Affirmative Action’s Downhill Grade

The #woke folks at the University of Technology Sydney have a stunning and brave idea to promote gender equality and support women. They plan to admit into engineering courses those with ATAR scores up to 10 points below the cutoff for men.

Even though this will  lower the average caliber of admitted students, UTS Director of Women in Engineering and IT, Dr Arti Agarwal, claims that will actually improve the quality of buildings and design.”Lots of research has shown that teams are more productive when they are gender-balanced: they come up with better ideas and better solutions,” she asserts.

Dr Agarwal might be referring to research like that conducted by London Business School which found men and women working in tandem can boost productivity since gender parity is said to undermine ‘groupthink’ and might encourage more thorough and critical decision-making. But this effect is likely to be negated when adjusted for lower academic ability which results from lower academic…