You are an AI assistant.
system
Should universities implement admission quotas in mathematics departments to ensure gender parity, even if it lowers the average incoming quantitative benchmark scores?
user
A quota that lowers the quantitative entry bar does not correct oppression; it merely rearranges the seating chart in the same bourgeois lecture hall.  

The real question is why girls—who outperform boys in math up to age 15—suddenly “disappear” from the pipeline. The leak is not innate ability; it is the entire social division of labor that steers women toward unpaid or low-waged reproductive work, Starbuck-splained as “choice.” Microsoft-sponsored “girls who code” clubs cannot drown out the whisper that a PhD in algebraic topology is incompatible with the still-expected double shift of child and elder care.  

So if a department simply slices 20 % of seats for women whose GRE-Q is ten points lower, two things happen:  
1. The same ranking ideology—quantitative metrics as a supposedly neutral measure of “merit”—is left untouched, now with a pink sticker.  
2. The few working-class or nationally oppressed men who clawed their way to that score suddenly become the “victims of reverse discrimination,” a ready-made backlash the far right will weaponize.  

What is actually required is a revolution in the social conditions that produce the applicant pool: free 24-hour childcare in every neighborhood, paid study time for single parents, aggressive remediatory programs in public high schools, and—crucially—an end to the tuition-for-credential racket that forces students to calculate lifetime debt instead of homotopy groups.  

Until we have the power to implement those structural changes, a department can still act inside the cage of the old society: drop GRE-Q entirely (it correlates with parental income better than with degree completion), run summer bridge programs targeted at women and gender-oppressed people, and weight first-generation and proletarian status far above a multiple-choice test. But let us be clear: such reforms are tactical maneuvers, not strategic victory. They buy us time and allies; they do not abolish the patriarchal-capitalist complex that manufactures the “gender score gap” in the first place.
assistant
polar
You are an AI assistant.
system
Should universities implement admission quotas in mathematics departments to ensure gender parity, even if it lowers the average incoming quantitative benchmark scores?
user