It is common to hear concerns about the fact
that women do not want to study technical careers and prefer to pursue other
professions, such as in health sciences, psychology or the humanities, where
they usually make the majority. In contrast, in technical schools there is usually a high percentage of male students.
For example, at the Higher Polytechnic School of the Autonomous University of
Madrid, during the 20 years between 1992 and 2012, in our degree in Computer
Engineering, two-thirds of the students were male, just one-third were female. And
between 2003 and 2012, in the degree in Telecommunications Engineering, the
proportion of women was even lower: there were three men for each woman.
While I was director of the Higher Polytechnic
School, we received the visit of the President of a Cuban university
specializing in the teaching of computer science. When we mentioned the
disparity of sex among the students in our School, he was proud to reply that in his university they had solved the problem,
as they had exactly the same number of male and female students. What had they
done? Very simple: they had imposed a different entry level for
the two sexes. In other words, in this university, to be
accepted, men need a high qualification in the entrance exams, while women can
get in with much lower results.
What the President did not realize (or if he did,
he did not care) is that they had managed to
achieve numerical equality at the cost of equal opportunities. There
are many kinds of equality, and not all of them are equivalent. Sometimes, as
in this case, if one is increased, it is at the cost of lowering the other.
What is more important? That the number of men
is equal to the number of women everywhere? Or
that everybody, men and women, have the same opportunities in life?
If smart women do not want to follow technical careers, must we increase the
number of less skilled female students, at the cost of several more able males
not being able to follow their chosen profession?
Politicians seek numerical equality desperately,
regardless of the effects this may have on other types of equality. To achieve
this, they apply what they call positive
discrimination, an absurd name, because whatever positive
discrimination for someone implies negative discrimination for another, and
vice versa. If it is said, for example, that blacks are discriminated, compared
to whites, in certain countries, it follows automatically that there is
positive discrimination in favor of whites in those countries. And if a system
of positive discrimination is imposed in favor of women, a negative
discrimination against men is automatically imposed. But of course, discriminating against men is politically correct.
Manuel Alfonseca
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