DoubleTake: Discrimination Against Men in

DoubleTake: Discrimination Against Men in College? – One of the virtues of a father-daughter blog is that from time to time you will receive the benefit of two perspectives on the same article or topic for the price of your single subscription to DISCRIMINATIONS. My daughter the libertarian will probably remind me that you’re not paying anything for your subscription, but if she does I would caution her about saying that out loud because, as a believer in the wisdom and sanctity of markets, she no doubt believes that you get what you pay for. Anyway, here’s our first DoubleTake.

John’s Take – I was initially going to post my comments on today’s Washington Post article about the gender gap in higher education as an update to my previous update about Title IX. That still works, so please consider this such an updated update. The WP noted that “the proportion of bachelor’s degrees awarded to women reached a post-war high this year at an estimated 57 percent. The gender gap is even greater among Hispanics — only 40 percent of that ethnic group’s college graduates are male — and African Americans, who are now seeing two women earn bachelor’s degrees for every man.”

These numbers obviously re-enforce my previous point that male “underrepresentation” among college students across the nation is much greater than the alleged “underrepresentation” of females in college athletics that has been much in the news lately as defenders of Title IX have loudly circled their wagons in defense of the old quota-promoting scheme of enforcing it.

Applying the approach of the Title Niners, i.e., that statistical disparities suggest discrimination and substantial disparities prove it, I have asked whether we should regard virtually all of American higher education as engaged in massive sex discrimination against men. (I myself don’t think so, since I believe intent is a crucial element of discrimination, but that’s for another Post post…and another…and….)

Defenders of racial preferences — henceforth I’ll call them preferentialists (I considered the acronym dorps but in a small gesture of civility rejected it) — do not believe intent is required. The whole corpus of disparate impact law is based on the view that policies or practices that are neutral on their face and non-discriminatory in their intent can nevertheless be illegally discriminatory if they have a disparate impact on minorities. This is the sort of complaint, for example, that is frequently lodged against the SAT and other tests. Disparate impact law was legitimized by the Supremes back in 1971 when they held that Duke Power Company’s policy of requiring all employees to have at least a high school diploma or pass an intelligence test violated the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (Griggs v. Duke Power Company, 401 U.S. 424).

Returning to the educational gender gap, this little disparate impact detour suggests some interesting possibilities for the future. With women increasingly “overrepresented” in the pool of college graduates, will employers who require a college degree be found to be engaging in disparate impact discrimination against men?

But wait; there’s more. I said above that preferentialists, lovers of disparate impact theory that they are, do not believe intent is a necessary component of discrimination. That turns out to be true primarily when they are attacking employers and others whose facially neutral policies or practices, adopted with admittedly non-discriminatory intent, result in an “underrepresentation” of minority employee hires or admittees. But when the preferentialists’ own overt racial preference policies are attacked, they defend them by saying they are not discriminatory because they are not motivated by animus against whites and do not stigmatize them. Go figure.

Now comes the ubiquitous