70% allocation for women and 30% for men. Isn’t this discrimination based on gender and blatant murder of merit?

rabel111 · 2020-12-30T20:33:04+00:00

I used to work for the Fulbright Scholarship. The recommendations are given by the schools they work for. The applications are taken blind with regards to race/gender. We were exceptionally happy when the finalists I picked were an almost exact proportional representation of the applicants and put that into the presentation of those accepted, it was completely by accident. In fact my first job was to open the recommendations and remove the names/genders and assign them a number. Then my boss asked me to just do the selection because she was busy.

I was actually surprised when an application for a grant for creating more female-friendly public spaces at some city in a Muslim country somewhere was from a male applicant. Apparently men and women needed separate spaces in the parks because of their culture and an open setting prevented women from using the parks.

Although I highly suspect that due to the US's funding for women's education in Pakistan there was a lot of loading up on female candidates done by Pakistan to get that sweet donut diplomacy money.

Another interesting, yet only vaguely related fact, is that many of the applicants to the HHH Fellowship consider the entire program a waste if they aren't sent to the top schools. They said (Fellows from Pakistan and Thailand though I assume the issue exists outside of those 2 countries) that if they didn't get sent to MIT, UC Davis, or Vanderbilt then the program wouldn't help them at all when they returned home because if Thai/Pakistanis didn't recognize the name VCU or Penn State that it wouldn't be any benefit for them to have it on their resume.

TLDR: This was almost certainly a political pushing of female applicants from within Pakistan but the Institute for International Education took no part in it because their applications are read name-blind.

ObviousObservationz · 2020-12-30T13:44:12+00:00

If they took the best applications for this year and 70 percent ended up being women....so be it. Thats not discrimination.

The blatant murder of merit would be if they instead chose 20 percent more men to make it balanced.

IronJohnMRA · 2020-12-30T13:41:04+00:00

It depends on how many men applied.

GmanTEM02 · 2020-12-31T16:56:11+00:00

Since when have feminists ever cared about merit.

jonnyhaldane · 2020-12-30T17:29:57+00:00

Pakistan is not ‘the west’, and women there actually do need help in ways that they don’t in other countries.

Not saying this is justified, but it’s hard to judge without knowing more.

mmmgohigher · 2020-12-30T14:09:37+00:00

No it isn’t. Stop crying you incel

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