A computer science professor at the University of Washington has a student revolt on his hands after breaking the politically correct barriers that prevent anyone in academia from disagreeing with a feminist position, ever. UW-Seattle Professor Stuart Reges, apparently under the mistaken impression that academics have a right to express a dissenting opinion on matters of social justice, penned an article on Quillette.com with the title: “Why Women Don’t Code.” And since he didn’t come to the conclusion that women are kept out of the computer programming industry due to THE PATRIARCHY, he is now coming under fire from the leftist mob at his school.
In the article, Reges took the eminently reasonable position that there are not more women in the IT industry because…women don’t particularly WANT to be in the IT industry. “One should never attribute to oppression that which is adequately explained by free choice,” he wrote.
You’d think this would be the kind of message that feminists could get behind. After all, unlike the vast majority of leftist arguments about female oppression, this one doesn’t steal agency away from half the U.S. population. Isn’t that what feminists are always going on about? Agency? Isn’t that what they’re always complaining about when it comes to screenwriters and Hollywood directors who don’t know how to create compelling female characters? Don’t they WANT to be recognized for their ability to CHOOSE? Could have sworn that was a major component of their entire ideology…
But no, not in this case.
“If men and women are different, then we should expect them to make different choices,” he wrote. “It is not lack of ability that causes females to favor non-STEM careers, but rather the greater likelihood that females with high math ability also have high verbal ability and thus can consider a wider range of occupations.”
Sadly, Reges was not familiar with the First Principle of Feminism, which states: Women and men are only different in those cases where men are clearly inferior. While he did his best to couch his theory in terms that lived up to that principle, his students were not fooled. If you say that women are not going into high-paying tech jobs because of some inherent difference in how men and women think…well, you get the kind of backlash that Reges is now getting.
According to Campus Reform, a group calling themselves the Diversity Allies drafted a petition against Reges, calling on the school to condemn the article due to the way it made them “feel.”
“Do you think the university should have an official response to this article?” wrote another anonymous group of students, deeply concerned about this bizarre weed of non-leftism that had grown in their midst.
The university did, indeed, respond, not wanting to court the kind of trouble that other schools have seen when their professors wander off the progressive path.
“Some of you may have read a recent editorial written by an Allen School faculty member about gender diversity in tech,” wrote Hank Levy, director of the UW School of Computer Science. “This is a good time to reaffirm our values. We acknowledge that we have a long way to go, but diversity efforts work. As you can see…women are interested in CS, and they do code!”
And we’ll keep hammering quotas and discriminating against men until we prove it, dammit!
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