OK... not about men's soccer. But that poster around here that hates the hell outta Title IX is just gonna looooooove the latest attempt at equality at all costs. The target? Science. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/15/science/15tier.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin
I hadn't really thought about that because the picture comes from the Tom for Judge website so he already made them public. That said, I wouldn't object if a mod were to remove it. (It's too late for me to edit.)
That would make the whole post irrelevant, as it specifically referred to the girls. EDIT: I just realized that tomforjudge.com is TF's campaign site. If he has the photos up there, what difference does it make that they're here as well? I mean, we made all sorts of jokes about Santorum's brood, but none of it went anywhere near a level of questionable commentary.
In this case, as the article stated, it doesn't seem to make sense to apply Title IX to science. On the personal side, I know a couple of qualified women in science and they are probably better than the men. In fact, I made a comment about one of them getting a position at Columbia that was unrelated to her academic achievement, and she got pissed off (she, as an undergrad, was probably smarter and more capable than the post-doc in the lab). This personal note indicates, to me, that PhD candidates or above in science are either qualified or not, and have very little to do with gender.
I'm in an engineering field, and this article was pretty interesting to me, although I did approach it with loads of scepticism. However, they did do a convincing job of backing up the assertation that once a woman gets a PhD in some of the hard science/engineering fields, she is on an equal footing with with male PhDs when it comes to getting professorships and tenure. That seems slightly inaccurate (there is still disparity at the tenure level), but they did put forward a good argument that it isn't about gender - it is about the fact that there are less female PhDs, ergo there will not be a 50/50 gender split at the professor level. And from my experience, I do kinda see that - if female grad students are 25%, then it is not gender discrimination at the university level that keeps the professor gender ratio at less than 50/50. It did strike me that efforts should be focused on earlier levels (high school, grade school, etc) such that there should ideally be closer to a 50/50 split in academia. Anyway, my personal experience - a female PhD is way more valued than a male PhD - and thus is more likely to get a private industry job. A good friend/coworker of mine was an african-american female PhD working in industry. She was fairly irate that she was always the one asked to do recruiting at college campuses - because she was a exacta/trifecta of diversity. It was like reverse discrimination in her job duties. But basically, my company thought she was great at her job, but really wanted to show her off to demonstrate our company's diversity. And at >$100k/year in industry, she made way more $ than professors - and as a rare commodity (black PhD in hard science), she could make way more money by not being a professor. Expecting a 50/50 split in acedemia is not in line with market forces.
As DJP said, that is the other side that the article did not mention - industry pays more than acedemia. Thus, if a qualified person wants the money, then industry is the best option. Further, what the article doesn't mention, is that it can take up to 10 years for somebody to go from PhD to asst professor. In that time, funding must be found, which is usually a qualifier for an asst professorship. In industry, you jump right in. I have a friend who graduated with a PhD a year+ ago. By the end of this year, she should be making close to $70k. Had she wanted to be a professor, she would still be doing her post-doc at about $35k to $40k. Big difference.
Well, in my unusual field, academia (but perhaps not ivy league institutions) ain't as horrible as you present it - you can possibly get tenure in ~ 5 years, not 10. But yeah - funding = tenure. As a consequence, many BS/MS/PhD go for the $ of industry (immediate payoff, and decent job security) instead of fighting for a potential, but often denied, tenure position. I'm skeptical of imposing a 50/50 gender split in professorships of my field, even though I'm pretty liberal and I am all for equal opportunity. My undergraduate classes had about a 3:1 gender ratio, so you would expect a similar ratio in academia. Any equality focus should be on changing the 3:1 undergraduate ratio (ie, upstream issues), not directed at the PhD/tenure level.