A Boise State University student was appalled when her professor gave a speech claiming women should not be recruited for jobs in engineering, medicine, or law.
Ally Orr was so angry that she decided to channel her frustration into something positive - a huge scholarship for women at the university.
In the speech made by political science professor Scott Yenor at the National Conservatism Conference in November 2021, the professor said, "every effort must be made not to recruit women into engineering, but rather to recruit and demand more of men to become engineers. Ditto for med school and the law and every trade."
"Our independent women seek their purpose in life in mid-level bureaucratic jobs like human resource management, environmental protection, and marketing," he said at another point. "They're more medicated, meddlesome, and quarrelsome than women need to be," he added.
Marketing student Orr was outraged by his words. In an interview on People, she asked host Gretchen Carlson: "How is it 2021 and someone thinks that that's okay as a professor?"
"What do you even say to that, when a professor who's supposed to be teaching you says, you being in my classroom or you being in the workforce, you are doing less, like are not helping America move forward?" she added.
Orr went on to say that his words left her feeling disheartened about her future.
"That felt so disheartening and so frustrating. I mean, college is so expensive. I invested all this money. And so for someone to say, you will find nothing after this investment, that hurts," she said.
But rather than let his words get her down, Orr decided to do something that would help empower her fellow female students at Boise State - start a scholarship fund.
She began by sending an email to 600 university staff members under a subject that quoted Yenor's speech: "Scholarship for medicated, meddlesome and quarrelsome women."
Next, she set up a GoFundMe with a provisional $10,000 goal - which was quickly achieved.
"The first $10,000, it was mostly professors and those that worked at Boise State. And once we hit $25,000 it was the Boise community," Orr recalled.
Slowly the web of benefactors spread to include parents and friends of students from across the country. The fundraiser has now raised over $123,000, and the Women in STEM, Medicine and Law Scholarship has officially been born.
Orr said that the fundraiser would be kept open indefinitely and that all future contributions would be reinvested into the scholarship.
As for Yenor, she says she has nothing to say to the professor.
"He's written books, podcasts, recorded videos about this. There's nothing I can say that could change his mind. But, if I can fund more women, that goes directly against what he thinks so that's good enough for me," she added.
Boise State University said in a statement that the school "has a long tradition of supporting women. We continue to do so across the university."
