Patrick Brophy and our editor, Lynn Wade, have taken two distinctly different positions on women's equality. The interesting thing is that both are wrong -- and both are right. It's like the group of blind people describing an elephant, what each one describes depends on where on the elephant they grab onto.

Brophy is right that no one should be put in danger because an individual takes a job for which they are not suited physically. It is just as wrong to hire someone because they are in a "protected" group as it is to not hire someone because they are in an "undesirable" group.

Wade says that women should be able to get any job that they are capable of, a position I heartily agree with. No one, not women, not blacks, not foreign born Americans or any other group should be denied a job just because of who they are.

The problem that Brophy correctly identifies is not that women are taking jobs in law enforcement but that the job descriptions have been changed so that more women can meet the physical requirement of the job.

Wade says that Brophy doesn't back up his opinions with science, but it turns out that Brophy's opinion is backed up by science even if he doesn't cite it. John R. Lott Jr., "Does a Helping Hand Put Others at Risk? Affirmative Action, Police Departments and Crime," is a scientific look at how hiring more minority officers changes crime rates.

In his own words Lott describes his work: "Using cross-sectional time-series data for U.S. cities for 1987, 1990, and 1993, I find that hiring more black and minority police officers increases crime rates, but this apparently arises because lower hiring standards involved in recruiting more minority officers reduces the quality of both new minority and new nonminority officers."

Lower standards result in lower achievement, that is a fact of life that is as immutable as the fact that if you hold a hammer at shoulder level and let go, it will fall to the floor.

The way to ensure that women and minorities get hired and promoted fairly is to make sure the standards they are being judged by are tailored to the job itself and not to someone's agenda, whether it be for good or ill.

If a job requires the ability to move heavy objects for long periods of time men will get disproportionally more of the jobs than women. It is a fact of biology and isn't meant to demean women.

I remember seeing a study 10 or so years ago that said women make better commercial pilots than men but men make better combat pilots. I don't remember all of it but basically it said women are better at focusing for long periods of time on detail rich environments without their minds wandering but that men are better at pushing the envelope and abilities of their equipment and their bodies.

Public service jobs should go to anyone capable of handling the physical and emotional demands of the job, whether the applicant be a man or woman, black or white, or any other subgroup of human. By the same token we should not change job requirements to make it easier for anyone to get a job where the public safety could be compromised just to satisfy political correctness.