Also Will Focus on the Fundamentals

In a column at the Washington Post, American Enterprise Institute scholar Christina Hoff Sommers writes that President Obama's plan to extend Title IX from athletics to the sciences "ought to give people pause." She says that Title IX has boosted women's participation in athletics but at the cost of male athletes, and she thinks the same will happen in the sciences. Already, she points out, women earn 60 percent of bachelor's degrees and half of the PhDs in the humanities, social sciences, life sciences, and education while men maintain the majority in physics, computer science, and engineering. Science Progress points out that after that step, women leave science and engineering in droves. A National Academies reports says 14.8 percent of the full professors in the life sciences are women. "These are the circles where gender parity is a significant question," Science Progress says.