It’s always difficult to understand why more women going into the science field is better for the future of science. For a start, we can more or less agree that today we have pretty advanced state of science, at least compared to hundreds (or thousands) years ago, or even compared to an animal kingdom. And ALL these scientific and technological advances have been made by MEN, without a single EXCEPTION. In other words, women haven’t contributed to a single bit to today’s complex science. And now people pretend that increasing women in the ranks of scientists is the single most urgent issue for the future of science. Remind you, women has 0% track record in the science field, but we want to do whatever we could do to increase their number, and reduce the number of men in the field who are responsible for all the advances made in this field in the first place. Is there something wrong here? How we could arrive at such twisted conclusion?

“More female science professor/teacher are needed if women are to get better grades in science.” What a self-serving non-sense.

The fact that female teacher/professor have a tendency to be show more ‘empathy” (as we all know women genetically have plenty of it) towards the student who belong to the same sex, is actually an argument against affirmative action programme for female science teacher/professor. It is abundantly clear that female professors are not capable of evaluating students' grades impartially, it's just that hormones intereferring with objective judgement.

And oh, yes, female students (or female cadets) are too timid and shy to show their true talent in science if their professor were men, ar at least not feminist men. And we want these young female cadets to be the future leader of US armed forces. Joke never ends.

And please, please, for the love of God, don’t tell me that the one of the criteria (or the ONLY criteria) for the outgoing female Xerox CEO in choosing her successor wasn’t a gender. It is the most blatant case of appointing people to senior position based solely on gender. I've never seen a more explicit case of affirmative action at the top level of Fortune 500 companies, and for that reason, I agree with the author that this one os for the record book.

Wow, I see you have studied science carefully.

I had no idea Marie Curie and Barbara McClintock were men.

Curie and McClintock's achievements are impressive, and I fear I may just be opening up a semantic discussion here, but I don't think I'd call their discoveries great.

There's no female Newton or Einstein or Copernicus. Heck, it would be tough to even point out more than a couple female scientists anywhere near on par with the Ohm or Kolmogorov or Prandtls of the world.

I say this not to denigrate the abilities of women. For most of the past millennium science was the hobby of choice of certain wealthy men. After this stopped being the case, the opportunities to forge ahead in science were still given to men nearly exclusively. It is only recently that women were able to contribute to the sciences and much more recently than that even that they were encouraged to do so.

However, this reminds me somewhat of black history month. I roll my eyes as we pretend that the stop light was one of the great modern inventions and George Washington Carver was a man of such achievement that everyone should know his name. Can't we just face up to the fact that certain groups have contributed very little to science and engineering over a long period due to overwhelming discrimination and lack of opportunity?