University lowers entry standard for women in engineering courses

[Derec]

Dr. Agarwal makes a good point that I think is being discounted. Bringing a variety of cultures and gender to the table gives a greater variety of opinions and approaches to problem solving than you might not get from a room full of, male engineers all from the same socioeconomic background. I would think this would be an even greater problem in more homogenous cultures.

That that apply to fields where women are overrepresented or only to engineering?
Should admission standards be lower for men in fields where there are more women than men?

 

[starwater]

Dr. Agarwal makes a good point that I think is being discounted. Bringing a variety of cultures and gender to the table gives a greater variety of opinions and approaches to problem solving than you might not get from a room full of, male engineers all from the same socioeconomic background. I would think this would be an even greater problem in more homogenous cultures.

That that apply to fields where women are overrepresented or only to engineering?
Should admission standards be lower for men in fields where there are more women than men?

Admission is not the same as graduating. No where does it say that they are lowering the academic requirements. I do agree that if a student is unprepared and flunks out, that is a wasted space for someone else that meets the standard. I think this is a bad idea and not the way to get more women engineering students enrolled.

 

[Derec]

Admission is not the same as graduating. No where does it say that they are lowering the academic requirements. I do agree that if a student is unprepared and flunks out, that is a wasted space for someone else that meets the standard. I think this is a bad idea and not the way to get more women engineering students enrolled.

That is not responsive to my question. If admission standards are lowered for women to get more women into engineering, should admissions standards in fields where there are more women than men likewise be lowered to increase representation of men in those fields?

Jarhyn and some others support unequal admission standards when it benefits women. I am wondering if they also support it when it discriminates against women. Or will they insist that it's misogynistic to not have double standards in admissions.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

For the life of me, I have no idea why some people are against giving some people opportunities.

1) Because for every one you admit with lower qualifications you deny someone with higher qualifications. I can't understand why you leftists are against giving unfavored people a chance.

2) Because when you do things like this you shift the burden--now the teachers that are flunking them out are the ones discriminating. Pretty soon you're graduating unqualified people.

 

[Loren Pechtel]

This sort of gender preferential handicapping tends to lead to overt discrimination against trans students as well. Observe the recent furore in the sporting world. Do they have a plan for this?

What we have seen about sporting is that trans is not the same as natural-born in athletic matters.

There's no way to be fair here, either you make the pseudo-females compete as males (which puts them at a substantial disadvantage) or compete as females (which puts them at an appreciable advantage.) The only truly fair approach would be to have 4 genders but that would leave two of them without very many people.

 

[barbos]

It's my experience that there is plenty of women with scores which is enough to pass the acceptance threshold but they simply don't want to apply.
So better solution would be a draft system where women who pass the grades are forced to be engineers

Yes, force someone into a field they have no desire to be in. Who wouldn’t give it their all?

Yes, that's the only way to get more women in STEM.

 

[starwater]

Admission is not the same as graduating. No where does it say that they are lowering the academic requirements. I do agree that if a student is unprepared and flunks out, that is a wasted space for someone else that meets the standard. I think this is a bad idea and not the way to get more women engineering students enrolled.

That is not responsive to my question. If admission standards are lowered for women to get more women into engineering, should admissions standards in fields where there are more women than men likewise be lowered to increase representation of men in those fields?

Jarhyn and some others support unequal admission standards when it benefits women. I am wondering if they also support it when it discriminates against women. Or will they insist that it's misogynistic to not have double standards in admissions.

I had no intention of answering your question.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

You don't say. What it means is that more marginal candidates will be offered entry, and more marginal candidates are more likely to drop out. Having people begin and not finish degrees benefits nobody. It does not benefit the university, it does not benefit the individual, it does not benefit society.

Not necessarily. They could lower the graduation standards too if too few are graduating. We do need engineers.

 

[Toni]

This is a poor approach in my opinion. Is this the only thing they're doing? I don't see how this will create anything other than a incoming freshman year with a lot of female dropouts, if the system in general is already heavily weighted against women, plus now a bunch of chauvinist rage and the assumption, already a problem, that any female student must have cheated her way into the program even if her personal score would have in fact gotten her in anyway.

And this is exactly why I support my solution: blind the eye, and shave back over-represented groups randomly. Candidates get seen on their own merits which are not changed, and it statistically weights the evaluators to see more of the under-represented group.

Ultimately, they still pick X qualified candidates, but it still suggests that women will be represented at a higher percentage.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'shave back' over represented groups randomly. Can you please explain what this means?

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

It's my experience that there is plenty of women with scores which is enough to pass the acceptance threshold but they simply don't want to apply.
So better solution would be a draft system where women who pass the grades are forced to be engineers

Yes, force someone into a field they have no desire to be in. Who wouldn’t give it their all?

Yes, that's the only way to get more women in STEM.

Its a weird world when for the sake of "equality" we're discussing forcing or coercing or nudging people to do something they don't want to do, just because of their gender.

 

[Jarhyn]

This is a poor approach in my opinion. Is this the only thing they're doing? I don't see how this will create anything other than a incoming freshman year with a lot of female dropouts, if the system in general is already heavily weighted against women, plus now a bunch of chauvinist rage and the assumption, already a problem, that any female student must have cheated her way into the program even if her personal score would have in fact gotten her in anyway.

And this is exactly why I support my solution: blind the eye, and shave back over-represented groups randomly. Candidates get seen on their own merits which are not changed, and it statistically weights the evaluators to see more of the under-represented group.

Ultimately, they still pick X qualified candidates, but it still suggests that women will be represented at a higher percentage.

I'm not sure what you mean by 'shave back' over represented groups randomly. Can you please explain what this means?

Imagine I have 50 candidates for a position, 10 women, 40 men. The person evaluating applications does not know who are men and who are women.

Assuming that the men and women are roughly equally qualified, the selection of "best" candidates will yield 4:1 probability of selecting men.

If you first remove 20 random men, the selection of the "best" candidates yeilds 2:1 men.

 

[Toni]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'shave back' over represented groups randomly. Can you please explain what this means?

Imagine I have 50 candidates for a position, 10 women, 40 men. The person evaluating applications does not know who are men and who are women.

Assuming that the men and women are roughly equally qualified, the selection of "best" candidates will yield 4:1 probability of selecting men.

If you first remove 20 random men, the selection of the "best" candidates yeilds 2:1 men.

Thanks. I hadn’t heard the term before and wasn’t sure I was understanding you properly.

 

[Toni]

I'm not sure what you mean by 'shave back' over represented groups randomly. Can you please explain what this means?

Imagine I have 50 candidates for a position, 10 women, 40 men. The person evaluating applications does not know who are men and who are women.

Assuming that the men and women are roughly equally qualified, the selection of "best" candidates will yield 4:1 probability of selecting men.

If you first remove 20 random men, the selection of the "best" candidates yeilds 2:1 men.

Thanks. I hadn’t heard the term before and wasn’t sure I was understanding you properly.

 

[barbos]

Yes, that's the only way to get more women in STEM.

Its a weird world when for the sake of "equality" we're discussing forcing or coercing or nudging people to do something they don't want to do, just because of their gender.

I don't really advocate taking this option, just saying that this is the only solution.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

There's a rather obvious answer to this.

If you are a guy, just mark that you are a woman on the application. They don't have the gall to openly discriminate against transexuals. And then later if anybody asks your gender while you're in the program, just act offended at such a personal question being asked. Otherwise carry on your life as you otherwise would. And if they catch you showing romantic interest in women just tell them you are a lesbian.

This reminds me of the Ontario Pay Equity Act that I had to deal with a few months back. It states that "women's work must be paid at least as well as men's work". Its so sexist it blew my mind. Not only does it not care if men's work is paid less than women's work, but it forces you to divide all your jobs in the company between what is women's work and men's work. And it then cares only about the work and not about who is doing that work. So if you have a female welder making less than a male welder, this doesn't cover her, because welding is men's work.

 

[SimpleDon]

https://www.smh.com.au/education/a-...ring-entry-bar-for-women-20190828-p52lpp.html...

It's difficult to believe that Dr. Agarwal has sufficient mathematical wherewithal to hold an engineering Ph.D., given that it is mathematically certain that letting in lower-ranked students will lead to lower-quality graduates.

No, this not true and the reason why it isn't, was in your the very next two paragraphs of your post.

Jessica Massih, a fifth-year student in Civil and Environmental Engineering at UTS, said gaining entry to a course was just the beginning, and the female students would still have to prove themselves during their degree.

"Some people I've spoken to think it's a handout, but I think it's a hand up," she said. "I hope it does [act as an incentive]. They will still be able to prove themselves throughout the degree by doing just as well, if not better."
...

I do wonder what Australia's anti-discrimination Acts are for. Clearly, they're not about stopping discrimination.

When I studied electrical engineering at the University of Texas in the late 1960s, more of the people who started out studying engineering graduated with a degree in Business Administration than graduated with a degree in engineering. And yes, the graduate engineers were overwhelmingly white males.

Engineering requires a different mindset than most people have. But it isn't an exclusively male mindset. It isn't an exclusively white person mindset. But the profession in the US and Europe is heavily dominated by white men. This raises the distinct probability that the admission policies to engineering schools are heavily weighted to white males. That the bar is lower for white males and that to get the quality of the people in the profession up we should encourage more women and minority students in it.

When I moved to Atlanta we had a large number of Russian Jews here because Jimmy Carter convinced the Soviet Union to allow them to emigrate to the US. A large number of these were professionals and many were engineers. Half of those Russian and Ukrainian engineers were women. We hired two of the women engineers and later one Romanian women engineer. They thought that it was strange that there were no women in engineering in the US. It was pretty much the same in the PRC when I went there in the late 1980s, it wasn't a half but at least 30%.

When I started working in engineering (and after dropping bombs on people for the Navy) I found out that the few women, foreign, and minority engineers I worked with were usually more qualified for the positions that they were in than the white males because of the discrimination that they faced getting promotions. And I started working with them pretty much exclusively.

I married one of them. My wife is a mechanical engineer. Engineers are born, they aren't made. Both of my children are graduate engineers, although my son went on to medical school. My daughter complains about the fact that the profession is still dominated by white males. She is a forensic structural engineer with a Ph.D. in her field. That is, she is already much more accomplished in engineering than I ever was.

So yes, your anti-discrimination law is about stopping discrimination in engineering, but not in a way that you are willing to accept. And you are the one who is wrong, not the law. There is no way to increase the number of women in the profession without reducing the number of men in it. But the profession will be better off with more women in it. You will elevate the profession rather than lower it as you said.

 

[ronburgundy]

Yes, it would be difficult for ATAR scores to cause knowledge backwards in time??

Actually, it would require ATAR scores to be psychic and know what all the countless factors are that will impact how much every student is going to learn in the future.

If the ATAR such a poor predictor of performance in engineering, the university should drop it as an entry criterion. But ATAR is not a poor predictor of university performance. Dropout rates are correlated with ATAR, for example.

Only about 26% of students are admitted on a basis other than their ATAR score. The overall correlation with dropout rates does not mean that a 10 point difference on it would predict dropout rates among those who choose one the hardest degrees, Engineering. The correlation is driven by the fact that students with ATAR's down at the 30th percentile have dropout rates of 25%, while students at the 100th percentile have a rate of only 3%. However, there is very little (about 2%) difference between the dropout rates of students at the 93rd percentile versus 83rd percentile, which is the kind of difference involved in the present policy. Plus, that tiny 2% difference in dropout rates is likely due to some of the lower scoring students being less motivated and committed to school. But such students are the one's who pick less difficult majors, not women who chose one of the hardest paths possible of entering an intellectually challenging major where they will face near certain sexism in both school and throughout their career. That requires and intrinsic passion that predicts perseverance.

So, contrary to the assumption inherent in your comment, there far from a 1:1 correspondence between a difference of X in ATAR scores and a difference of Y in the quality of work a person is able to do upon graduating with an Engineering degree.

My comment does not require a "1:1 correspondence".

A claim of "mathematical certainty" does presume that. If the relation is uncertain, variable, or non-linear, then it's plausible that a small 10 point difference in score does not reliably correspond to any difference in graduate quality in the specific context of females who chose Engineering.

Plus, the "quality of graduates" isn't even solely about what a graduate is potentially capable of doing, it includes what they actually will do given not only their skills, but their motivation, drive, and uniqueness of the perspective they bring which determines how much what they wind up doing actually adds to what would be there otherwise.

The ATAR represents achieved results; it already partly reflects motivation and "drive".

Motivation and drive is not a general quality but a highly context specific one. At most, ATAR only reflects some small, unreliable amount of motivation to do well in one's required high school courses within the context of whatever was going on to the person in high school. That has minimal application to the motivation that a person has to do well in courses they got to freely choose and that directly relate to their desired career, especially among women who so strongly desire it, they are willing to put up with the sexist nonsense.

Given how rampant sexism against women in STEM is, any woman willing and capable of putting up with it and successfully completing an Engineering degree is likely to have greater motivation and perseverance than the average male who completes such a degree that many men would have bailed on had they faced the type of adversity that female Engineers do.

This is asserted without evidence. You are making an assertion about the resilience of male and female engineering students, among other assertions.

It's a matter of basic logic that follows from 2 premises that cannot be reasonably denied: 1. People are more likely to bail on some effort the more obstacles they face. 2. There is a mountain of evidence that women face the additional obstacle of sexism when trying to enter STEM field (and Engineering may be the worst). From this we know that males entering Engineering do not face the additional selection pressure, which means many of them who would not be able handle that additional pressure and obstacle are retained in the field b/c they did not have to face it.

In addition, woman comprise half of the end users of the things that are engineered, for some products the vast majority of users, and sex differences are a factor in usability in a number of applications, females engineers would have a decided advantage in adding quality to products that is otherwise generally overlooked.

Even if I accepted this as true (I do not: I'd want to see evidence of everyday engineered objects that would have been different if only the engineering team had female input--can you name some?), that is not a reason to discriminate against men.

That's a matter of personal values, and as I said, I agree that there are ethical concerns about instituting such policies. However, it certainly is "a reason" to enact such policies, and one that is actually based in the principle of fairness and representative government.
Government paid for University should serve all members of the public equally. A major justification for subsidizing higher education is not just the benefit to the students but to society at large. If Engineers tend to identify, think about, and solve problems based upon their own perspective (and being human beings it is a certainty that they largely do), then the field of Engineers being subsidized by public money will not equally serve the interests of female members of the public. In that light, reserving some spots for female Engineers is "discrimination against men", only in a similar justifiable way that a strip club serving straight male clients hires female strippers.

In sum, not only is it highly questionable how much a lower ATAR translates into post degree Engineering capabilities, even in the decontextualized vacuum of academic work, but further, differences in those capabilities may not translate into difference in the quality of actual Engineering work performed in the real world where drive, social skills, perspective, and access to relevant but usually overlooked user experiences all interact to determine the ultimate "quality of Engineers" produced by that system.

Then lower the bar for all entrants.

That doesn't follow, and shows a basic failure of statistical understanding on your part, and fallacious reasoning in going between the general and the specific. Just b/c a lower entrance score does not automatically translate into a lower quality Engineer, doesn't mean that lower aggregated average scores won't on produce a lower aggregate average quality of Engineer. It just means that in particular cases and subgroups of cases, especially under particular circumstances, there is not valid basis to presume that a lower score will "with mathematical certainty" translate into those people being lower quality than Engineer with higher scores (but also different other qualities) would have been.

The Acts were created for stopping the otherwise rampant discrimination that has occurred for centuries and would still be occurring against women and minorities. Since there were virtually no instances of white males being the victims of discrimination, the Acts clearly were not created to solve a problem that did not exist.

The Acts protect all genders, ethnicities, etc. This was deliberate. If the commonwealth Sex Discrimination Act was meant to protect only women, it not be written as it is.

People do things to solve problems that actually exist. And when people are describing their solution to a known problem, they don't specify which non existent problems their solution wasn't intended to apply to. Also, virtually all laws are worded more generally than the particular problems they were designed to fix. This gives the greatest latitude in being able to apply them to unforeseen circumstances where relevant. But that general wording should not be mistaken for the law's original intent, otherwise you wind up with misapplications of the general to the specific, which is a pervasive problem in law enforcement. In addition, the Acts were not created to due to isolated, context-specific acts of bias, but to address a systematic pervasive problem of inequality caused by nearly all acts of discrimination were targeted against particular groups by the group in power. General wording ensures that the laws apply no matter what group winds up in majority power. However, when the effects of the prior discrimination continues to have material impact on causing the same old problem, then isolated, context-specific efforts to undo (aka, reverse) those problems are clearly not what the Acts were intended to prohibit.

However, those centuries of discrimination shaped the entire culture and put in place entrenched inequalities that continue to have impacts even when overt acts of such discrimination are removed, and will continue to do so for likely as or more centuries than that discrimination was openly allowed. Some forms of discrimination that favors those historically harmed groups are thought to be useful if not neccessary to stop that continued momentum of past discrimination and reverse it's harmful effects. Yes, these acts of reverse discrimination

They're discrimination, not "reverse" discrimination.

They are discrimination designed to be in the reverse direction of the centuries (and up until today) of misogynistic discrimination against women that has reduced their representation in particular endeavors. So, the term "reverse discrimination" is accurate and conveys the huge objective difference between it and the traditional discrimination that caused the problem these policies are intended to solve.

do violate the general principle of fairness to individuals, but they do so in an effort to mitigate the continued harms done to people from the centuries of violations of that same principle, and it is that harm that anti-discrimination laws were created to prevent.

The immense difference, lies in the clear ethical difference in goal and intent, with historical discrimination designed to cause harm to select outgroups

Historical discrimination was not "designed" to cause harm to outgroups, at least not all the time or as its main intention.

Of course it was. The people it harmed were (and still are by most conservatives) viewed as inherently lesser. The discrimination was designed to ensure that they were treated as lesser, which by definition causes them harm. Simultaneously, it was designed to create inequality in economic and political power, which is also by definition a harm to those given less of it. That is the exact opposite of this present type of favoritism which is designed to reduced those very inequalities caused by those past discrimination.

based on beliefs they are inherently less capable or deserving, while the efforts to discriminate in favor of those previously harmed groups is done to undo centuries of harm, without belief in any group being less deserving or capable, and without malice toward those members of the majority group that are negatively impacted.

Granted, one can make a reasoned argument that the long term impact of such well intentioned efforts to reverse the harm of past discrimination is ultimately negative and counterproductive, and that any gains are outweighed by those costs (which I myself have argued elsewhere). But one cannot reasonable equate the bigotry and selfish malice that motivates traditional discrimination of the majority against minorities with far more noble and well intentioned efforts to stop the momentum of past injustices that continue to cause harm by temporarily inverting who gets the advantages of favoritism.

You believe their intentions are noble because they claim they are. I do not see the intention as noble: I see them as thoroughly self serving with no actual evidence for the goodness or nobleness of their intentions.

Well then, it is rather sad that you don't believe that it is noble to stop the continued objective material harm that continues to be caused by centuries of extreme systematic and often violent discrimination against women and non-whites in nearly every facet of society.
That this is the goal of these policies is beyond rational dispute. This is proven by their very targeted application to situations where there has been clear discrimination resulting in large inequalities and under-representation (rather than trying to make existing inequalities even larger as is the case with all traditional discrimination the Acts were intended to stop).

This lowering of standards will not ratchet up women engineers to fifty percent of graduates. If the policy is to remain in place until that happens, the policy will be with us until the heat death of the universe.

Non-sequitur:No one claimed that a 50/50 split in Engineering is the endgame, simply to offset the extreme under-representation caused by historical and current bigotries and discrimination that impede female entry into and success in the field. Granted, there is no data telling us what the representation would and should be in the absence of all those countless discriminatory effects. So, the policy is just giving a relative few additional women the opportunity to try and enter the field, if they are willing and able. It will likely only result in a couple % boost to the female Engineers in Australia.

 

[TV and credit cards]

Dr. Agarwal makes a good point that I think is being discounted. Bringing a variety of cultures and gender to the table gives a greater variety of opinions and approaches to problem solving than you might not get from a room full of, male engineers all from the same socioeconomic background. I would think this would be an even greater problem in more homogenous cultures.

That that apply to fields where women are overrepresented or only to engineering?

It applies to fields where diversity would benefit the field. For example, females make up 90% of nurses but I don’t think the field would necessarily benefit from more male nurses.

Should admission standards be lower for men in fields where there are more women than men?

It can be as an incentive to enter a particular field, like psychology. Though this may not address the underlying problem, it works toward getting gender representation where it’s needed.

 

[Toni]

It applies to fields where diversity would benefit the field. For example, females make up 90% of nurses but I don’t think the field would necessarily benefit from more male nurses.

I definitely can see areas which would particularly benefit from more male nurses.

I think society would benefit from becoming a place where more men who wished to become nurses felt free to pursue that interest rather than a more 'manly' one.

 

[Jolly_Penguin]

I think society would benefit from becoming a place where more men who wished to become nurses felt free to pursue that interest rather than a more 'manly' one.

I agree. But I don't believe men should have a lower entry requirement than women to get into nursing schools, or that a bunch of female applicants should have their applications randomly rejected because they are women, so more men are admitted. Do you?