Feds consider gender quotas for university engineering, physics, computer science departments

Look...I know that math and science geeks need all the help they can get when it comes to getting laid, but this is ridiculous:

On March 25, National Journal reported that the Bush administration planned an unprecedented expansion of Title IX enforcement into the math and science departments of the nation's leading research universities. In interviews with several publications, Assistant Secretary of Education Stephanie Monroe announced that the Department of Education would be teaming up with the National Science Foundation to investigate the sex disparities in hard sciences--particularly engineering, physics, and computer science--that got former Harvard University president Larry Summers into so much trouble when he broached the subject in an academic meeting last year.

Monroe said that, beginning this summer, Education's Office of Civil Rights--which she heads--would conduct intensive investigations of colleges and universities to determine if they are complying with Title IX in their treatment of women as undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty. ...

She told Inside Higher Education...that because the discrimination faced by women in math and science is often "subtle," the government would investigate policies that result in women "feeling unwelcome" in their pursuit of advanced degrees or tenured positions in the hard sciences. Although Monroe promised to "not simply look at the numbers," the unwelcoming environments for women she intended to investigate were in fact schools where a relatively small number of women pursue postgraduate work or where relatively few women are hired as faculty in math and science.

Seriously, though...my guess is that the scarcity of women in the fields of math, science, and engineering is the result of self-selection, not discrimination. For whatever reason - whether nature, nurture, or some combination of the two - women as a group just don't find these particular fields that appealing. So what? Men are underrepresented in colleges of nursing, social work, and education. That's not evidence of discrimination, either. It only demonstrates the age-old notion that men and women have different interests and abilities. No amount of bureaucratic busybodyism can change that.

Now, for the good news:

...on March 29--four days after Monroe's announcement appeared in National Journal--the White House quietly forced a retraction. On Department of Education letterhead, a statement was released over Monroe's signature promising that "the Department of Education is not expanding Title IX enforcement beyond its regular activities to combat unlawful discrimination. Further, the Department is not implementing any quota system or new enforcement program to advance study opportunities in math and science." And then Monroe promptly went on "travel," according to an Education Department spokesman, and has since been unavailable for interviews.