John Tierney’s column this week looks at that old question, why are there so few women in the hard sciences?

Well, long term readers of this blog will know that it’s because there are fewer female systemisers than there are male ones.

Pretty simple, really, isn’t it? However, that’s not, unfortunately, the end of the story:

This week I want to discuss a volatile topic: the relatively low numbers of women in some fields of science and engineering. As I explain in my Findings column, federal agencies have begun “Title IX compliance reviews” of some science departments — a novel step, because until now this anti-discrimination law has been enforced mainly for sports programs, not academic departments. Why, now that women students are approaching a 3-to-2 majority on campus and predominate in so many disciplines (including many science departments), is Washington singling out a few male-dominated departments in engineering and physical sciences?

The answer from advocates of this policy is that science must be “Titled Nined” for women to get “Beyond Bias and Barriers,” to borrow the title of the 2007 report from the National Academy of Sciences on women in science. The answer from their critics — call them the Anti-Title-Niners — is that this bias exists largely in the imagination of well-organized activists, and that women on average just aren’t as interested as men are in these disciplines. (Ritual caveat: Plenty of individual women are passionately interested and superbly talented in these fields. The issue here is the overall percentage of women drawn to these areas — the figure that’s routinely cited by the Title Niners as evidence that women are “underrepresented.”)

Yup, we’ve got a huge Federal bureaucracy swinging into action (umm, well, having meetings, spending our money doing so, but not actually doing anything for that is not the way of bureaucracies) over something that we already know the answer to.

There are fewer women scientists than male scientists because there are fewer women who want to be scientists than there are men who want to be. Further, fewer who have the innate talents and mindset to be them.

If only more people read this blog, eh?