[Note added 6.7.14: The Brunel University story is small beer in comparison with this story, the government committing £30 million to bribe more women into engineering.]

[Note added 3.7.14: A FoI request has led us to the information that these MSc courses are of one year’s duration, and the sponsorships are worth £22,750. There’s a ‘living allowance’ of £15,000 – male students don’t need to live, it would seem – and the course fees of £7,750 are paid. Today we posted a new piece on the matter.]

Yet more lunacy, part of a scheme expected to cost long-suffering taxpayers £25 million.

From the article:

“Only around a quarter of students on engineering master’s courses are women,” said Brunel engineering lecturer, Petra Gratton. “Bluntly speaking, that has to change if UK engineering is going to continue to compete as successfully as it currently does… While some may see this as positive discrimination the stark reality is that UK plc can no longer afford not to exploit fully this enormous potential talent pool.

Some may see this as positive discrimination? Who – with an IQ above that of a particularly dim fruitbat – wouldn’t? Four out of seven unemployed people in the UK are men, unemployment is a larger driver of male suicide than female suicide, the male/female suicide differential has increased from 1.8:1 to 3.5:1 in the past 30 years… and here we have one of the few remaining male-dominated professions discriminating against men.

It’s time to join up the dots. In this and many other ways, the state is leading men to kill themselves in large numbers – suicide is the leading cause of death among young men – although men collectively pay 72% of the income tax which largely finances the state.

The £22,750 p.a. additional grants will be paid to female postgraduates solely on account of their gender. So a female student from a rich family will get the grant, while a male student from a poor family won’t. From the piece:

A spokesman for Brunel added that the university was trying to dispel the myth that engineers spend most of their time on site, wearing hard hats.

“At advanced level, engineering is very much an office-based profession, where the emphasis is working with teams on a collaborative basis. These skills are areas where women have traditionally excelled.”

I’ve yet to see any evidence that women have ‘traditionally excelled’ at teamwork in a way that leads to improved economic performance. If there were any truth in this self-congratulatory fantasy, the senior reaches of our major companies would have long been dominated by women. Indeed, without positive discrimination, few women reach those positions.

Would female engineering graduates not understand by the end of their engineering courses, what being an engineer was about? Are they really that stupid? Let’s read between the lines in that extract, shall we? Women clearly prefer to be in nice cosy offices than ‘on site, wearing hard hats’, which presumably mess up their hair.

The reality is surely that by the time these women graduate, they understand perfectly well what the life of an engineer entails, and that’s why they’re quitting the profession they were suckered into entering in the first place – suckered by taxpayer-funded initiatives aimed at getting more women to study STEMM subjects. Now it seems the only way to persuade these women to undertake postgraduate engineering studies is for long-suffering taxpayers to bribe them with an additional £22,750 pa. They must be so proud of having been born with the ‘correct’ genitals to ensure additional taxpayer funding. The effort required from them? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

It’s not just the state that’s relentlessly pursuing this direction of travel. Professional bodies in engineering and other male-dominated professions are discriminating again men, although men surely represent the majority of their existing membership. Our public challenge of Nick Baveystock, the director general of the Institution of Civil Engineers, remains unanswered to this day.