Yesterday the Office for Civil Rights in the Obama administration’s Education Department sent out a “Dear Colleague” letter on “gender equity” in career and technical education. The accompanying press release ties this in with the White House’s “United State of Women” summit, which immediately raises eyebrows: Why is this “significant guidance” regarding, supposedly, complying with the law being timed to coincide with a political event?
Oh, well. As you might expect, the principal bogeyman here is not having enough females in auto repair programs and not enough males in nursing programs — that sort of thing. It’s made clear that mere equal opportunity is not enough if there aren’t equal results accompanying it, and that you better get your numbers right.
Some examples: States must “meet negotiated targets for participation and completion rates of males and females in programs that are nontraditional for their sex“; “Despite efforts to increase enrollment of male and female students in fields that are non-traditional for their sex, disparities persist in certain fields”; and so let’s “tak[e] proactive steps to expand participation of students in fields where one sex is underrepresented.”
There are also a couple of warnings about “implicit bias” and “ambient bias.”
One way to ensure that the numbers come out right is to take the beloved (to the Obama administration) “disparate impact” approach to civil-rights enforcement. Even though the language of Title IX prohibits only actual “disparate treatment” on the basis of sex, the educrats and their rules and regulations look askance at any policy that has a disproportionate effect. It doesn’t matter if the policy is nondiscriminatorily written, intended, and applied.
Thus: “Recipients also may not use any test or criterion for admission to a school or degree program that has a disproportionately adverse effect on individuals of one sex unless certain criteria are met” — i.e., “A school may use such a test or criterion for admission [only] if it is shown to predict validly success in the education program or activity in question and alternative tests or criteria that do not have such a disproportionately adverse effect are shown to be unavailable” (emphasis added).
Here’s a specific example the letter helpfully gives: “A community college requires students who wish to enroll in its construction management program to have taken classes in construction technology in high school. Few female students are enrolled in the college’s construction management program. Each year a number of female students who express interest in the program are not able to enroll because they did not take classes in construction technology in high school. [OCR will] prohibit schools from using admissions criteria that have a disproportionate adverse effect on students of one sex unless the criteria are validated as essential to participate in the program and are shown to predict success in the program.”
Gotta meet those quotas, interest and qualifications be damned.