As we all know, discrimination leads to inefficiency. If you forbid a woman who excels at astrophysics from becoming an astrophysicist simply because she's a woman, there's a welfare loss. I think the same is true if you push someone into doing something they're not very good at and/or interested in.

I understand the blogger's complaint completely. I never quite felt the pressure to excel at math and science because I am a woman necessarily, but I always felt that pressure because it always seemed to me to be more valued by society. There always seemed to be an air of superiority over the social science majors coming from the natural science majors of both sexes when I was at my liberal arts college. When I told my parents what I decided to major in, I got a response "but anyone can be an economics major." (I really disagree with that, btw). Even since I've been out of college I've felt lots of pressure in my career and in grad school to focus on the "hard stuff"- statistics, math, modeling...but I'm starting to realize, shouldn't someone who likes this stuff more be doing it? I think there are PLENTY of women out there who would be happy to pick up the modeling slack if I drop it. And even if a man picks it up instead, fine- if he enjoys it and is good at it, more power to him. We all bring something different to the table.

One of the things that I've discovered since getting a bachelor's degree in British Literature is that our society's focus on math and science to the exclusion of "useless" and "girly" subjects like English means that there are truckloads of people in engineering departments who never learned to write a complete sentence. Part of my job at a university involves proofreading research papers and theses--in fact, I have a ~130-pager sitting on my desk right now. Without my supposedly "useless" punctuation skills, these people wouldn't get degrees, jobs, or tenure.

Which is a pretty good (if late) answer to the question I heard over and over: "So what are you going to do with *that* degree?"

Engineers can learn to punctuate, and even communicate, without studying literature. If the focus in your literature program was on the mechanics of utilitarian writing, then it must have been pretty boring. Good engineering schools now incorporate writing in the curriculum. Even twenty years ago, my alma mater had an English professor assigned full time to the engineering college, just to grade lab reports and technical papers.

Developing writing skills across a variety of subjects, including the arts, helps to grow thinking skills as well. To me, that's the greater advantage of learning about the arts. It's also a part of being a well-rounded, interesting person. Someone once told me that the purpose of a college education is to be good company for yourself.

I agree wholeheartedly that people should be well-rounded in their education for a variety of personal and professional reasons. However, the laserlike focus on math and science as the only worthwhile subjects to study does not produce well-rounded graduates. Instead, it mostly gives me job security.

I coordinate a research program that accepts applications from a wide range of universities and schools, and you are sorely mistaken if you think that good engineering schools incorporate writing in their curricula. (A single mediocre technical writing class, maybe. Any understanding of how language works, unlikely.) When I see an application that doesn't have a sentence fragment in the personal essay, I cheer. Your alma mater pretty much proves my point: have you ever heard of a humanities college assigning a math or science professor to review humanities students' work?

I'm curious how many of those bad writers are non-native English speakers.

As far as sharing skills in the other direction, one trend I've heard of is the beefing up of statistics for journalists and humanities students. The idea here is that innumeracy among the chattering classes is at least as bad as illiteracy among engineers.

Do you expect to find work in your actual field of literature, or are you relying on the nuts & bolts level to earn a living? I wonder if the advice that the blogger found offensive was possibly geared more toward financial independence, rather than feminizing the male-dominated world. High earners have more choices.

People who can write are a dime a dozen. Competent technical people are not. I have worked in Talent Aquisition for three fortune 500 companies and a few high tech start ups. I can tell you from experience that we have to fight tooth and nail to hire the best engineering students and pay them top dollar to attract them. Meanwhile, the art history or psychology or political science or english lit grads break down our door to take a 40k administrative assistant job.

The vast majority of the bad writers are home-grown Americans whose sole language is English. Most of them are white men.

I think the statistics trend is a great idea, and one that's especially good for journalists.

I don't expect to find work in the field of literature--for one, I'd take a depressingly large pay cut, and I don't think I'd find a lot of satisfaction in either academia or teaching English on the high-school level. I do, however, really enjoy the nuts and bolts level, and not just the earning-a-living part. The people whose papers I correct genuinely appreciate what I'm doing for them, and they often end up learning a bit about English as a result. (I can't tell you how many times I've heard someone say, "So *that's* how you're supposed to use a semicolon!")

I don't doubt that the offensive advice was geared towards financial independence. Far too many women do end up in jobs that don't pay very well due to their majors. The bigger question, I think, is why those jobs don't pay very well. Is it because writing is less valuable, or because engineering is more useful?

Or is it because English programs are still mostly filled with female students and engineering programs are still mostly filled with male students? Do we automatically devalue something just because a lot of women do it? (Those aren't rhetorical questions, by the way; I see that another poster has already stated his take on it.)

la.donna-

to reinforce your point, I used to work with this BRILLIANT girl from MIT. Native speaker. Something like a 3.9 GPA coming out of college.

She would literally RUN from anything involving writing. She had an awful experience writing her grad school entrance essays. She knew her lack of writing skills as well, and seemed to feel bad about it.

Interestingly, we had the same major as undergrads, but I went to a liberal arts college. We had the same amount of quantitative work in our major, but I had infinite more writing experience to go with it. She said that as a kid, she was really good at math, so no one noticed that she wasn't good at English or tried to improve her English skills, because once you're good at math, who cares what else you can do?

I agree with the poster that said that anyone CAN BE made into a good writer. But I also agree that anyone CAN BE made good at math. If your initial strength is in one, there's no reason to be afraid of the other math is just as easy to learn. Hell, I did. Imagine my surprise when I showed up at grad school and all the knew people I met saw me as "the math person." If my high school teachers could have seen that!

But it's true that some people are more comfortable with numbers and some are more comfortable with words. I can't think in numbers, but I can still solve a math problem. But while I'm a good writer, I could never feel as comfortable with foreign languages as some people I know. But people shouldn't think they "can't" do the other one. I'm so glad I learned at some point along the way that it's just plain stupid to be afraid of numbers.

But as I mentioned above, some people (even women!) are afraid of words!