Further to our epic discussion on notions of default gender parity, here’s Christina Hoff Sommers on the prospect of quota-driven, “gender-balanced” and non-competitive science.

Nancy Hopkins, an effective leader of the science equity campaign (and a prominent accuser of Harvard president Lawrence Summers when he committed the solecism of suggesting that men and women might have different propensities and aptitudes), points to the hidden sexism of the obsessive and competitive work ethic of institutions like MIT. “It is a system,” Hopkins says, “where winning is everything, and women find it repulsive.” This viewpoint explains the constant emphasis, by equity activists such as [Donna] Shalala, [Debra] Rolison, and [Kathie] Olsen, on the need to transform the “entire culture” of academic science and engineering…

When the women-in-sports movement was getting underway in the early 1990s, no one suggested that its success would require transforming the “culture of soccer” or putting an end to the obsession with competing and winning. The notion that women’s success in science depends on changing the rules of the game seems demeaning to women – but it gives the equity movement extraordinary scope, commensurate with the extraordinary power that federal science funding would put at its disposal…

[Virginia] Valian is intent on radically transforming society to achieve her egalitarian ideals. She also wants to alter the behavior of successful scientists. Their obsessive work habits, single-minded dedication, and “intense desire for achievement,” not only marginalise women, but also may compromise good science. She writes, “If we continue to emphasise and reward always being on the job, we will never find out whether leading a balanced life leads to equally good or better scientific work.”

Valian may be a leader in the equity-in-science movement, but she is not an empirical thinker. A world where women (and resocialised men) earn Nobel Prizes on flexi-time has no relation to reality. Unfortunately, her outré worldview is not confined to women’s studies. It is a guiding light for some of the nation’s leading scientific institutions… In 2001, the National Science Foundation awarded Valian and her colleagues $3.9 million to develop equity programs and workshops for the “scientific community at large.” Should Congress pass the Gender Bias Elimination Act, which mandates workshops for university department chairs, members of review panels, and agency program officers seeking federal funding, Valian will become one of the most prominent women in American scientific education.

Please, read it all.   

Of course, what matters is that men and women of comparable skill and motivation compete fairly for employment. Whether or not meritocratic selection has been achieved cannot be determined by whether or not gender parity results, since we have no solid basis on which to say that gender parity should be the meritocratic outcome. On what basis could one determine that there “ought” to be a particular ratio of male and female mathematicians, engineers or oil workers? At what point and on what basis – besides political dogma – could one determine that a particular gender is sufficiently “represented” in any given vocation? Yet these are the assumptions of much of the research mentioned above, and of those who wish to “correct” who is interested in what. The belief that, magically stripped of all external influences, the male and female population should be roughly symmetrical in interests, skills and dispositions is just that – a belief; a prejudice, if you will. And not, it seems, terribly scientific.

Update: Mary Jackson has more.

Via Photoshop Disasters, I stumbled across a romance novel whose cover promises a little more than is delivered. Behold Christina Dodd’s historical yarn, Castles in the Air. From the blurb: What man would have her once he discovered her secret…?

Ms Dodd’s publishers have subsequently fashioned a corrected – and, alas, less intriguing – jacket.

A brief taste.

In today’s Guardian, the fearless Oliver Kamm ventures into choppy waters with a qualified defence of rendition:

The principled objection to rendition is that it stands outside legal process, and the rule of law is the best means we have of constraining arbitrary authority by our own governments. But there is no supranational sovereign authority that can effectively implement the body of international law. After 9/11, peace campaigners urged a judicial approach to bring the perpetrators to justice. What they would have advised if Osama bin Laden had unaccountably declined to turn himself in was never put to the test…

There is an important role for Britain, whose commitment to the war on terror (a phrase I use without irony because it is accurate) is beyond dispute, to intercede with the US administration. There should be no rendition to autocracies whose word on the issue of torture is untrustworthy, such as Syria. Renditions should be used only in extreme cases, against those suspected of directly plotting terrorist acts. The country to which they are transferred must exercise due process under its own laws.

But Europeans have a responsibility too. We are the beneficiaries of American efforts to disrupt terrorism. Diplomacy on the issue of rendition should deal with anticipating and preventing abuses. It should not be an opportunity for hyperventilation on the identity of the hated Bush-Cheney regime and our declared theocratic enemies.

Naturally, rumblings ensue. One comment in particular caught my eye as it distils what might be thought of as the very essence of a Guardianista worldview:

The entire rendition process is about the desire to feed and sustain the sadistic fantasies of that perverse constituency which amuses itself with the Threat of Terror and the War against Evil. The victims themselves are merely stage props in this public demonstration of the anger and power and implacable stupidity of the Empire… Only by reducing international society to a clash between cultures and races can the neo-conservatives prevent people from coming together to deal with the real problems, poverty, disease, environmental degradation…

Ah, bless.

What’s interesting to me is how the subject is currently being discussed on the Guardian’s own moderated website, or rather reacted against, very often with wholesale fantasy. For every partially serious response to a particular point, there are two, perhaps three, comments that are unhinged and simply perverse, albeit in a broadly similar way. I stopped counting after a dozen different commenters asserted, smugly, that no war against terrorism exists, or that the West shouldn’t have made efforts to defend itself, or that the US is some kind of fascist autocracy, or that Osama bin Laden and his associates weren’t responsible for 9/11, or that the US government killed its own citizens for unspecified reasons, or that Bush and Blair are morally indistinguishable from homicidal jihadists. As a thumbnail sketch of Guardianista opinion, or a large part thereof, these reactions are worth noting. 

Busy today, but here’s a rather fine collection of condiment sachets.

There’s just about every possible formulation of ketchup, mustard and spicy relish, and several substances I can’t quite identify.

(Via Coudal.)

Chinese space race propaganda. Pandas, kittens, reindeer, all flying into space. (h/t, Coudal.) // Armour for cats and mice. Let battle commence. (h/t, Things.) // The wardrobe of Watchmen. // Welding masks we have known and loved. // Cloverfield green screen. The seams revealed. // BSG in 8 minutes. Roslin loves that airlock. // Brett Lock on pricey booze and social engineering. // Fabian Tassano on disaffection as illness. // Flemming Rose on the Vatican and al-Azhar, united in piety. // Michael Sheridan visits three of the Bali bombing jihadists. “Some try to make a link between al-Qaeda and us. The only link is faith.” // Iranian shoppers turn on Islamic modesty police. // High on Mount Sinai? The tripping Israelites. (h/t, Chastity Darling.) // 10 mental curios. // Mind reading machine will know what you’re looking at. // HAL’s display screens. // Snowflakes and bacteria. (h/t, Dark Roasted Blend.) // The Zenith music hall, Strasbourg. // Tree houses of note. // Eco-terrorists burn down three Seattle homes. For Gaia, of course. // The leather dachshund bag. £65. // Family Guy chicken fight, rounds 1, 2 and 3. // Pork Knox. // The periodic table of condiments. // My pepper heart. // And, via The Thin Man, it’s the New Orleans Ragtime Orchestra.