Discrimination Against Males in the Contemporary Sciences

Discrimination against women in the sciences may have been prevalent fifty years ago, but it is not the case today. If anything, the trend has shifted in the opposite direction: an equally unjustified, equally harmful discrimination against males.

Though Rosalind Franklin, one of the co-discoverers of the DNA molecule, had been discriminated against in the 1950s, the culture of fifty years later displays a startling inversion of that trend, which may be even more devastating to scientific progress and individual opportunity. Far from being discriminated against in the sciences, women today have obtained an institutionally privileged position while males are steadily becoming the new underclass.

From the earliest years of school, girls are given plentiful opportunities to attend "Women in Science" conferences barred to males, no matter what the merits or the curiosity of the latter. Colleges practice gender-based affirmative action with great rigor in the medical schools and science departments, as if gender was at all relevant to one's performance in a scientific field, and as if females' "gender identity" were somehow more desirable than that of males.

In the meantime, the intellectual paradigm of today seeks further to entrench the matriarchal society. Feminists like Katharine McKinnon deride Classical science and Newtonian objectivity as "a male attempt to rape nature" and seek to bring about a more "feminine" approach, which they define as a state of passive submission to natural cataclysms and the uncertainty of the ecosystem.