Yale Law School student Amelia Rawls complains in the Post about the callousness of the high-achievers of her generation:

…[S]ometimes some of these students will denounce world hunger but be unfriendly to the homeless. They will debate environmental policy but never offer to take out the trash. They will believe vehemently in many causes but roll their eyes when reminded to be humble, to be generous and to “do what is right.”

Maybe they will gladly accept positions at prestigious universities that will continue their privileged positions in society. Will Ms. Rawls gladly accept a high salaried position upon graduation, a salary only possible by charging clients outrageous fees?

Nonetheless, her point is good.  Many people adopt fashionable causes with little sincere regard to those they claim to represent.  A recent Slate article discusses George Orwell’s complaint about England’s condescending Socialists:

[George] Orwell also rails against the condescension many on the left display toward those they profess to care most about. Describing a gathering of leftists in London, he says, “every person there, male and female, bore the worst stigmata of sniffish middle-class superiority. If a real working man, a miner dirty from the pit, for instance, had suddenly walked into their midst, they would have been embarrassed, angry and disgusted; some, I should think, would have fled holding their noses.”

Grave hypocrisy of this sort is the result of the fair weather adoption of popular causes.  For instance, it may be all the rage to adopt environmentalism (accompanied by the obligatory complaints against the Bush Administration, and installation of CFLs), just so long as one doesn’t have to give up a spacious suburban home and personal cars.

Our civil rights vocabulary contains a vague word called representation. When investigating the possibility of discrimination—be it in access to higher education or in hiring decisions—one piece of evidence often considered is the representation of certain groups of people. A particular group’s “underrepresentation” is considered evidence of illegal discrimination. Though this is taken as a matter of fact, I disagree.

A group’s representation, if below its proportion of the total population, is not necessarily a sign of illegal discrimination. Though states and the Federal Government prohibit denying access to education or employment on account of race and sex, the lack of women or certain minority groups at a particular workplace or university does not necessarily prove discriminatory practices.

The American has a good article about attempts to apply Title IX, a Federal statute requiring equal commitments to women’s and men’s sport programs at schools and universities, to the math, science, and engineering faculties. If women account for 60% of a university’s student body, shouldn’t they account for 60% of math majors, too? Supporters of Title IX’s expansion say yes. The American is not so enthusiastic:

If numerical inferiority were sufficient grounds for charges of discrimination or cul­tural insensitivity, Congress would be holding hearings on the crisis of underrepresentation of men in higher education. After all, women earn most of the degrees—practically across the board. What about male proportionality in the humanities, social sciences, and biol­ogy? The physical sciences are the exception, not the rule.

Does academia hold a bias against women in the physical sciences, but an overall bias against men in everything else? I doubt it. The rarity of women in the upper echelons of math, science, and engineering does not necessarily prove systematic discrimination. However, nor does it prove differences in innate scientific abilities. It could just be that in the aggregate, women and men tend to have different academic and career interests. Though the divergence in these interests may be social influence, it is not so clear that discrimination in academia or among job recruiters is the cause of all this. As a result, disparities in proportional representation may have little to do with bias on the part of the science faculty and more to do with self-selection.