The Toronto Star gleefully covers Algonquin College's new approach to increasing the number of female students in technical programs.

For the past decade, Kathryn Reilander would stand at the front of her classroom and survey her newest crop of students, struggling to find a female face in the crowd. Reilander is a professor at Algonquin College in Ottawa and every year in her electrical engineering technician program, she only sees an average of eight women in a class of roughly 200.

In response, the college is implementing a pilot project that will reserve 30 per cent of classroom seats for female applicants. In other words, playing with quotas for gender.

The initiative is part of a broader push by post-secondary institutions to close the gender gap in so-called STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering and math), where women are woefully under-represented.

How odd. Women are massively over-represented in teaching, nursing, veterinary medicine, English literature, speech/language pathology and a host of other disciplines.

I don't see anyone at Algonquin finding ways of increasing the miniscule fraction of males in health-related programs.