This College Professor Made Some Very Disparaging Remarks About Women In STEM At A Recent Conference

When you get knocked down, shake the whole system up on your way back up. During the National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, a Boise State University professor used his privileged position in academia and society to promote his toxic agenda. What was his main argument?

Women were not well-suited for careers in historically male-dominated fields, such as engineering, law, and medicine.

His position assumes a meritocracy rather than a system that has and will continue to leverage whiteness and maleness against all other intersections of identity.

Not only does gender not determine a person’s potential, but sex does not determine their gender.

But Yenor’sYenor’s argument is utterly reliant on biologically-disproven sexist assumptions, implying that harmful generalizations are effective when applied to an entirely autonomous group of people.

Yenor is a professor in the university’s politics department and appeared to entirely dismiss his female students’ potential success in the field.

In his speech, he said that “independent” women are “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome.”

Besides the implied condescension, a young person aspiring to improve the world around her could potentially take this as a compliment.

After all, how do you make positive change if you are not at least willing to “meddle” in inequitable practices or “quarrel” with those who state that things should remain as they always have, despite issues of prejudice embedded in every traditional academic discipline (including the sciences)?

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