At Orlando conference, professor says women should stay home, have babies, avoid careers
An Idaho professor and his university are facing backlash after he declared at an Orlando conservatism conference that feminism is ruining society and women should stay home and have lots of babies instead of having careers.
Scott Yenor, a political science professor at Boise State University, spoke at the National Conservatism Conference on Oct. 31, but his comments didn’t go viral until a nurse posted clips of his speech on TikTok on Nov. 25, the Idaho Statesman reported.
Responding to the backlash Wednesday, the university tweeted: “Women have made significant and meaningful contributions to all areas of academia, industry and society. Boise State University has a long tradition of supporting women. We continue to do so across the university.”
That attempt to cool the furor came a few days after a Boise State spokesperson said Yenor has a right to free speech, that the university can’t infringe on his First Amendment rights, and that the university supports academic freedom and the expression of ideas, the Statesman reported.
However, a Boise State MBA student suggested the university could be vulnerable to a potential Title IX complaint over Yenor’s declaration that women shouldn’t be recruited into law, engineering and medicine.
“He has power. He has power to issue a grade,” Walton, co-founder of the Idaho 97 Project, told the Statesman. “It’s disgusting. He needs to come into the current century, but it doesn’t sound like he will.”
In his speech, Yenor also said women are “medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome” as a result of being too independent.
He also urged the U.S. to “de-emphasize” colleges and universities, and called universities “indoctrination camps” and “the citadels of our gynecocracy.”
“Young men must be respectable and responsible to inspire young women to be secure with feminine goals of homemaking and having children,” he said. “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.”
As of Thursday afternoon, over 2,500 people signed a Change.org petition titled “Investigate and Discipline Professor Scott Yenor on the Grounds of Gender Discrimination.”
Yenor has faced criticism for previous statements and activities, the Statesman reported. He served on a governor’s task force this year to investigate “indoctrination” in Idaho schools.
In 2017, he published an article claiming transgender activists were “seeking to undermine parental rights.”