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"The subject is a bit more layered than most people seem to think. The reason that the major engineering schools are at 40% today may be BECAUSE they were only 10% 20 yrs ago.

Traditionally what has happened is that medical school or officers school didn't have as many woman as the PC types thought they should so standards were then dumbed down to "correct" the lack. This makes the educational experience less valuable to merit-minded males and the slide begins."

Your right about why it happened but wrong about how it happened. They don't dumb down the standard for everyone, just for women. I go to the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (the main campus) and we have a very well respected engineering college. We'll the average male engineering student was in the top 5% of their high school graduating class and high (over 30) ACT score. A girl I know in the engineering college, got a scholarship even though she was only the top 15% and 27 ACT. Not only would a male not get in with those scores they wouldn't get a penny in scholarship.

Its affirmative action, even though girls do better in high school, they get an advantage. The reason girls don't go into math and science because on average they aren't interested. As I've gone on in my curriculum the number of girls in my classes shrinks every semester, because many find its not for them and go into another field.

They don't dumb down the standard for everyone...

I understand that but that is actuallly another layer to the problem. When you make a thing leass competitive and outright unfair you lower the standard of ALL candidates (ala the police depts and the military) for, among other reasons the fact that you lose a certain type of candidate, ie; some of the most intelligent and intellectually aggressive males.

I wish I could find the article, but a thoracic surgeon writing in the NY Post a few years ago pointed to this problem in medecine. After the dumbing down to get more females in the 1970's The medicine is becoming glutted with mediocre peditricians and OBE/GYN's and slipping in the high tension areas such as brain surgery, thoracic etc.

Since the Roman army engineering has been a neccessary dicipline for officers but not anymore because...you guessed it...it tended to limit the number of females eligible. Kinda scary, actually.

I never knew until high school that were even was a gender gap for math and sciences, because almost all of my teachers and tutors in those subjects were women. This was in my very non-PC parochial school. I'd suppose women with those strenghts largely choose K-12 teaching because it fits in well with raising a family. All of my teachers with school-age children attended the school.