A university professor has sparked outrage after suggesting women should be banned from professions including engineering, medicine and law to focus on ‘feminine goals’ such as having children.
Scott Yenor, political science professor at Boise State University in Idaho, US, said ‘every effort must be made not to recruit women’ into those career paths.
He insisted independent women were ‘more medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome than women need to be’.
Addressing a National Conservatism Conference in Orlando, Florida, Professor Yenor said: ‘Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of home making and having children.
‘Every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men who become engineers.
‘Ditto for med school, and the law, and every trade.’
Professor Yenor’s remarks were branded ‘disgusting’ as one university student said ‘he need to come into the current century’.
Now a petition has been launched calling for Professor Yenor to be investigated and disciplined on the grounds of gender discrimination.
The Change.org campaign has amassed almost 4,000 signatures since being launched three days ago.
Action needs to be taken to preserve the academic intergrity of Boise State, the petition states, to ‘set an example to others in academia that discrimination in any form will not be tolerated, and to ensure that a generation of women and women in posterity can pursue an education and career at the highest level with the support and fair treatment of the academic community.’
But a Boise State University spokesperson told the Idaho Stateman that Professor Yenor will not be sanctioned over his comments.
‘Boise State University understands that the open exchange of ideas, which is fundamental to education, can introduce uncomfortable and even offensive ideas,’ university direction of media relations Mike Sharp said.
‘However, the university cannot infringe upon the First Amendment rights of any members of our community, regardless of whether we, as individual leaders, agree or disagree with the message. No single faculty member defines what Boise State—or any public university—endorses or stands for.’
Professor Yenor, a Washington fellow at the Claremont Institute, a Conservative think-tank in California, shared a compilation of the abusive voice messages he has since received, branding him ‘putrid’ and a ‘maggot’, on Twitter under the caption ‘When you criticize feminism.’
He recorded a video revealing how he has become an ‘object of hatred’ on social media – but doubled down on his controversial views, insisting men are needed to ‘rebuild a country where we act with responsibility and purpose.’
He added that the weakening of the family has ‘brought addiction, suicide, misery, crime, pain and purposelessness.’
The remarks also drew criticism from Democratic State Senator, Melissa Wintrow, who said: ‘You start to wonder, what is the goal here?
‘If it’s to set us back in time and disenfranchise women from as far as we’ve come, that’s a problem,’ she told Idaho Statesman.
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