences between the three examples. In all cases, we face ideologies that reject reality as we observe it and that want to replace it by a conspiratory theory whose political goal is to substantially alter the natural structure of the society.
