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The Push For Quotas For Women In Science
mlimber writes "The NYTimes has a story about how Congress has quietly begun to press for an equal number of women in the hard sciences and engineering under Title IX, which is best known for mandating numerical equality for boys' and girls' sports for institutions that accept federal funding. The problem is, the article says, it is not merely that women face discrimination from male colleagues, though that is often true, or that they are discouraged from pursuing these fields. Rather, women with aptitude in these areas often simply have other interests and so pursue their education and careers in other fields like law, education, or biology. Opponents of this plan, including many women in scientific fields, say implementing sex-based quotas will actually be detrimental because it will communicate that the women can't compete on even terms with men and will be 'devastating' to the quality of science 'if every male-dominated field has to be calibrated to women's level of interest.'"
Law, psychology, education, journalism, etc. are dominated by women. Should we expect to see male quotas there?
So they object because a) It will make it seem that women need a leg up, and b) they'll have to dumb down science to give women a leg up. I don't particularly believe the second, but if it is true, that would mean the first is just an accurate appraisal of reality.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
The only way to achieve true equality between genders is to treat them the same.
How about putting those in positions who have earned them, regardless of age, sex or race, instead of mandating a certain ratio. If anything, the mandated ratio will foster more discrimination because of the perceived view that they "didn't earn it".
Hi, I Boris. Hear fix bear, yes?
Since the interest isn't equal, this could conceivably deny young men education in science simply because there weren't enough women to match. Oh well, not like much of our lawmakers care about science education anyway...
Why is this so terrible to admit? It's obvious to everyone, yet all these PC jerks want to deny it.
Trouble is, you are confusing the end result with the root cause.
What these "PC jerks" believe is that women and men are socially conditioned to have different interests -- in other words, it just ain't natural. The concern is that the social conditioning is detrimental. That stereotypical "women's interests" are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical "men's interests."
Agreed. There are fewer women in science and technology not because they lack the ability, but because they lack the interest. This is not a bad thing, but too often it gets interpreted as an issue of perceived inferiority.
Quotas are never a good idea. They spawn resentment from those being left out and imply that those in need of a quota wouldn't be good enough to get in without it. Equality is giving everyone a fair and equal opportunity. Besides, this does nothing to fix the fundamental problem: there are fewer women because they are less interested. If the government wants to start a program to get more women into science and engineering fields, it should be aimed at young kids. Get elementary, middle and high school girls excited about going into these fields and the numbers will grow.
-- Anyone who has never made a mistake has never tried anything new. -- Albert Einstein
50% women; 50% men?
So? That still means they have different interests. If the reason for that is that women are encouraged to be interested in non-scientific fields, fine, you can address that issue all you want. Forcing women into science if they are not interested, or keeping men out because of a need to meet quotas for female enrollment, doesn't suddenly cause women to be interested in those fields.
Honestly, why is that so hard to admit?
Palm trees and 8
8 hours? I want to work where you work! Seriously, at least in the US, the insanely long hours, total lack of respect, and having to watch as the idiot "manager" gets tons of money while the scientist/engineer, while not doing bad, isn't making nearly as much despite doing all the work is probably a bigger turn off for women(and many men for that matter) than almost anything else.
Monstar L
Quotas are just discrimination by another name. Requiring employers to hire based on any criteria other than an applicant's qualifications is a terrible thing to do to anyone already in that profession, especially the members of whatever group is getting the preferential treatment. Any woman employed in the sciences will suddenly come under suspicion as to wether she can actually do the work, or just got the job because of the quota.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
Many organizations that try to encourage women to enter the physical sciences and engineering tend to generate a lot of extra work for women who are already in those fields. They expect these women to drop what they're doing and sit on committees, speak to high school crowds, participate in a disproportionate number of peer reviews for other women (to keep panel sex ratios "fair"), etc.. The list goes on.
These women, having "made it" themselves, often don't feel that sexual discrimination is still a significant issue in their field. However, they still feel pressured to participate lest they be labeled "anti-feminist". I wouldn't be surprised if some women who have had success in the physical sciences have, when possible, fled to a less male-dominated field just to lighten their workloads.
While it's certainly a good thing to ensure that there is a level playing field in male dominated fields, some of these organizations really ought to back off and let women in science and engineering concentrate on their work instead of wasting their time and holding them back with nonsense. Make no mistake, if you saddle a woman with 20+ hours/week of extra duties just because she's a woman, you're no better than the "evil oppressing misogynists" you think you're fighting.
I say we put quotas on Congress, first; talk about your "boys clubs"...
Why don't they get their own house in order?
-- Terry
Undoubtedly the late stages of pregnancy and the early stages of Motherhood are challenging, but we are talking about a few months.
I don't think that motherhood alone is a serious barrier to getting a PhD.
The challenges of getting good childcare, and having sufficiently supportive male partners - now we're talking...
Oh - but implementing social programs would cost money - but enforcing quotas is "free"
Nullius in verba
That still means they have different interests.
Perhaps its not clear to you that similar arguments were made about black people not so long ago. "They just aren't interested in white-collar jobs. Can't you just admit that blacks and whites are different?"
Forcing women into science if they are not interested, or keeping men out because of a need to meet quotas for female enrollment, doesn't suddenly cause women to be interested in those fields.
Of course that is a vast over-simplification, but feel free to joust at all the strawmen riding windmills that you wish.
Of course that is a vast over-simplification
Oh, and blocking men from hard science jobs so that you can fill those same slots with whatever women you can come up with isn't a vast over-simplification?
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Sure, we should not be putting up barriers to girls, but we should not paint engineering pink to attract more girls. Here in New Zealand there has been a slow shift in medicine from males to females. New Zealand now graduates more female medical doctors than male.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
That stereotypical "women's interests" are less valued and thus less rewarding than stereotypical "men's interests."
Personally I always thought of it as the other way around. Culture didn't force women to have less valuable interests, but rather it took interests that women already had and devalued them socially. So now you have a bunch of people running around and freaking out trying to force all of society into a "superior" masculine role.
In a male dominated society, of course you'd expect a widespread belief that male interests and are superior and therefore "more rewarding" and "valuable". So as you see, these gender quotas are just symptoms of a very deep rooted form of misogyny that is so pervasive that even women buy into it.
The success of women in law, medicine, and life sciences strongly supports the argument that discrimination and cultural bias are not significant barriers to women, but that the paucity of women in many fields of engineering is due to inherent tastes.
If there are more males than females pursuing a given career path, there are bound to be disproportionately more males than females succeeding in pursuing that career path. (Note that the reverse is also true.)
This would be false if and only if the group less inclined to pursue the career path were actually significantly better suited to the career path.
You see, if both groups follow the same curve for quality, the group that is larger is going to have more people who are at the high quality end of the curve (and at the low quality end of the curve, though this is irrelevant). Thus you get a disproportionate success rate on top of their already larger numbers.
Trying to force ratio changes at the stage of hiring can only lead to reduced numbers of good people or reduced pay (and maybe both). I'm all for encouraging fair opportunities, but the work has to be done years before the job hunt begins.
I can't speak for the engineers, but I think a reasonable case could be made that scientific careers are indeed poorly accessible for women. Because they are, generally speaking, not very family friendly: The standard assumption is that young scientists are willing to work long and irregular hours for modest pay and put up with a long series of short-term funding and temporary contracts. Scientific careers are high-effort, high-risk, and even many men feel that this kind of work culture is not very compatible with family life and responsible behaviour towards their children, and abandon academic research for industry jobs.
However, instituting quota for women seems to be very much the wrong answer, and one that is likely to be treated with some contempt by female scientists. However, call me a cynic, I doubt Congress really cares about that. Female scientists are not a large voting block. And the lawyers who dominate the political professions are, in the depths of their soul, probably not convinced that science really matters that much. (Well, certainly not as much as lawyering.) Defining quota seems a typically lawyerly answer to me.
Besides, in the case of the USA, the country doesn't just have a shortage of female scientists but plainly a shortage of scientists, albeit one that is much alleviated by immigration. The real answer is in making scientific careers more attractive. The reason why Congress is not considering this is not difficult to figure out: It would cost money, if only a modest amount, and any results would only be visible after they have left office.
Which is a load of bullshit -- I can not recall a single instance during school where a female was ever discouraged from any math or science pursuits, but many where they were encouraged just as much as any boy would've been.
My sister was pretty good with math and science -- growing up I was in advanced math classes the whole time and would teach her things 3 years before she'd actually get to them in school. Guess what, she got to college and got a Biology degree.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
for a start, no one is proposing women should be kept out of these jobs. what they are in fact proposing is that sexual discrimination against men is ok. if it's a cultural "weakness" in america that causes women to avoid science, then spend money getting them interested in highschool and even earlier. don't deny anyone based on gender, it's wrong no matter what spin you try put on it.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
If universities are forced to ensure that the gender of athletes is proportional to the rates of enrollment, regardless of actual interest, then I don't see why they shouldn't have Men's Studies programs to mirror Women's Studies, regardless of actual interest.
This is because feminism was never actually about equality, but improving the social status of women. Nothing wrong with that in and of itself - I don't see why the NAACP should take it upon itself to stick up for Latinos, for example. Whereas the goal of feminism is gender equality, but is really only about improving things for women.
Take the suffragist movement, for example. It was started at a convention in 1848, finally succeeding on a national scale with the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920. Know what else happened in that time? The Civil War and World War I. Note that suffragists didn't demand the right to be drafted with the right to vote. Ditto that for WWII, the Korean War, and Vietnam. Hmm.
Today, breast cancer research receives far more money than prostate cancer research, even though prostate cancer kills about as many men as breast cancer kills women. Many states have an Office of Women's Health, but only New Hampshire has an Office of Men's Health - and it had to start without any funding.
Men are far and away the #1 victim of assaults and murders and make up at least 40% of domestic violence victims, yet Congress passes a Violence Against Women Act.
But back to school - yes, the vast majority of PhD's are men - but men also round out the bottom of the scale with the most mental disabilities. And if these people were really concerned about equity, they'd be doing something about the 60/40 female/male disparity in overall enrollment.
Which isn't to say that women haven't gotten a raw deal, the point is that men have too. Feminism needs to go away, and be replaced with straight up egalitarianism.
Which is a load of bullshit -- I can not recall a single instance during school where a female was ever discouraged from any math or science pursuits,
Would you have even recognized it if happened? You think it is as simple as some authority figure telling a girl she's just no good at science?
Its a lot more subtle and a lot more pervasive than that. Like the relatively few number of women portrayed in those jobs in movies and television.
Equal rights:
Man: has to earn his job, being better then all other applicants (woman and men the same)
Woman: only has to be the best woman in the list to get the job.
This isn't equal rights, at best its equal numbers, and pissing on the rights of men to actually get the job when they are the best candidate, EVEN when all other employed are male, and EVEN when going up against a female candidate.
But they again the US is fucking up everything anyways, in a cuple of years, only hermaphrodites will be allowed to run for precidency.
I'll clarify: men and women have different interests. Doesn't matter what the cause is, quotas are not a way to change those interests, just to piss off all the people who have no legitimate bias.
If it is a result of social conditioning, then the way to actually solve it is to stop conditioning girls to dislike/fear science and math. Perhaps we could start by not making shows that cater to teenage girls be centered around fashion.
It is inherently misguided to assume that, whenever there is an imbalance in gender, race, or any other factor in a given field, it is a result of bias by the "gatekeepers" of that field. Sometimes, there is a legitimate imbalance in the interest in that field, to say nothing of the reason for that imbalance.
Palm trees and 8
Why do we want women in sciences and engineering?
Follow the money. Industry wants this badly. Why? Supply and demand for jobs. With the current demand for workers and limited supply, wages stay up. Increase the supply of workers and the wages go down.
In other words, more women in sciences and engineering means less money for you, me, and her, but more money for big business.
And you just proved his point. You just told half of the population that if they want to work in research related fields, they can't have a natural born child. It doesn't affect men, but this might be a real problem with some women.
I finally updated my sig, but now it's lame.
Women are less interested than men in sports as a general rule. A lot of schools have to beg women to join teams just to try to get "equity." Of course most Americans believe in equality of opportunity, not outcome, the latter smacking of Marx.
Just as female fashion models make a lot more than their male counterparts, college (and pro) sports are gender driven. Nobody is suggesting that there be affirmative action for male models.
And spare me this silly "society makes the genders different" nonsense. There are innate differences between the sexes! Go to a fourth grader's birthday party and see. The boys are raising hell and the girls are sitting around talking. Give a little boy a doll, he burns it or rips off the head. Give a little girl a firetruck, she names it and puts it to bed.
Men and women are different, deal with that inconvenient truth. Different DOES NOT MEAN unequal.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Then stop slashing research funding.
Seriously, right now we reject 7 out of 8 K01 and a similar number of R01 grant applications at NIH and NIA.
Which means they leave hard science and tell their friends and younger female relatives not to bother.
You can't raise a kid without funding for your research.
Period.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Just ask any parent.
Why do think that anecdotal behavior of children who exist in the current system of social conditioning somehow proves that social conditioning does not exist?
It is not anecdotal. Ask any parent for God's sake, or any day care worker. Men and women have genetic and hormonal differences. Have you never even met a woman before? How can you even argue this?
When in a large group together, all the boys do one thing and all the girls do another thing, sure seems like a strong argument for the existence of social conditioning
It is also a strong argument for explaining to you the difference between correlation and causation.
that girl who wants to run around and raise hell is shamed into behaving like a good little girl and that boy who wants tuck his firetruck into bed is laughed at.
Surely you have no kids and do not work around them. Put your slide rule and feminist studies book away, and go take a day care worker to lunch and ask her what she (yes, she, since they rarely let men work at such places - so much for men conditioning these stereotypes!) has to say about innate differences. Then you'll see what it's like to be laughed at.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
Here's how the genius program worked with regard to university places to study medicine in the UK...
University recruitment was non gender biased. It was simply a case of less women had the grades in hard sciences and the interest to apply than men did.
The universities got quotas.
With admissions largely based on grades, the only way to get the number of women up was to lower the requirements for women. Typically an A average for men became a B average for women.
Except then they had less able female students failing out of their courses at a much higher rate than more able men.
So they lowered the grade requirements through the whole course. If 90% was an A for a male student, 80% was good enough for a female to get an A.
Universities achieved their directive of educating as many females as males.
And then no one wanted to hire female doctors because they knew an "A" was much easier for women to achieve and thus they were less likely to be as well qualified as a male with a slightly lower grade.
This ended up screwing the bright female doctors. The ones who could get that same A grade entry, who kept getting 90%+, now had the same "A" that was considered worthless as the ones who got in on Bs and kept making 80%. Thus the bright female doctors got tarred by the same denial based system.
If you want to fix a problem, you have to fix it from the ground up. Don't ever lower entry and passing requirements for any subset. If you're finding out a subset don't apply as much and don't do as well, figure out what the root of that is and fix it.
Don't let women slack their way through science degrees and give them a meaningless certificate. Find out why science doesn't appeal to girls much earlier in their academic lives and challenge that.
Don't give half price admission to universities to someone because of their skin color. Look at what the roots of that skin color not getting to university really are. If a disproportionate number are failing because they're disproportionately coming from lower income areas and schools in those areas don't turn them out at the same levels as schools in good areas... address those schools. If the root cause goes deeper, look deeper. If their community doesn't value education, look at how to change that perception, rather than making a blanket racial based change way down the line.
As an aside, why do these programs always seem to only go one way? No one suggests nursing should have quotas to force the schools to lower entry requirements for males... it's accepted that more men aren't interested for reasons that kick in far earlier in life. Yet, if women aren't interested in a science degree... that's something that has to be forced on schools.
If you're really stupid enough to slap a quota based bandaid on a problem, rather than addressing underlying causes, at least be consistent enough to apply it to all course types. That's at least more consistent than just picking one minority (though, technically, there are slightly more women than men) that you feel is underserved and making the situation even more discriminatory, just in new ways.
Wait, being "discouraged" and being discriminated against based on sex are two different things. The former can be attenuated by raising strong youth which, I submit, is important in that if you can't buck up and get yourself into the position, you're going to do a disservice to your field by showing the same lack of guts in furthering your conclusions in the face of detractors. The latter is illegal in the US, despite being difficult to prove.
As the lady a few up mentioned, there's a whole lot more of a problem with people not strong enough to be doing hard work being given the position on a silver platter without having to prove themselves than there is with outright discrimination. Want an example? Congress. 'Nuff said.
Except that one night at the club does not foster resentment by men. Free tuition for many years will undoubtedly foster an enormous resentment among those not getting free tuition, especially if the beneficiaries of that tuition don't have to show an economic disparity in order to receive it. It is difficult to question programs that allow poor people to go through college for free without sounding selfish; it is a little less difficult to say, "Why should that woman, whose family is making more than mine, get free tuition when I don't?"
Like I said, this problem cannot addressed at the college level. It must be addressed at the middle school level, right when kids hit puberty. The shows that target middle school and high school girls should contain subtle hints that science and engineering are not "just for men" if we are going to close this gap. Why aren't the "mother" characters on these shows portrayed as computer programmers or physics researchers? (It doesn't matter if it is an accurate depiction of reality, because such shows almost never reflect the reality of the world anyway).
Palm trees and 8
That has been my experience. Not at my current job, but every other job I have every had. Part the problem gender quotas is that the people in favor of them don't seem to be able to do simple math. They like to count the number of women, and the number of men in the country, and use that as a basis for the number of people that could go into the field. What they fail to account for is that PEOPLE are lazy. Most people, if given the opportunity, would take a steady stream of cash that comes with no work over working their ass off. Not all people, but most. Those that would keep working would be less likely to take difficult jobs than easy ones.
In our culture, women do not HAVE to work. There are plenty of men that will happily work two jobs to pay their way as long as they are putting out. This is not a slight against women. It is just a recognition that being a housewife/girlfriend/date or whatever you want to call it, is a job opportunity that is available to most women, and very few men. Given that many PEOPLE who have that opportunity will take it, you will find that the number of women who either get full income through dating/marriage or take less difficult jobs because they can supplement their income via dating/marriage is pretty darn high. In fact, the 'housewife' field is so weighted in women's favor that many people don't even believe that a man can have the job. It is not uncommon for people to see a wife without a job as a housewife, but a husband without a job as a bum. So, right off the bat, you can take half of the women out of the job pool, as they get to retire before they even get started.
Then take the fact that kids see this. Kids know that we live in a society where women who don't work are housewives, and men who don't work are bums. This leads to girls growing up thinking about how rich and handsome her husband will be, and boy growing up thinking about how expensive of a car he can get for picking up girls and in turn, how much money he can make. Does this apply to all kids? Obviously not. But it does apply to the majority of them. This training from a young age of boys to look to making lots of money and working hard, and training girls to exploit those boys. So, as they grow older, you will find more girls who have not invested in learning the things necessary to go into the sciences.
Finally, take the fact that everybody is trying to get what few women are left so that they don't look like they discriminate. This leads to women being able to ride the glass elevator to positions that they could not get if they were men. Would men ride the glass elevator if they could? Sure. Taking the best job you can get is not gender specific, but just like being a housewife, it is an opportunity that is just not presented to men as often as women. Now, if you are the best employer, you might be able to beef up ratio, but the women available just are not there in the numbers for everyone to have very many of them working for them. Plus, every time a woman takes a ride on the glass elevator, it leaves an even bigger gap in the hiring pool for the next level down, who in turn have to lower their standards, and thus create an even bigger gap below them. I figure that this is why the women I have met in tech fields who are higher up on the chain, have been more qualified for the jobs they have than those in the middle and lower levels. The farther down the chain you go, the bigger the disparity between available men and women for the job.
This is why their plan will fail. If Congress wants equal numbers of women in the hard sciences and engineering, they will have to start at the bottom and get more women to pay their own way. They will have to either make being given money/goods for being a housewife/girlfriend/date very unattractive, or figure out a way to convince women that they should start supporting men so that men can be the housewives/boyfriend/date that gets paid for.
There's a simple explanation to this. Black people started out poorer than white people early on in this century. Then, some morons came up with the idea of "welfare" in the 60s during Johnson's term, and then the welfare generation destroyed the black subculture in America by encouraging poor people to NOT work, to NOT get married, to have children out of wedlock (getting married would cause them to lose their benefits), etc. Welfare told black men they weren't important because women could just get a welfare check based on how many kids they had, as long as they stayed unmarried and didn't have a husband contributing an income. Add in drugs and the tax-free money that makes available, and that compounds the problem.
The problem isn't black peoples' genetics, it's that they were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and are victims of a horrible social experiment that discourages personal responsibility and hard work. Lyndon Johnson should be resurrected and then painfully executed for all the things he's done to screw up America, between welfare and Vietnam. I'd rank him as one of the worst Presidents ever, much worse even than Bush.
The less qualified are pushed ahead of the more qualified, just because of gender. How is this not the brazen form of discrimination?
What studies? The ones where women report being more harassed and opressed than men? These self-reporting data cannot be trusted since women tend to be overly sensitive to that sort of thing, and are actively looking for social conflict.
Women are in fact much more sensitive to social conflicts given their brain peculiarities, including differences in dopaminergic innervation, larger size of speech and social centers (up to twice the number of cells of males, which means some women can basically read your mind just by looking at your face), hormonal effects, depression prevalence (x5 times the rate of males), and so on.
I agree that as a woman you probably FEEL you get more discrimination because that's what your brain is wired up to detect, but objectively that doesn't have to be the case.
Obama likes poor people so much, he wants to make more of them.
Would any Slashdotters care to actually see that data before modding up to +5? Or are claims the data exists somewhere now sufficient?
Relax I just want some peanuts.
Actually it was said that blacks where subhumans and ape-like with considerably less intelligence. No one is saying this about women. From my environment I know that people barely get away with the old and tired women + parking let alone asserting that women can't do equal work or aren't smart like men. Someone saying that would get laughed out of the room. I suspect that moving up to higher echelons intelligence wise would amplify this.
I'm convinced though that men and women have genetical differences in cognition and behavior that are far greater than any genetic differences between the different 'races' (black, asian, white etc). It's quite obvious in how women speak differently (not worse!) from men, in any strata of society. Most women I know i.e. (except my mum, go figure) find it hell to sit in front of a computer without any human interaction and much prefer jobs where they meet and communicate to people. In my mind women are the glue that hold society together though elegant webs of social networks and I find it hard to believe that this is not genetically caused. It also perfectly explains why women dislike IT and 'hard' science and tend to go for law, medicine or teaching. There is nothing gained from suggesting to women through quotas that they can only be equal if the go for careers that are not to their liking.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
The "average" man or woman wants to be a doctor, lawyer or business executive. In the case of doctors and lawyers, women are now more successful at getting those degrees than men, and it would not surprise me if its true for business degrees too (it wasn't mentioned in the article).
Not many people, male or female want to become a scientist or engineer. This is the overall problem, and is especially bad when looking just at female numbers...
Linking to a Debra Rolison search isn't nearly enough. She's an advocate and a very good scientist, but she doesn't actually study gender disparity. Post the data. The studies I've heard about have been discredited due to things like "the data getting lost" and adjectives like "possible" turning into "actual" due to some mistake. The data is far less than "copious" that girls are being singled out and discouraged from being physicists.
I would love to have more women working with me (I'm also a physicist). How are quotas going to do that, when we can't recruit women into advanced physics degrees when outreach in middle school, extra funding and administrative support hasn't done it? Really, what do we do? Force them? Hire a biologist and call her a physicist? Your suggestion elsewhere of forced retirements is good, if cold and heartless. Maybe we could go further and just fire every other male professor? Would that really change the culture, or just piss people off and encourage the awful idea that women need some help if they're to compete with men in physics.
The people who know what they're talking about know that the culture of physics has to change. It's not just something easy like "stop being mean to girls."
The schooling is long, you don't get paid well at all, and you have to compete for any scraps of money that may be available. The fight for funding is such that there is enormous pressure to get rid of any student/postdoc/junior faculty who may not make it. Why would anyone want to do this? We can't get enough qualified people from the US to fill open positions. So it's useful for potential immigrants. The rest of us would do it for free if we had to.
As a male, I've had professors tell me I didn't belong in physics, didn't belong in grad school and that I was expected to work 13 out of every 14 days (but only get paid for 20 hours a week). I had one professor tell me I was going to fail his class, and then he gave me an A when I didn't wilt. Most of my classmates didn't fare so well and quit under the pressure. Of the 20 people who started with me in my degree program, 4 have or will get a PhD from the program (true to the statistics, the survivors are 25% women). That's the kind of thing that needs to stop, but it shouldn't stop just for women. You've been through this! Did you feel bad for only the women who were sent crying from the department offices?
We need what biology had a decade ago to get to equality: a good reason to do this. Biology did that by doubling the available funding over the course of 10 years. If departments aren't breaking the budget to keep one more student, there will be less pressure to force out anyone who doesn't desperately want to do physics. That means less abuse, less intense competition and a culture which may not be toxic to women. (It also means a crisis when the funding stops going up, which you see in biology today, but which hasn't hurt gender equality.) Double the funding and put in the quotas, but my guess is you wouldn't need the quotas.
You're making the assumption that these 'female interests' (whatever those are) really are of equal worth to 'male interests' (again, whatever you define those to be). I don't buy that for a minute. Let's take a very stereotypical female interest - child care. Do you believe that is as valuable a skill on the free market as something like the skill of a plumber or a welder? If you said yes, then you are wrong. It is much easier to find someone to baby sit than it is to find someone who is qualified to do the work of a skilled trades person. This has nothing to do with any "very deep rooted form of misogyny", either. It's just a result of the simple fact that the value of a skill is related both to the demand for that skill and the supply of people who can provide it.
The differences in pay for 'women's work' and 'men's work' can be much more easily and simply explained in terms of economics than it can with convoluted and paranoid appeals to 'misogyny' and 'patriarchy'. The 'women's work' people like you so often speak of pays less than 'men's work' - not because we devalue it because such work is typically done by women - but because it's easier to find and replace people for such jobs. It's just that simple. Please leave your paranoid conspiracy theories behind and take a course in basic economics. We've got enough problems in this world without uninformed people dreaming up new ones based on nothing more than their own misunderstanding of how the free market works.