Women now claim more than 57 percent of all bachelor's degrees, 61 percent of all master's degrees, and half of all professional and doctoral degrees, according to Education Department data cited by University of Michigan economist Mark Perry and others. They also earn more Ph.D.s than men in the humanities, education, health sciences, and social sciences, in-cluding two-thirds of new psychology doctorates.

Such data might find a principled administration and academic establishment busy documenting and attacking discrimination against or cultural hostility toward underrepresented males.

After all, it is an article of faith in the Obama administration, Congress, and much of the academic establishment that there are no innate differences between females and males in interests or cognitive capacities. From this dubious premise, they conclude that only pervasive, ongoing sexism and stereotypes can explain the huge gender disparities in academic fields -- hard sciences, engineering, and mathematics -- that are still male-dominated.

But advocates of this disparity-proves-discrimination dogma apply it quite selectively. They have shown virtually no concern about the small and shrinking percentages of males in colleges generally and in most academic fields.

Instead, the interest -- self-interest, in many cases -- of the gender-equity cops is in pushing for spending programs, hiring goals, and other preferential treatment for women and girls over men and boys in hard sciences, engineering, and math.

Administration officials and others are "promising to litigate, regulate, and legislate the nation's universities until women obtain half of all academic degrees in science and technology and hold half of the faculty positions in those areas," as my colleague Neil Munro detailed in the July 4 National Journal.