11 ms·

Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

51 points by voisin 2y ago

KingOfCoders 2y ago
I think The Last Psychatrist wrote, when women move in, it's a sign that power has moved on. [Edit] Found the quote: "when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? [...] I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless [...] I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go?" https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_woman_would.html https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w... Wow, what a disservice to women to keep up the charade, didn't think there were so many women haters on HN.
- AnimalMuppet 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - gruez 2y ago
    [flagged]
    - tdeck 2y ago
      To be fair it never felt like these were deeply held convictions during Harris's first primary campaign.
    - knowaveragejoe 2y ago
      She wants to win, and winning in this scenario does not involve pandering to the more extreme elements of the party. You need to win to actually achieve anything. The reality is that the more extreme elements of her party are not actually that popular.
      - gruez 2y ago
        In other words she's not really powerful, because she's ultimately beholden to the electorate/political machine and has little leeway to affect change in anything she believes in.
        knowaveragejoe 2y ago
        ...yes? You have to win to do anything at all. Would you prefer she were ideologically pure and irrelevant?
    - rangerelf 2y ago
      And this is how we get trump as president. "Oh, Hillary is not a PERFECT candidate, I'm going to punish the Democratic party because of it and vote for Trump". Or, one of my favorites, "Those jerks, they totally passed on Berny! I'm going to vote for Trump!" Idiots that vote against their (and everyone else's) own interests just because they can't have THE PERFECT candidate is why things are such a mess right now. Always letting PERFECT get in the way of BETTER.
      - GrassTheBikes 2y ago
        [flagged]
      - gruez 2y ago
        >And this is how we get trump as president. Not sure how this got derailed into a "trump vs harris" discussion. The comment I was replying to was arguing about the "power" of the presidency/vice-presidency. That's entirely orthogonal to whether you think harris is a good candidate or not. Indeed, you could even argue harris is a good candidate for not being powerful, because she's doesn't narcissistic and will defer to staffers/experts rather than sticking to her agenda to the bitter end.
      - mantas 2y ago
        Not in US, but my reasoning in similar situation is following. If I keep voting for a party that is getting worse and worse for a long time, that will enable people at the top to keep doing the same. Why would I vote against my interest looking long term? Why should I enable people I don’t like?
  - xhkkffbf 2y ago
    [flagged]
  - willcipriano 2y ago
    [flagged]
- stackghost 2y ago
  Do you reference that quote to imply that Caltech has somehow become diminished? What is the intent of your comment?
  - xhkkffbf 2y ago
    I can't speak for the original commenter, but it's been widely noted that the university system isn't a very exciting or innovative place to be. Between the strict dogma and the high costs, many are moving on. Google, for instance, claims it doesn't look at your undergraduate degree. The best startups have long been run by dropouts. My guess is that the school has trouble finding capable students of any gender that want to pay the expensive tuition. State schools like Michigan, Maryland and Berkeley have top notch programs that cost a fraction of Caltech's. Are parents of girls more likely to buy into the Caltech dream? Perhaps. I suppose this batch of statistics might be said to prove that claim. But in general, females are much more risk averse and so are their parents. This suggests that Caltech is a "safe" choice. Not a bad thing to be, but it's not where the innovation and the exploration happens.
  - KingOfCoders 2y ago
    "The move comes just months after accountancy firm Ernst & Young, one of Britain’s biggest graduate recruiters, made a similar announcement, saying in August that it would no longer consider degree or A-level results when assessing potential employees." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditches-the-need-for-job-seekers-to-have-university-degrees https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditche...
    - stackghost 2y ago
      And so you're suggesting what, exactly?
  - indoordin0saur 2y ago
    By his Last Psychiatrist quote "when women move in, power moves out" he was probably suggesting the more widespread decline some are observing in elite institutions, not Caltech specifically. Though I disagree that this has much to do with gender ratios.
klipt 2y ago
The overall gender imbalance in American higher education is now just as bad as when Title IX was first implemented, only in the opposite direction. What's interesting is this is deliberately excluded from many metrics of gender inequality, eg the UN defines inequality as "fewer women in college than men" so even 100% women and 0% men would be graded as "more equal" than 51% men and 49% women. Pretty Orwellian.
- riffic 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - nsxwolf 2y ago
    Would this question ever have worked the other way?
  - klipt 2y ago
    Have humans fundamentally changed since 50 years ago? Was there something fundamentally wrong with women 50 years ago that we "fixed"?
    - riffic 2y ago
      societal roles and expectations have certainly changed.
      - BenFranklin100 2y ago
        [flagged]
        dang 2y ago
        No personal attacks, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - klipt 2y ago
riffic 2y ago
Caltech didn't even admit women until 1970.
- EasyMark 2y ago
  That was a half century plus ago though? 50 years is a long long time.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    And even some of the top tier engineering schools that have admitted women for an even longer time generally had a pretty minuscule number until relatively recently.
  - riffic 2y ago
    no, it really wasn't that long ago.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      I'd like to think that 55 years ago isn't really that far in the past but, at the scale of undergraduate academic institutions it sort of is. Although I think it was always coed going back to the 1800s, I think MIT still had just a handful of women in a class into the 1960s.
tdeck 2y ago
In case you didn't read the article, the class is 50.9% women.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  So probably statistical noise.
vsuperpower2021 2y ago
Most colleges and university are majority women. The one I went to had 2 women for 1 man. This was unambiguously a mistake.
- yeeetz 2y ago
  at least it makes dating easier for guys at schools like caltech now which is a non-trivial plus
  - g15jv2dp 2y ago
    Women don't go to university to enter your personal dating pool.
    - b112 2y ago
      Actually, the parent didn't say their personal dating pool, did they? They spoke generically. They also didn't say men would even ask anyone out, are you being sexist, and assuming men always ask, and women do not? And unless 20 year olds have changed dramatically, everyone is looking for new dating pools. Or are you suggesting women don't have a sex drive, and should be chaste?
      - g15jv2dp 2y ago
        > They also didn't say men would even ask anyone out, are you being sexist, and assuming men always ask, and women do not? Not remotely related to what I said. > Or are you suggesting women don't have a sex drive, and should be chaste? Not remotely related to what I said. Why do you feel the need to make stuff up?
        b112 2y ago
        I'm responding to your direct personal attack on the parent, demonstrating what such assumptions look like. And for your initial assumption to be true, men would have to be doing the asking. Otherwise, why white knight to save the poor women? Yet if women did the asking, there's no downside for them, yes? Your post was wrong.
ghaff 2y ago
Some of it is probably a matter of deliberate policy choices. Other aspects include an organic shift away from engineering disciplines (like mechanical engineering) that were historically very heavily male dominated. I don't know the exact current ratio at MIT without looking up (pretty close to equal) but it was something like 1:7 50 years ago even though women were admitted since I think its founding.
- FormerBandmate 2y ago
  Also there are way more women applying, to the point where you’re more than double as likely to get in as a man than as a woman. There’s a huge argument about this but no one actually looked up the data for some reason: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-caltech https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Good Lord. I'd never get into any of these schools these days. (Three people from my 59 person high school class got into MIT and we weren't a high-powered school.) Though I guess if it's any consolation a bunch of the great professors would never get tenure either because they were more tinkerers than theoreticians.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - tines 2y ago
    What? No. From your link: > The overall acceptance rate for women was 4.5%, and the overall acceptance rate for men was 1.9%. You're less than half as likely to get in as a man. Transfer acceptance rates are even more skewed towards women.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      Of course, you don't know what the distribution of applicants looks like. Though I do strongly suspect that some groups (by gender, geography, even athletic credentials, etc.) almost certainly have a better shot than others all other things being equal.
mchannon 2y ago
This is a third rail of conversation, regarding gender equality and equity, so please hold your downvotes if you differ from my positions. Some might value the perspective, and I feel we all could learn something here. I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in. This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus (the top 100 of say 20000 is going to be more qualified than the top 100 of say 7000). In pursuing equality, the admissions group has achieved the greatest inequality in school history from a different perspective. I submit this also is unfair to women. Imagine yourself with a case of impostor syndrome and having the mathematical understanding to back it up. I’d want to know I earned it and deserve to be there just as much as anybody else there. Some do and have, and there’s no way to know who those some are. Is it worth sacrificing merit for optics? Maybe it is, but we ignore this double-edged sword (even and especially one of its edges) at our peril. Until equal numbers of men and women apply, deviating from the application gender percentages will disadvantage everybody.
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  How does this premise: > I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. lead to this conclusion: >That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in.
  - throwway120385 2y ago
    I think they're arguing from the statistical "spread" of capabilities in a group of women as compared to a group of men. Not sure if it's a valid conclusion but that's how I read it.
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    Unless the pool of females applying was significantly more qualified than the males, it is almost certainly true. Just a matter of statistics.
moffaz 2y ago
[dead]
photochemsyn 2y ago
Caltech's gender makeup was 45% female a decade ago, although the school did only started admitting women in 1970. A more interesting question would be the ratio of debt-burdened to free-and-clear graduates from Caltech, which reflects on parental wealth. Not that the LA Times would want to take the focus off identity politics and onto class politics.
- bfrink 2y ago
  32% of 2023 graduates had any debt at all; the average total indebtedness (over all four (or more) years) of that 32% was $15,896[0]. Not bad for a school that costs $86,886 _per year_[1]. One should also note that "[s]tudents from families making $90K or below, will receive a no loan financial aid package (package will consist of grants and work-study)" and "[a]t least 20% of first-year students in the past three incoming class were Pell eligible students." [2] [0] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/typesofaid/loans/disclosure https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/typesofaid/loans/disclosure [1] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/documents/25301/2324_tuitionfees-final230516.pdf https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/documents/25301/2324_tuitionf... [2] https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford
jimt1234 2y ago
My boomer mother started her career in accounting/bookkeeping, working in payroll for a large company back in the 70s. The company decided to migrate their payroll system onto a fancy new mainframe computer, so they sent my mother to college to learn COBOL. The stories she tells about being the only female in the college courses, and then most of her career as the only female programmer - those stories are almost incomprehensible compared to today's standards. So, when I read about things like this (Caltech enrolls more females), I think of my mother and the countless other women who paved the road. Not all heroes get Hollywood movies made in their honor. Now, if I could just get Mom to stay off the stupid Nextdoor app, complaining about people's trashcans being in the street or someone's dog pooped in her yard. LOL

51 points by voisin 2y ago

I think The Last Psychatrist wrote, when women move in, it's a sign that power has moved on. [Edit] Found the quote: "when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? [...] I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless [...] I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go?" https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_woman_would.html https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w... Wow, what a disservice to women to keep up the charade, didn't think there were so many women haters on HN.

AnimalMuppet 2y ago
[flagged]
- gruez 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - tdeck 2y ago
    To be fair it never felt like these were deeply held convictions during Harris's first primary campaign.
  - knowaveragejoe 2y ago
    She wants to win, and winning in this scenario does not involve pandering to the more extreme elements of the party. You need to win to actually achieve anything. The reality is that the more extreme elements of her party are not actually that popular.
    - gruez 2y ago
      In other words she's not really powerful, because she's ultimately beholden to the electorate/political machine and has little leeway to affect change in anything she believes in.
      - knowaveragejoe 2y ago
        ...yes? You have to win to do anything at all. Would you prefer she were ideologically pure and irrelevant?
  - rangerelf 2y ago
    And this is how we get trump as president. "Oh, Hillary is not a PERFECT candidate, I'm going to punish the Democratic party because of it and vote for Trump". Or, one of my favorites, "Those jerks, they totally passed on Berny! I'm going to vote for Trump!" Idiots that vote against their (and everyone else's) own interests just because they can't have THE PERFECT candidate is why things are such a mess right now. Always letting PERFECT get in the way of BETTER.
    - GrassTheBikes 2y ago
      [flagged]
    - gruez 2y ago
      >And this is how we get trump as president. Not sure how this got derailed into a "trump vs harris" discussion. The comment I was replying to was arguing about the "power" of the presidency/vice-presidency. That's entirely orthogonal to whether you think harris is a good candidate or not. Indeed, you could even argue harris is a good candidate for not being powerful, because she's doesn't narcissistic and will defer to staffers/experts rather than sticking to her agenda to the bitter end.
    - mantas 2y ago
      Not in US, but my reasoning in similar situation is following. If I keep voting for a party that is getting worse and worse for a long time, that will enable people at the top to keep doing the same. Why would I vote against my interest looking long term? Why should I enable people I don’t like?
- xhkkffbf 2y ago
  [flagged]
- willcipriano 2y ago
  [flagged]
stackghost 2y ago
Do you reference that quote to imply that Caltech has somehow become diminished? What is the intent of your comment?
- xhkkffbf 2y ago
  I can't speak for the original commenter, but it's been widely noted that the university system isn't a very exciting or innovative place to be. Between the strict dogma and the high costs, many are moving on. Google, for instance, claims it doesn't look at your undergraduate degree. The best startups have long been run by dropouts. My guess is that the school has trouble finding capable students of any gender that want to pay the expensive tuition. State schools like Michigan, Maryland and Berkeley have top notch programs that cost a fraction of Caltech's. Are parents of girls more likely to buy into the Caltech dream? Perhaps. I suppose this batch of statistics might be said to prove that claim. But in general, females are much more risk averse and so are their parents. This suggests that Caltech is a "safe" choice. Not a bad thing to be, but it's not where the innovation and the exploration happens.
- KingOfCoders 2y ago
  "The move comes just months after accountancy firm Ernst & Young, one of Britain’s biggest graduate recruiters, made a similar announcement, saying in August that it would no longer consider degree or A-level results when assessing potential employees." https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditches-the-need-for-job-seekers-to-have-university-degrees https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditche...
  - stackghost 2y ago
    And so you're suggesting what, exactly?
- indoordin0saur 2y ago
  By his Last Psychiatrist quote "when women move in, power moves out" he was probably suggesting the more widespread decline some are observing in elite institutions, not Caltech specifically. Though I disagree that this has much to do with gender ratios.

klipt 2y ago

The overall gender imbalance in American higher education is now just as bad as when Title IX was first implemented, only in the opposite direction. What's interesting is this is deliberately excluded from many metrics of gender inequality, eg the UN defines inequality as "fewer women in college than men" so even 100% women and 0% men would be graded as "more equal" than 51% men and 49% women. Pretty Orwellian.

riffic 2y ago
[flagged]
- nsxwolf 2y ago
  Would this question ever have worked the other way?
- klipt 2y ago
  Have humans fundamentally changed since 50 years ago? Was there something fundamentally wrong with women 50 years ago that we "fixed"?
  - riffic 2y ago
    societal roles and expectations have certainly changed.
    - BenFranklin100 2y ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 2y ago
        No personal attacks, please. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - klipt 2y ago

riffic 2y ago

Caltech didn't even admit women until 1970.

EasyMark 2y ago
That was a half century plus ago though? 50 years is a long long time.
- ghaff 2y ago
  And even some of the top tier engineering schools that have admitted women for an even longer time generally had a pretty minuscule number until relatively recently.
- riffic 2y ago
  no, it really wasn't that long ago.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I'd like to think that 55 years ago isn't really that far in the past but, at the scale of undergraduate academic institutions it sort of is. Although I think it was always coed going back to the 1800s, I think MIT still had just a handful of women in a class into the 1960s.

tdeck 2y ago

In case you didn't read the article, the class is 50.9% women.

throwway120385 2y ago
So probably statistical noise.

vsuperpower2021 2y ago

Most colleges and university are majority women. The one I went to had 2 women for 1 man. This was unambiguously a mistake.

yeeetz 2y ago
at least it makes dating easier for guys at schools like caltech now which is a non-trivial plus
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  Women don't go to university to enter your personal dating pool.
  - b112 2y ago
    Actually, the parent didn't say their personal dating pool, did they? They spoke generically. They also didn't say men would even ask anyone out, are you being sexist, and assuming men always ask, and women do not? And unless 20 year olds have changed dramatically, everyone is looking for new dating pools. Or are you suggesting women don't have a sex drive, and should be chaste?
    - g15jv2dp 2y ago
      > They also didn't say men would even ask anyone out, are you being sexist, and assuming men always ask, and women do not? Not remotely related to what I said. > Or are you suggesting women don't have a sex drive, and should be chaste? Not remotely related to what I said. Why do you feel the need to make stuff up?
      - b112 2y ago
        I'm responding to your direct personal attack on the parent, demonstrating what such assumptions look like. And for your initial assumption to be true, men would have to be doing the asking. Otherwise, why white knight to save the poor women? Yet if women did the asking, there's no downside for them, yes? Your post was wrong.

ghaff 2y ago

Some of it is probably a matter of deliberate policy choices. Other aspects include an organic shift away from engineering disciplines (like mechanical engineering) that were historically very heavily male dominated. I don't know the exact current ratio at MIT without looking up (pretty close to equal) but it was something like 1:7 50 years ago even though women were admitted since I think its founding.

FormerBandmate 2y ago
Also there are way more women applying, to the point where you’re more than double as likely to get in as a man than as a woman. There’s a huge argument about this but no one actually looked up the data for some reason: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-caltech https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...
- ghaff 2y ago
  Good Lord. I'd never get into any of these schools these days. (Three people from my 59 person high school class got into MIT and we weren't a high-powered school.) Though I guess if it's any consolation a bunch of the great professors would never get tenure either because they were more tinkerers than theoreticians.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- tines 2y ago
  What? No. From your link: > The overall acceptance rate for women was 4.5%, and the overall acceptance rate for men was 1.9%. You're less than half as likely to get in as a man. Transfer acceptance rates are even more skewed towards women.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    Of course, you don't know what the distribution of applicants looks like. Though I do strongly suspect that some groups (by gender, geography, even athletic credentials, etc.) almost certainly have a better shot than others all other things being equal.

mchannon 2y ago

This is a third rail of conversation, regarding gender equality and equity, so please hold your downvotes if you differ from my positions. Some might value the perspective, and I feel we all could learn something here. I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in. This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus (the top 100 of say 20000 is going to be more qualified than the top 100 of say 7000). In pursuing equality, the admissions group has achieved the greatest inequality in school history from a different perspective. I submit this also is unfair to women. Imagine yourself with a case of impostor syndrome and having the mathematical understanding to back it up. I’d want to know I earned it and deserve to be there just as much as anybody else there. Some do and have, and there’s no way to know who those some are. Is it worth sacrificing merit for optics? Maybe it is, but we ignore this double-edged sword (even and especially one of its edges) at our peril. Until equal numbers of men and women apply, deviating from the application gender percentages will disadvantage everybody.

lotsofpulp 2y ago
How does this premise: > I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. lead to this conclusion: >That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in.
- throwway120385 2y ago
  I think they're arguing from the statistical "spread" of capabilities in a group of women as compared to a group of men. Not sure if it's a valid conclusion but that's how I read it.
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  Unless the pool of females applying was significantly more qualified than the males, it is almost certainly true. Just a matter of statistics.

moffaz 2y ago

[dead]

photochemsyn 2y ago

Caltech's gender makeup was 45% female a decade ago, although the school did only started admitting women in 1970. A more interesting question would be the ratio of debt-burdened to free-and-clear graduates from Caltech, which reflects on parental wealth. Not that the LA Times would want to take the focus off identity politics and onto class politics.

bfrink 2y ago
32% of 2023 graduates had any debt at all; the average total indebtedness (over all four (or more) years) of that 32% was $15,896[0]. Not bad for a school that costs $86,886 _per year_[1]. One should also note that "[s]tudents from families making $90K or below, will receive a no loan financial aid package (package will consist of grants and work-study)" and "[a]t least 20% of first-year students in the past three incoming class were Pell eligible students." [2] [0] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/typesofaid/loans/disclosure https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/typesofaid/loans/disclosure [1] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/documents/25301/2324_tuitionfees-final230516.pdf https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/documents/25301/2324_tuitionf... [2] https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford

jimt1234 2y ago

My boomer mother started her career in accounting/bookkeeping, working in payroll for a large company back in the 70s. The company decided to migrate their payroll system onto a fancy new mainframe computer, so they sent my mother to college to learn COBOL. The stories she tells about being the only female in the college courses, and then most of her career as the only female programmer - those stories are almost incomprehensible compared to today's standards. So, when I read about things like this (Caltech enrolls more females), I think of my mother and the countless other women who paved the road. Not all heroes get Hollywood movies made in their honor. Now, if I could just get Mom to stay off the stupid Nextdoor app, complaining about people's trashcans being in the street or someone's dog pooped in her yard. LOL