In an effort to promote the tired, stale and just plain wrong idea that women and men are equally capable of, and equally interested in university level mathematics and statistics, Melbourne University in Australia has limited three academic appointments to women applicants only.
The head of the School of Mathematics and Statistics, Professor Aleks Owczarek, said the decision had been taken to promote change.
"We clearly have an issue with attracting female applicants appropriately to our workforce," Professor Owczarek said.
"So this is an agenda to attempt to address that."
It's going to do exactly the opposite of what they hope for. See, here's the thing: in every occupational category, women work fewer hours on less demanding, less rigorous assignments because women prefer to spend more time doing things other than working, and by and large they are allowed to do this, because they have men (either individually or by proxy as the majority of the taxbase) covering their lost earnings. This is not oppression. It's privilege.
Malcolm Gladwell noted in his book David and Goliath that affirmative action programs designed to help black students achieve actually harmed those students in the long term: a black student who performs at a high level in a middling school who is shoved up into the elite Ivy Leagues suddenly drops to the bottom of the class in terms of performance. That's a shattering blow to confidence, and indeed, black students who enroll in college are far less likely to complete their educations than white students. Affirmative action is not the only reason this happens, but it contributes.
It's better to be a big fish in a little pond than the other way around. It's better to be at the top of your game than the bottom. This isn't hard to understand, but for some reason the left doggedly refuses to do so. Affirmative action not only harms the students it promotes, it harms minority student who earned their right to be in the Ivy League, because it paints all minority students as the recipient of unearned advantage, which is simply not true. But even more than that, it does the exact opposite of what it intends to do: affirmative action is supposed to place black students in extremely competitive academic environments to show them and the world that black students can indeed compete with whites at these levels: racism and lack of opportunity is the only thing that keeps the black student down.
Instead, affirmative action simply reinforces the idea that whites are superior. Black students placed in elite academic environments do not perform competitively against their white peers: black students are demonstrably, measurably inferior. Black students who earned their right to be in the game do compete, but they are overwhelmed by the under-performing affirmative action students.
The single biggest problem in this system — a problem documented by a vast and growing array of research — is the tendency of large preferences to boomerang and harm their intended beneficiaries. Large preferences often place students in environments where they can neither learn nor compete effectively — even though these same students would thrive had they gone to less competitive but still quite good schools.
We refer to this problem as "mismatch," a word that largely explains why, even though blacks are more likely to enter college than are whites with similar backgrounds, they will usually get much lower grades, rank toward the bottom of the class, and far more often drop out. Because of mismatch, racial preference policies often stigmatize minorities, reinforce pernicious stereotypes, and undermine the self-confidence of beneficiaries, rather than creating the diverse racial utopias so often advertised in college campus brochures.
All affirmative action does is demonstrate to white and black students alike that white students are superior and only a tiny minority of black students can compete, which is precisely the situation affirmative action meant to address. Rather than dispelling this notion, affirmative action only serves to confirm it.
Good job, libtards!
Nothing has changed in elite academic environments, except that deserving black students are now treated suspiciously and resentment has been sown between deserving white students prevented from opportunities they have done the work to earn, and black students who are faced with a competitive environment they can't function in. It's just stupid all the way around. The correct course of action is to let the chips fall where they may, let assortative mating produce families that generate legitimate black students for Harvard, Princeton and Yale. See Malia Obama. Remove such barriers that exist (effectively none) to ensure equality of opportunity and stop worrying about equality of outcome. The only way equality of outcome can be achieved is to drag everyone down. No thanks.
The situation is no different when affirmative action is applied to women: promote women into positions where they legitimately cannot compete with male applicants and all you are going to do is confirm that women are incompetent, incapable imbeciles who can't be trusted in positions of leadership. This is what is happening in Canada: Justin Trudeau chose his cabinet ministers on the basis of what their underpants contain (because it's current year!), rather than merit. Except that male cabinet ministers had to compete with one another, while the women were simply appointed. Guess who the fricking incompetent, idiot Ministers fricking up their portfolios are? Luckily, most committee chairs are still men. Chairs make the big decisions.
Melbourne University wants to hire math professors on the basis of genitals rather than resumes and research? Guess what, Melbourne? You are virtually guaranteed to get pathetic applicants who do half-assed, moronic research no one reads or cares about, who refuse to commit fully to the demands of their jobs, who offload as much work onto their male colleagues as they can (work-life balance, dontcha know) and who will thus confirm to your entire department and all students and likely the wider university that hiring women into demanding professional positions is a waste of fricking time because women won't or can't work the way men will.
Reality check: hiring women who can't compete with men does not magically make the women competitive. You will simply be stuck with women who can't compete, leaving everyone with the understanding that women can't compete with men.
And of course, one of the persons who gets hurt here is the rare kickass math b***h who can throw down Manifolds and Fourier Analyses with the best of them. Instead of finding herself in an environment filled with highly competitive, like-minded mathematicians focused on concepts, she will be surrounded by half-witted women ducking out of committee meetings again so they can go to Betsy's soccer game while collecting their full salaries. The qualified men who get shoved out of the competition to make room for these halfwits are also harmed, as are those men's families and the wider community deprived of the research these men might have carried out. These policies do far more to hurt than help. They hurt everyone.
And they do exactly the opposite of what they promise: affirmative action and positive discrimination policies do absolutely nothing to challenge ideas of male or white superiority.
They confirm supremacy.
It's almost like liberals are the real racists and sexists, isn't it?
Or they're just really fricking dumb.
