Title IX Redux A correspondent writes:

First you need to wake up and smell da coffee. The elimination of football PERIOD is the hidden agenda of some of the more ardent Title IX sports crusaders. If that is accomplished they will move on to demanding proportionality in physics, engineering, and any high-prestige or high-paying field where they can claim disproportionately low numbers of females. All while keeping wimmin's studies 100% female and supporting the right of the Mary Dalys of the world to refuse to allow males in their classes.

Perhaps I was being unclear: I think that if you keep the funding for football, but remove it from the tally of "men's sports funding", then you'll get a number that is more reasonable. that is, if you set (women's funds) = (men's funds - football funds) that alone would go a long way towards clearing up the problem of cutting teams left and right. I agree that Title IX is a stalking horse for enforced gender equality in every profession, which will doubtless undermine the quality of our engineers/physicists/mathematicians. Perhaps eventually there will be male pressure to break into what will soon become the "matriarchy" of medicine/biology/law...who knows. However...unlike the relentless minority quota pressure, there are many of my colleagues who are less opposed to the pressure to increase the number of women in engineering programs. This is because many of them have grim memories of lonely nights in the basement soldering circuits. There's too much "fraternizing with the enemy" for them to get REALLY worked up over an influx of women. Remember, enforcing gender equality in engineering is unfortunate from society's perspective but not from the perspective of the individual male engineer. Not only will it be easier for the male to do well in school due to decreased competition (especially at elite schools where math ability differences become more important), but they'll be able to practice assortative mating with women who are still quite far out on the right tail of the IQ distribution. La Griffe Du Lion did some sample calculations that seem relevant to this topic, and he estimates a maximum percentage for women in math-intensive disciplines around 22-27%.