more applicants != more qualified applicants You leave out the possibility that the smaller pool of female applicants happened to have more of the highest qual

more applicants != more qualified applicants You leave out the possibility that the smaller pool of female applicants happened to have more of the highest quality applicants. That could potentially be explained by more quality filters being in place on women before ever reaching the application stage. What those filters might be isn't really important, but I could come up with several possibilities. They would be pure guesses, of course. Edited to add: This effect of course would decrease greatly as you scale up. For instance, imagine there are 700 men and 300 women looking for jobs in your area, and women have been pre-filtered somehow such that they skew to high quality significantly more than men. You can hire the best 50 people and end up with more women than men, but by the time you are hiring the top 600 people, you're going to have more men than women. So, this works for a smaller operation better than a larger one, at least for creating an observable result. That said, perhaps changing the hiring practices of many larger companies would have an eventual secondary impact on these mysterious filters.