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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

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.
  - lukas099 2y ago
    I think it's feasible that the females were significantly more qualified than the males. The fact that going to Caltech is seemingly against the gender norm for women may actually cause them to self-select for only the most qualified and dedicated to STEM to apply. Whereas a lot more men may have applied 'just because'. Also, women are just doing better in school right now. The average female college applicant is better than the average male college applicant. So it's not hard to imagine this it true for CalTech too.
lawlessone 2y ago
>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. Prove it.
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  Unless the pool of female applicants was way more qualified than the male pool (i.e. by several standard deviations) this is true as a simple matter of statistics.
  - kjkjadksj 2y ago
    Then lets see your statistics
    - HideousKojima 2y ago
      Suppose there are 100 female applicants and 200 male applicants, and there is an even distribution of GPAs and ACT scores (or whatever criteria is used) in both the male and female pools. If Caltech takes the top 10 females and the top 10 males, the bottom 5 females of the 10 selected will be less qualified than all 10 of the males that were selected. We would need more data from Caltech about total applicants and their qualifications etc. to say for certain, but barring some significant aberrations or selection effects what the OP said is going to be true. Edit: overall acceptance rate for women at Caltech is 4.5%, 1.9% for men (as of 2022): https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-caltech https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca... So unless the female applicant pool is significantly more qualified than the male pool, OP is correct.
      - kjkjadksj 2y ago
        You made my point. A lot of assumptions, no data. The female pool could very well skew higher in their stats. My assumption is that the pools aren’t any different as you are randomly selecting from a general population of people above a threshold level of qualification. Given that you can easily take in more females that have the same qualifications as the males. Given how stuff like the act is scored there will be a lot of people with the same score at every score level.
foobarian 2y ago
I don't disagree with your conclusions. However, keep in mind what problem we are trying to solve here. The problem being that there is a positive feedback loop in gender participation in the disciplines such as Caltech focuses on, which we would like to fix. This feedback loop stretches horizontally across societal institutions way beyond just Caltech, and vertically across time and generations. Put on your engineering hat and see how you would solve this problem? The current push is to attack it from many leaf nodes, the Caltech example being one of them. The hope is that if this is done in many places, we will dampen the feedback loop and end up with a more equitable representation. Whether that problem is the problem we ought to be solving is another debate entirely.
- mchannon 2y ago
  The problem I’m trying to solve is reducing the amount of ignorance associated with this milestone, and not much more than that. I don’t have a problem with the Caltech admissions organization doing what they do as long as everyone isn’t afraid to acknowledge every aspect of what’s going on and are content with it. Caltech is a private college, and if they want it to be a private women’s college, or a women’s-first college, that’s fine if they want to admit to it. I abhor cognitive dissonance, particularly when weaponized, and the linked article smells like that to me.
caddemon 2y ago
I don't think it's purely an optics thing. College is a community not just school. Do you want all your social groups, living area, etc. to be 75+% male as a college student?
- yergi 2y ago
  WHAT. You're far off base. You go to school to learn a skill or trade. Go to the bar, church or anywhere else to socialize if that's your goal.
  - Jtsummers 2y ago
    Whether you like it or not, schools are communities. They have a shared identity and set of experiences that people outside the school don't have. Whether this should be the case or not is a separate matter, but it is the reality of today (and for pretty much all schools since they first started).
    - mchannon 2y ago
      Starting anything with “whether you like it or not” is a sure sign you’re not arguing to learn or teach but arguing to win (win what? the internet?) Schools are not communities, they have communities within them, but they are more than just communities. Your high school homecoming court also has a shared identity and a set of experiences that people outside the court don’t have. How is either important? A lot of people paid $75 to become one of those data points, and the majority of them didn’t pick Caltech because of the social opportunities (because Caltech is not anywhere near the top of that list unless you’re talking social opportunities strictly for people north of 180 I.Q.). In Caltech we have an exclusive and highly desirable learning institution with a finite and insufficient number of seats. Rigor or optics, you can’t have both. If you’re choosing optics, own it and don’t be ashamed of it.
  - lief79 2y ago
    In the case of a large university in smaller/to medium towns, there frequently won't be much of a change in ratio unless you're really willing to travel. It's the same community feeding all the places within walking distance or a short drive. Relatedly, a selective school means that the peers are likely to be similar. Those connections can last a life time, and socialization can greatly broaden your knowledge base and lead to a potentially more interesting skill set and/or a more complex trade.
yergi 2y ago
It's very VERY bad for women if you REALLY think about it from a perspective where life and death are on the line. Think about it: You need brain surgery to remove a tumor. You have a slim chance of surviving the procedure. Maybe your doctor is there in that position ONLY because they are the best. But, MAYBE they are only there based purely upon some non-skill based factor as well. Do you take that chance? No. You don't. You seek out that Asian or White male brain surgeon because there is no doubt that they are there ONLY because they are skilled and not due to some other indelible physical quality. This DEI stuff only hurts the talented women who ARE there based upon merit: because you have to stereotypically assume that they aren't the best of the best. It sucks, but this is what they have done to the workforce by pushing this backwards ideology.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  You don't have to SHOUT so much like an angry uncle sending rants via their still active AOL account. From the guidelines: > Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. asterisk is italicized when surrounded by single asterisks on either side, and if you want your asterisks back use \* or **.
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  hackernews.txt
lukas099 2y ago
How do you know that, of the Caltech applicants, there weren't just more qualified women than men? Women are outperforming men in education across the board.
- mchannon 2y ago
  Because I googled it. 58:42 ratio of applicants. While I could accept that the bottom 16 of males and bottom 0 of females are joke applications, these each included a substantial application fee ($75).
  - lukas099 2y ago
    They wouldn’t have to be joke applications, just worse than the ones that were accepted.
    - ghaff 2y ago
      It wouldn't be the slightest bit shocking if, on average, men were somewhat more overconfident than women on their ability to get admitted and to the work at an elite technical school. Of course, that doesn't mean the school doesn't also have their thumb on the scales to adjust demographics in various ways.
TheRoque 2y ago
How can you guarantee this ? From the article, it was the result of campaigns, not affirmative action. Not saying you're in the wrong, but it would be nice to provide proof from what you're assuming.
pseudosavant 2y ago
It is funny how you take as a default fact that the male students (and even rejected applicants) are smarter and more talented than female students without a single shred of data.
- nickpeterson 2y ago
  One big problem in their theory is it assumes that men and women have an equal opinion of themselves, but that’s seldom true. The numbers tell us that many more men believe themselves qualified to attend caltech, not much more ;)
- onetimeusename 2y ago
  We don't know the specifics of the Caltech students unless they publish all the data. I am not aware of any school that does that or breaks down data by gender even. (I could be wrong). But here[1] there is a gender gap in SAT scores on average across all test takers, especially for mathematics. If that holds for Caltech applicants, which is reasonable to assume, then male students were more qualified. The article mentions that men are not better at math than women are and talks about a long quest for gender parity but doesn't seem concerned at all when men are accepted less than women so I am curious how that is consistent. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/u8ok2w/oc_the_gender_gap_in_us_sat_scores_over_the_years/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/u8ok2w/oc_...
  - lotsofpulp 2y ago
    > If that holds for Caltech applicants, which is reasonable to assume Caltech is an outlier if there ever was one, so why would it be reasonable to assume Caltech’s applicant statistics reflect broad population SAT statistics?
    - navvyeanand 2y ago
      Precisely. I think almost everyone who applies has a 1500+ SAT score and ~3.8-4.0 GPA
  - 2y ago
jimt1234 2y ago
I'm not gonna downvote, but I am gonna challenge this premise: "...the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented..." That's just not necessarily true. If me and a bunch of my bros try out for the Lakers, and LeBron and a bunch of his highly-skilled friends also try out, and LeBron and all his friends make the team, and none of me and my bros make the team, that doesn't mean me or my bros got screwed, or that the team is now full of under-qualified players, it just means that LeBron and his friends or A LOT better at basketball than me and my Average Joe friends.
- mchannon 2y ago
  Interesting perspective, so I should just assume all these get-girls-interested-in-STEM initiatives should instead be focused on boys, since your argument means that boys suck so much more at STEM?
kjkjadksj 2y ago
This only makes sense if you assume you even can discretely bin a gaggle of high school applicants. Really its the same situation as anything else whether it be university or jobs or whatever other display of talent: the talent pool is both larger than the number of slots and it is also more or less equivocal.
fckgw 2y ago
Your argument starts from the standpoint of "obviously women are inferior to men, so for there to be more women admitted than men it must reason that the scales were tipped in women's favor and good men are being left behind" You see how flawed that argument is, right?
- mchannon 2y ago
  In the event you're not just trolling (the downvotes seem to make it clear most people think that) and you actually believe what you wrote, I suggest you consider the possibility that I'm arguing something else entirely.
rexpop 2y ago
> a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman I am not sure that "talented and impressive" is the metric by which we should be admitting students into higher education. On the contrary, I submit that we should be admitting the least impressive candidates who can matriculate in order to "train our weaknesses." Women's disenfranchisement has long been a hand tied behind our back, and it's high time that we free ourselves to be maximally productive.
- scottyah 2y ago
  That's what State Schools are for. CalTech is where we send all the giant-brains so they're not held back and can produce things for society that us small-brains could never comprehend.
  - rexpop 2y ago
    I don't subscribe to your eugenicist ontology.
eigenket 2y ago
> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus This does not follow from what you wrote before. I think it would if equivalently talented men and women were equally likely to apply to Caltech. This does not seem to be the case, since as you say not as many women are applying. I'm going to make up some numbers for an analogous problem which might make the logic more clear. Let's say the top 50% of men in a year apply to some university, while only the top 10% of women apply. Assume there is some randomness in the admissions process (because frankly there is), then a randomly sampled woman who was admitted is likely to be a stronger candidate than an average man who was admitted.
- mchannon 2y ago
  Unfortunately this is a textbook straw man fallacy, the epistemological Fourier transform from the actual argument to a domain where your position is solvable. Let’s start with the assumption that the most qualified women applied to Caltech instead of pursuing educations in law, medicine, or other top-tier professions. I posit a number of top-tier women who tick all the boxes would simply have no interest in Caltech as a school. Men too, but less of them wouldn’t be interested. It’s not a matter of women having less merit, quite the contrary: they consider the legal or medical professions more worthy of their merit and thus for them applying to Caltech would be suboptimal for their career aspirations. No, the fact is more men applied because men have fewer attractive alternatives, and unless you believe men are inferior writ large, more women are getting in than men in spite of fewer applying, not because the women are more talented, but because the admissions organization prefers having more women than men, application numbers be damned.
  - eigenket 2y ago
    Did you reply to the wrong comment? This doesn't appear to have anything to do with what I wrote.
    - mchannon 2y ago
      No, yours. I think it does, though it’s not as to the point as it could be.
g15jv2dp 2y ago
> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. You cannot guarantee that. Show some data or don't say anything. > 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 doesn't follow. If women self-censor (not sure how to say it in English correctly) their applications in such a way that only top women dare applying, while men don't, then no, it's not true that the men who didn't get in are more talented than the women who didn't get in. I'm not speaking in hypothetical, this is what actually happens - see e.g., Bosquet C., Combes P-P., García‐Peñalosa C., 2019, « Gender and Promotions: Evidence from Academic Economists in France », Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 121 (3), 1020-1053 or https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/nos-blogs/dialogues-economiques/plafond-de-verre-a-luniversite-quand-les-femmes-sautocensurent https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/nos-blogs/dialogues-economiques/pl... The rest of your comment is based on faulty premises so I won't bother replying point by point.
- Aunche 2y ago
  > Show some data or don't say anything. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/2/gender-parity-admissions/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/2/gender-parity-a... > At Caltech, there has been an average gap of 10 percentage points between the acceptance rate for male and female applicants since 2003-04. Women were accepted at more than double the rate for men for the 2022-23 school year. It's worth noting that men have it easier time getting into liberal arts universities like Brown or Yale. > If women self-censor (not sure how to say it in English correctly) their applications in such a way that only top women dare applying, while men don't In my personal experience, it was actually the opposite. I self censored my application to MIT because I noticed that they rejected all the men from my high school and accepted all the women who applied, despite the men being equally or more qualified.
  - g15jv2dp 2y ago
    > At Caltech, there has been an average gap of 10 percentage points between the acceptance rate for male and female applicants since 2003-04. Women were accepted at more than double the rate for men for the 2022-23 school year. This is about acceptance rate. We were talking about number of applicants. Where are the numbers for applications? > In my personal experience, it was actually the opposite. I self censored my application to MIT because I noticed that they rejected all the men from my high school and accepted all the women who applied, despite the men being equally or more qualified. Your anecdote is supposed to beat data...?
sagarm 2y ago
As a group, girls outperform boys in school. By this simple model, men are statistically unqualified for every job. Seems a little unfair to men, but those are the facts. All models are wrong; some are useful.
- switchbak 2y ago
  "As a group, girls outperform boys in school" - but is that true in science and engineering, as we're discussing here? Regardless, I think most folks would disagree with the conclusion that: if group $X outperforms $Y, then every instance of $X is more qualified and competent than every instance of $Y. The OP did very much not say "$X are statistically unqualified for every job" as you're saying, they said effectively: "on average, a member of $X is more qualified to be there than an instance of $Y". That's a very different statement. What we're talking about is taking the top N from an applicant group where the sizes of those two groups are very lopsided, that's a different discussion. I don't believe that the OP has proven that the quality of applicants between those groups are equivalent though (in either direction), which is important for comparing apples to apples. (Edit): As a parent commenter said, we also don't know the raw numbers of people who applied from each group. So if we don't know the applicant quality nor the number of applicants, I don't think you can make objective statements about the average/median quality of the students that made it through this process.
  - sagarm 2y ago
    "group A is on average more qualified" and "group B is statistically unqualified" are similar statements, IMO. More importantly, this overly simplistic model clearly does not lead to useful conclusions. The fact that you appear to be taking the argument seriously is confusing.
    - switchbak 2y ago
      That depends entirely on what's meant by "statistically unqualified", I can't say I even know what's exactly meant by that. This overly simplistic model (and I agree it's oversimplified) is what's being debated here, and someone threw up a strawman, which I identified, and which you have apparently conflated as being the same thing.
jamesmontalvo3 2y ago
My daughters, in 2024, still hear “you’re a girl, you can’t be good at math”. My 10 year old is the best programmer on her school’s robotics team, but she hears words like these regularly and she’ll be told she’s not good enough throughout school. My 17 year old is a straight A student, triple varsity athlete, and talented musician, but in applying to colleges she’s repeatedly told me “I couldn’t get into $eliteSchool”. So maybe if there are 20k male and 7k female applicants, those are just the females who fought the societal forces telling them they can’t. Maybe there’d be 70k female applicants otherwise.
- mchannon 2y ago
  [flagged]
disentanglement 2y ago
Coming from a country where the sort of super selective universities like Caltech don't exist, the fierce debates about equality of admissions to these sort of places never made sense to me. If Caltech, Harvard, MIT or wherever really were committed about advancing gender inequality, why not just raise the numbers of students and admit more people? The number of students is mainly limited artificially and there's no reason they can't educate both men and women who apply.
- onetimeusename 2y ago
  I think the prestige matters. I agree with you but in the US we deliberately create bottle necks and then award people who make it through with the most powerful jobs. The powerful want to perpetuate this. I don't think this is a healthy situation, it is creating a zero sum game and a tiny class of people whose children have an edge getting accepted. There is such a gap between the average high school student and the people who can get into high ranked schools that it's very bad for the nation's health overall.
- ghaff 2y ago
  For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall (as well as introducing pragmatic difficulties like housing). Schools do tweak who they admit outside of largely artificial measures like SATs. But, within reason, that's not a bad thing. You probably don't want to admit a class of students from top prep schools who had college test prep classes and helped starving children in Africa.
  - disentanglement 2y ago
    > For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall Why would that be the case? There are many much larger universities all around the globe and also in the US that manage to provide quality education to their students. To me, the statements that colleges make about their admission procedures always seem hypocritical to me. The colleges claim that the goal is to advance gender equality and provide education to underrepresented groups (which would not require a small student body) when their main goal seems to be in fact to create a small in-group of people who have made the right connections during their studies (which absolutely does require a small student body).
isotypic 2y ago
> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did Actually, my understanding was that women typically apply to higher education at higher rates than men. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.09.008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.09.008 has some data supporting this, but it is an older paper - has this changed in recent years, or is it different for Caltech specifically? > This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus Given the article has a difference of 4 students (109 men to 113 women) I have a hard time believing there is a significant difference in abilities of the students. The small class size only further emphasizes this - when the applicant pool is around 13000 students and you are selecting the top 200 or so, you are selecting the high tail of the applicants, where differences in relative ability are marginal (unless you believe the ability distributions of men to women are vastly different.) Why can't it be the case that the top 500 applicants are all roughly equal in ability, and so no matter what distribution of men to women is picked you have low variance in the ability of the class?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- FormerBandmate 2y ago
  It seems like there is actually some affirmative action for men going on at Caltech, the exact opposite of what he claimed. Check out the acceptance rates, it’s double for men https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-caltech https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    "The overall acceptance rate for women was 4.5%, and the overall acceptance rate for men was 1.9%." I think you misread this? Edit: the transfer acceptance rate is even more imbalanced in favor of women
- mchannon 2y ago
  I spent a few seconds googling Caltech admissions (we’ll table the topic of how many commenters can’t google the actual number before accusing me of assuming wrong). Google’s AI assistant (which is often wrong) cited a 58 male:42 female applicant ratio for a recent Caltech class.
FormerBandmate 2y ago
Actually it’s the opposite, it’s harder for women to get into college. 4.5 vs 1.9% for Caltech lmao https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-caltech#:~:text=For%20first%2Dyear%20students%20entering,early%20action%20and%20regular%20decision https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca....
- lief79 2y ago
  You seem to have read that backwards. A greater percentage of woman were accepted.
snarf21 2y ago
I think you are missing the point that this is the way you get equal numbers of men and women applying. Mechanical engineering is currently 90/10 in the US. It takes extraordinary measures to create change and change is a pendulum. You can't ride the break to make it not go past equilibrium, you have to push it further past so that it will eventually move in the direction you want. If you want more women applying, give them role models that are engineers. Make them aware of the profession their whole life, not at an 11th grade career fair. This kind of perspective strikes me as "not fair". What percentage of qualified candidates don't get into Harvard because rich legacies get in? Are you just as outraged at that? I also seen no proof that the women admitted are incapable of the work. At these top schools, lots of highly qualified students don't get in for random reasons and test scores and grades are not a great predictor of career success. As in most things, you get what you optimize for and Caltech is optimizing for more women graduates.
- tines 2y ago
  > this is the way you get equal numbers of men and women applying I don't think this is the only way, it's just the easy/lazy way. Being sexist during admissions is a proximal way of getting more women graduates, but it's also unfair. Focusing on distal methods can be more fair and also get the outcome we all want. Things like helping girls out in elementary school and high school by, say, requiring STEM courses for everyone and giving plenty of help to the low-performing students, along with plenty of encouragement to enter the field, and plenty of good examples to show girls that they're individuals and might be good at STEM, are ways to avoid being sexist while also advancing toward the goal. The fact that it's a slower method isn't a good argument; we could just ban boys from doing STEM at all and that would make women 100% of the graduates. But that's not fair, so we don't do it. IMO the university is not the place to try to achieve these balances, because they only have gross methods that can't be applied fairly, it's way too late in the process. Intervening earlier is the correct and fair way.
onlypassingthru 2y ago
> 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. That is a hasty generalization fallacy. That presumes the applicant pools were comprised of the same quality of applicants. It could also be that there are simply more young men than young women willing to go to a tiny, expensive and boring undergraduate program.
- mchannon 2y ago
  To the contrary, it presumes that the right edge of the curves for both applicant pools do _not_ connect at n - ~100. Given the size difference between cohorts, I argue the curves would never meet at all. If the sizes were identical or close, then you could argue I'm using the fallacy. Your second guess is correct.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    I had zero interest in Caltech for reasons I probably couldn't tell you years later from when I was a young man. Ended up at a different engineering school somewhat by default and it was good for me. (Never even went on campus before I started.) No regrets.
dennis_jeeves2 2y ago
[flagged]
foxyv 2y ago
> 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 is almost a statistical certainty no matter how many women are admitted. Not because of any preferential treatment of women or men, but because the admissions process is not perfect. If you reverse this statement, that the least qualified man accepted to the college is less qualified than the most qualified woman who was denied, you are also probably right. Another way to look at it is that only the most qualified women even bother applying. The number of filters on women in technical fields is absurd. When I was studying Physics there were only five women in the entire program of 200 students. My graduating class for Physics was 5% women. We were all there because we loved physics. Otherwise we would have dropped out 10 times over after being stuck in a male dominated program for 4+ years.
- mchannon 2y ago
  Disagree. In my argument I used “talented and impressive” to mean as the admissions group saw them. It’s subjective, it’s likely inaccurate, but it’s consistent with itself. Essentially the admissions group stack-ranked a male pile and a separate female pile and pulled the top 100 off each. Having to stack rank #100 from the thin pile and #101 from the thick pile would reverse their order using the organization’s stack ranking rubric. Filters for women aren’t high-pass or low-pass, they’re bandpass. Many of the top tier women with the background for Caltech simply have no interest in the school or the doors it can open, versus Stanford or Harvard or MIT, so that self-imposed filter is not a barrier to their qualifying. You thrived in Physics as a minority not because you were lucky but because you worked hard. If luck got you here you’d see more women dropping out than men over the course of the program, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if you have numbers to show that happened.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    As a guy, I just never had an interest in Caltech not because I probably saw it as more of a stretch than other schools I applied to and some of which I was admitted to. For one thing, it was in California which was probably more of a practical barrier from the East than it would be today. But it's probably fair to say that the other schools you list (including MIT) are probably seen as more "normal" than Caltech is.
tzs 2y ago
I believe you've overlooked some important factors. First, Caltech puts a lot more effort into recruiting top women than into recruiting top men. So if you are a top man but are not considering applying to Caltech Caltech probably won't reach out to try to change your mind. If you are a top women they are much more likely to reach out to you, maybe even sending someone to visit and personally pitch applying to Caltech. This is going to tend to raise the average quality of the set of women who end up applying to Caltech, so we should expect to see a higher acceptance rate for women. Second, Caltech has been doing this for a long time. It was an all male school until around 1970 then went coed. I don't know when they started actively trying to recruit women, but they were doing it by the late '70s when I was a student there. At that time incoming classes were around 15% women and the percentage was slowly rising. It has been a long slow rise to where they are today. That gives us at least 45 years of data on the results of these policies and as far as I know no one has ever found any indication that the women of Caltech are any less meritorious than the men. If they had went from 15% women to 50% in a few years then it would probably require lowering standards, but doing it over 45+ years can plausibly be explained just by the recruiting efforts. Third, wanting to have more women isn't a mere matter of optics. Most undergraduates live on campus. For the first couple of years students are generally required to do so. But Caltech is a very hard school. Most undergraduates have little to no time to have any kind of social life that is not on campus. And they are around the age of peak horniness. When the gender ratio is out of whack in such an environment it causes a lot of stress (at least for the heterosexual students), for both men and women, which can greatly affect academic performance. Also, as far as imposter syndrome goes, a sizable majority of the men at Caltech probably have it too. Most of them were at the top of the class for their whole life, and without having to put a lot of effort into it. School was always easy. Then they get to Caltech where they have to work their assess off just to reach average. It's hard to avoid getting some imposter syndrome.
- blacksmythe 2y ago
  Caltech - where your best just isn't good enough. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pixieza/79223350
creer 2y ago
Caltech is a "different", "technical" school anyway. I don't expect as many students apply to Caltech just because everyone does it like to - I don't know - UC Berkeley or Stanford. Some do no doubt but don't most Caltech applicants apply there because seeking a specifically technical school for a technical field? (Which means then that men/women distribution won't simply mirror university education in general.)

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.
- lukas099 2y ago
  I think it's feasible that the females were significantly more qualified than the males. The fact that going to Caltech is seemingly against the gender norm for women may actually cause them to self-select for only the most qualified and dedicated to STEM to apply. Whereas a lot more men may have applied 'just because'. Also, women are just doing better in school right now. The average female college applicant is better than the average male college applicant. So it's not hard to imagine this it true for CalTech too.

lawlessone 2y ago

HideousKojima 2y ago
Unless the pool of female applicants was way more qualified than the male pool (i.e. by several standard deviations) this is true as a simple matter of statistics.
- kjkjadksj 2y ago
  Then lets see your statistics
  - HideousKojima 2y ago
    Suppose there are 100 female applicants and 200 male applicants, and there is an even distribution of GPAs and ACT scores (or whatever criteria is used) in both the male and female pools. If Caltech takes the top 10 females and the top 10 males, the bottom 5 females of the 10 selected will be less qualified than all 10 of the males that were selected. We would need more data from Caltech about total applicants and their qualifications etc. to say for certain, but barring some significant aberrations or selection effects what the OP said is going to be true. Edit: overall acceptance rate for women at Caltech is 4.5%, 1.9% for men (as of 2022): https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-caltech https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca... So unless the female applicant pool is significantly more qualified than the male pool, OP is correct.
    - kjkjadksj 2y ago
      You made my point. A lot of assumptions, no data. The female pool could very well skew higher in their stats. My assumption is that the pools aren’t any different as you are randomly selecting from a general population of people above a threshold level of qualification. Given that you can easily take in more females that have the same qualifications as the males. Given how stuff like the act is scored there will be a lot of people with the same score at every score level.

foobarian 2y ago

I don't disagree with your conclusions. However, keep in mind what problem we are trying to solve here. The problem being that there is a positive feedback loop in gender participation in the disciplines such as Caltech focuses on, which we would like to fix. This feedback loop stretches horizontally across societal institutions way beyond just Caltech, and vertically across time and generations. Put on your engineering hat and see how you would solve this problem? The current push is to attack it from many leaf nodes, the Caltech example being one of them. The hope is that if this is done in many places, we will dampen the feedback loop and end up with a more equitable representation. Whether that problem is the problem we ought to be solving is another debate entirely.

mchannon 2y ago
The problem I’m trying to solve is reducing the amount of ignorance associated with this milestone, and not much more than that. I don’t have a problem with the Caltech admissions organization doing what they do as long as everyone isn’t afraid to acknowledge every aspect of what’s going on and are content with it. Caltech is a private college, and if they want it to be a private women’s college, or a women’s-first college, that’s fine if they want to admit to it. I abhor cognitive dissonance, particularly when weaponized, and the linked article smells like that to me.

caddemon 2y ago

I don't think it's purely an optics thing. College is a community not just school. Do you want all your social groups, living area, etc. to be 75+% male as a college student?

yergi 2y ago
WHAT. You're far off base. You go to school to learn a skill or trade. Go to the bar, church or anywhere else to socialize if that's your goal.
- Jtsummers 2y ago
  Whether you like it or not, schools are communities. They have a shared identity and set of experiences that people outside the school don't have. Whether this should be the case or not is a separate matter, but it is the reality of today (and for pretty much all schools since they first started).
  - mchannon 2y ago
    Starting anything with “whether you like it or not” is a sure sign you’re not arguing to learn or teach but arguing to win (win what? the internet?) Schools are not communities, they have communities within them, but they are more than just communities. Your high school homecoming court also has a shared identity and a set of experiences that people outside the court don’t have. How is either important? A lot of people paid $75 to become one of those data points, and the majority of them didn’t pick Caltech because of the social opportunities (because Caltech is not anywhere near the top of that list unless you’re talking social opportunities strictly for people north of 180 I.Q.). In Caltech we have an exclusive and highly desirable learning institution with a finite and insufficient number of seats. Rigor or optics, you can’t have both. If you’re choosing optics, own it and don’t be ashamed of it.
- lief79 2y ago
  In the case of a large university in smaller/to medium towns, there frequently won't be much of a change in ratio unless you're really willing to travel. It's the same community feeding all the places within walking distance or a short drive. Relatedly, a selective school means that the peers are likely to be similar. Those connections can last a life time, and socialization can greatly broaden your knowledge base and lead to a potentially more interesting skill set and/or a more complex trade.

yergi 2y ago

It's very VERY bad for women if you REALLY think about it from a perspective where life and death are on the line. Think about it: You need brain surgery to remove a tumor. You have a slim chance of surviving the procedure. Maybe your doctor is there in that position ONLY because they are the best. But, MAYBE they are only there based purely upon some non-skill based factor as well. Do you take that chance? No. You don't. You seek out that Asian or White male brain surgeon because there is no doubt that they are there ONLY because they are skilled and not due to some other indelible physical quality. This DEI stuff only hurts the talented women who ARE there based upon merit: because you have to stereotypically assume that they aren't the best of the best. It sucks, but this is what they have done to the workforce by pushing this backwards ideology.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
Jtsummers 2y ago
You don't have to SHOUT so much like an angry uncle sending rants via their still active AOL account. From the guidelines: > Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized. asterisk is italicized when surrounded by single asterisks on either side, and if you want your asterisks back use \* or **.
add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
hackernews.txt

lukas099 2y ago

How do you know that, of the Caltech applicants, there weren't just more qualified women than men? Women are outperforming men in education across the board.

mchannon 2y ago
Because I googled it. 58:42 ratio of applicants. While I could accept that the bottom 16 of males and bottom 0 of females are joke applications, these each included a substantial application fee ($75).
- lukas099 2y ago
  They wouldn’t have to be joke applications, just worse than the ones that were accepted.
  - ghaff 2y ago
    It wouldn't be the slightest bit shocking if, on average, men were somewhat more overconfident than women on their ability to get admitted and to the work at an elite technical school. Of course, that doesn't mean the school doesn't also have their thumb on the scales to adjust demographics in various ways.

TheRoque 2y ago

How can you guarantee this ? From the article, it was the result of campaigns, not affirmative action. Not saying you're in the wrong, but it would be nice to provide proof from what you're assuming.

pseudosavant 2y ago

It is funny how you take as a default fact that the male students (and even rejected applicants) are smarter and more talented than female students without a single shred of data.

nickpeterson 2y ago
One big problem in their theory is it assumes that men and women have an equal opinion of themselves, but that’s seldom true. The numbers tell us that many more men believe themselves qualified to attend caltech, not much more ;)
onetimeusename 2y ago
We don't know the specifics of the Caltech students unless they publish all the data. I am not aware of any school that does that or breaks down data by gender even. (I could be wrong). But here[1] there is a gender gap in SAT scores on average across all test takers, especially for mathematics. If that holds for Caltech applicants, which is reasonable to assume, then male students were more qualified. The article mentions that men are not better at math than women are and talks about a long quest for gender parity but doesn't seem concerned at all when men are accepted less than women so I am curious how that is consistent. [1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/u8ok2w/oc_the_gender_gap_in_us_sat_scores_over_the_years/ https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/u8ok2w/oc_...
- lotsofpulp 2y ago
  > If that holds for Caltech applicants, which is reasonable to assume Caltech is an outlier if there ever was one, so why would it be reasonable to assume Caltech’s applicant statistics reflect broad population SAT statistics?
  - navvyeanand 2y ago
    Precisely. I think almost everyone who applies has a 1500+ SAT score and ~3.8-4.0 GPA
- 2y ago

jimt1234 2y ago

I'm not gonna downvote, but I am gonna challenge this premise: "...the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented..." That's just not necessarily true. If me and a bunch of my bros try out for the Lakers, and LeBron and a bunch of his highly-skilled friends also try out, and LeBron and all his friends make the team, and none of me and my bros make the team, that doesn't mean me or my bros got screwed, or that the team is now full of under-qualified players, it just means that LeBron and his friends or A LOT better at basketball than me and my Average Joe friends.

mchannon 2y ago
Interesting perspective, so I should just assume all these get-girls-interested-in-STEM initiatives should instead be focused on boys, since your argument means that boys suck so much more at STEM?

kjkjadksj 2y ago

This only makes sense if you assume you even can discretely bin a gaggle of high school applicants. Really its the same situation as anything else whether it be university or jobs or whatever other display of talent: the talent pool is both larger than the number of slots and it is also more or less equivocal.

fckgw 2y ago

Your argument starts from the standpoint of "obviously women are inferior to men, so for there to be more women admitted than men it must reason that the scales were tipped in women's favor and good men are being left behind" You see how flawed that argument is, right?

mchannon 2y ago
In the event you're not just trolling (the downvotes seem to make it clear most people think that) and you actually believe what you wrote, I suggest you consider the possibility that I'm arguing something else entirely.

rexpop 2y ago

> a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman I am not sure that "talented and impressive" is the metric by which we should be admitting students into higher education. On the contrary, I submit that we should be admitting the least impressive candidates who can matriculate in order to "train our weaknesses." Women's disenfranchisement has long been a hand tied behind our back, and it's high time that we free ourselves to be maximally productive.

scottyah 2y ago
That's what State Schools are for. CalTech is where we send all the giant-brains so they're not held back and can produce things for society that us small-brains could never comprehend.
- rexpop 2y ago
  I don't subscribe to your eugenicist ontology.

eigenket 2y ago

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus This does not follow from what you wrote before. I think it would if equivalently talented men and women were equally likely to apply to Caltech. This does not seem to be the case, since as you say not as many women are applying. I'm going to make up some numbers for an analogous problem which might make the logic more clear. Let's say the top 50% of men in a year apply to some university, while only the top 10% of women apply. Assume there is some randomness in the admissions process (because frankly there is), then a randomly sampled woman who was admitted is likely to be a stronger candidate than an average man who was admitted.

mchannon 2y ago
Unfortunately this is a textbook straw man fallacy, the epistemological Fourier transform from the actual argument to a domain where your position is solvable. Let’s start with the assumption that the most qualified women applied to Caltech instead of pursuing educations in law, medicine, or other top-tier professions. I posit a number of top-tier women who tick all the boxes would simply have no interest in Caltech as a school. Men too, but less of them wouldn’t be interested. It’s not a matter of women having less merit, quite the contrary: they consider the legal or medical professions more worthy of their merit and thus for them applying to Caltech would be suboptimal for their career aspirations. No, the fact is more men applied because men have fewer attractive alternatives, and unless you believe men are inferior writ large, more women are getting in than men in spite of fewer applying, not because the women are more talented, but because the admissions organization prefers having more women than men, application numbers be damned.
- eigenket 2y ago
  Did you reply to the wrong comment? This doesn't appear to have anything to do with what I wrote.
  - mchannon 2y ago
    No, yours. I think it does, though it’s not as to the point as it could be.

g15jv2dp 2y ago

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. You cannot guarantee that. Show some data or don't say anything. > 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 doesn't follow. If women self-censor (not sure how to say it in English correctly) their applications in such a way that only top women dare applying, while men don't, then no, it's not true that the men who didn't get in are more talented than the women who didn't get in. I'm not speaking in hypothetical, this is what actually happens - see e.g., Bosquet C., Combes P-P., García‐Peñalosa C., 2019, « Gender and Promotions: Evidence from Academic Economists in France », Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 121 (3), 1020-1053 or https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/nos-blogs/dialogues-economiques/plafond-de-verre-a-luniversite-quand-les-femmes-sautocensurent https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/nos-blogs/dialogues-economiques/pl... The rest of your comment is based on faulty premises so I won't bother replying point by point.

Aunche 2y ago
> Show some data or don't say anything. https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/2/gender-parity-admissions/ https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/2/gender-parity-a... > At Caltech, there has been an average gap of 10 percentage points between the acceptance rate for male and female applicants since 2003-04. Women were accepted at more than double the rate for men for the 2022-23 school year. It's worth noting that men have it easier time getting into liberal arts universities like Brown or Yale. > If women self-censor (not sure how to say it in English correctly) their applications in such a way that only top women dare applying, while men don't In my personal experience, it was actually the opposite. I self censored my application to MIT because I noticed that they rejected all the men from my high school and accepted all the women who applied, despite the men being equally or more qualified.
- g15jv2dp 2y ago
  > At Caltech, there has been an average gap of 10 percentage points between the acceptance rate for male and female applicants since 2003-04. Women were accepted at more than double the rate for men for the 2022-23 school year. This is about acceptance rate. We were talking about number of applicants. Where are the numbers for applications? > In my personal experience, it was actually the opposite. I self censored my application to MIT because I noticed that they rejected all the men from my high school and accepted all the women who applied, despite the men being equally or more qualified. Your anecdote is supposed to beat data...?

sagarm 2y ago

As a group, girls outperform boys in school. By this simple model, men are statistically unqualified for every job. Seems a little unfair to men, but those are the facts. All models are wrong; some are useful.

switchbak 2y ago
"As a group, girls outperform boys in school" - but is that true in science and engineering, as we're discussing here? Regardless, I think most folks would disagree with the conclusion that: if group $X outperforms $Y, then every instance of $X is more qualified and competent than every instance of $Y. The OP did very much not say "$X are statistically unqualified for every job" as you're saying, they said effectively: "on average, a member of $X is more qualified to be there than an instance of $Y". That's a very different statement. What we're talking about is taking the top N from an applicant group where the sizes of those two groups are very lopsided, that's a different discussion. I don't believe that the OP has proven that the quality of applicants between those groups are equivalent though (in either direction), which is important for comparing apples to apples. (Edit): As a parent commenter said, we also don't know the raw numbers of people who applied from each group. So if we don't know the applicant quality nor the number of applicants, I don't think you can make objective statements about the average/median quality of the students that made it through this process.
- sagarm 2y ago
  "group A is on average more qualified" and "group B is statistically unqualified" are similar statements, IMO. More importantly, this overly simplistic model clearly does not lead to useful conclusions. The fact that you appear to be taking the argument seriously is confusing.
  - switchbak 2y ago
    That depends entirely on what's meant by "statistically unqualified", I can't say I even know what's exactly meant by that. This overly simplistic model (and I agree it's oversimplified) is what's being debated here, and someone threw up a strawman, which I identified, and which you have apparently conflated as being the same thing.

jamesmontalvo3 2y ago

My daughters, in 2024, still hear “you’re a girl, you can’t be good at math”. My 10 year old is the best programmer on her school’s robotics team, but she hears words like these regularly and she’ll be told she’s not good enough throughout school. My 17 year old is a straight A student, triple varsity athlete, and talented musician, but in applying to colleges she’s repeatedly told me “I couldn’t get into $eliteSchool”. So maybe if there are 20k male and 7k female applicants, those are just the females who fought the societal forces telling them they can’t. Maybe there’d be 70k female applicants otherwise.

mchannon 2y ago
[flagged]

disentanglement 2y ago

Coming from a country where the sort of super selective universities like Caltech don't exist, the fierce debates about equality of admissions to these sort of places never made sense to me. If Caltech, Harvard, MIT or wherever really were committed about advancing gender inequality, why not just raise the numbers of students and admit more people? The number of students is mainly limited artificially and there's no reason they can't educate both men and women who apply.

onetimeusename 2y ago
I think the prestige matters. I agree with you but in the US we deliberately create bottle necks and then award people who make it through with the most powerful jobs. The powerful want to perpetuate this. I don't think this is a healthy situation, it is creating a zero sum game and a tiny class of people whose children have an edge getting accepted. There is such a gap between the average high school student and the people who can get into high ranked schools that it's very bad for the nation's health overall.
ghaff 2y ago
For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall (as well as introducing pragmatic difficulties like housing). Schools do tweak who they admit outside of largely artificial measures like SATs. But, within reason, that's not a bad thing. You probably don't want to admit a class of students from top prep schools who had college test prep classes and helped starving children in Africa.
- disentanglement 2y ago
  > For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall Why would that be the case? There are many much larger universities all around the globe and also in the US that manage to provide quality education to their students. To me, the statements that colleges make about their admission procedures always seem hypocritical to me. The colleges claim that the goal is to advance gender equality and provide education to underrepresented groups (which would not require a small student body) when their main goal seems to be in fact to create a small in-group of people who have made the right connections during their studies (which absolutely does require a small student body).

isotypic 2y ago

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did Actually, my understanding was that women typically apply to higher education at higher rates than men. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.09.008 http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.09.008 has some data supporting this, but it is an older paper - has this changed in recent years, or is it different for Caltech specifically? > This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus Given the article has a difference of 4 students (109 men to 113 women) I have a hard time believing there is a significant difference in abilities of the students. The small class size only further emphasizes this - when the applicant pool is around 13000 students and you are selecting the top 200 or so, you are selecting the high tail of the applicants, where differences in relative ability are marginal (unless you believe the ability distributions of men to women are vastly different.) Why can't it be the case that the top 500 applicants are all roughly equal in ability, and so no matter what distribution of men to women is picked you have low variance in the ability of the class?

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
FormerBandmate 2y ago
It seems like there is actually some affirmative action for men going on at Caltech, the exact opposite of what he claimed. Check out the acceptance rates, it’s double for men https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-caltech https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...
- HideousKojima 2y ago
  "The overall acceptance rate for women was 4.5%, and the overall acceptance rate for men was 1.9%." I think you misread this? Edit: the transfer acceptance rate is even more imbalanced in favor of women
mchannon 2y ago
I spent a few seconds googling Caltech admissions (we’ll table the topic of how many commenters can’t google the actual number before accusing me of assuming wrong). Google’s AI assistant (which is often wrong) cited a 58 male:42 female applicant ratio for a recent Caltech class.

FormerBandmate 2y ago

Actually it’s the opposite, it’s harder for women to get into college. 4.5 vs 1.9% for Caltech lmao https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-caltech#:~:text=For%20first%2Dyear%20students%20entering,early%20action%20and%20regular%20decision https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca....

lief79 2y ago
You seem to have read that backwards. A greater percentage of woman were accepted.

snarf21 2y ago

I think you are missing the point that this is the way you get equal numbers of men and women applying. Mechanical engineering is currently 90/10 in the US. It takes extraordinary measures to create change and change is a pendulum. You can't ride the break to make it not go past equilibrium, you have to push it further past so that it will eventually move in the direction you want. If you want more women applying, give them role models that are engineers. Make them aware of the profession their whole life, not at an 11th grade career fair. This kind of perspective strikes me as "not fair". What percentage of qualified candidates don't get into Harvard because rich legacies get in? Are you just as outraged at that? I also seen no proof that the women admitted are incapable of the work. At these top schools, lots of highly qualified students don't get in for random reasons and test scores and grades are not a great predictor of career success. As in most things, you get what you optimize for and Caltech is optimizing for more women graduates.

tines 2y ago
> this is the way you get equal numbers of men and women applying I don't think this is the only way, it's just the easy/lazy way. Being sexist during admissions is a proximal way of getting more women graduates, but it's also unfair. Focusing on distal methods can be more fair and also get the outcome we all want. Things like helping girls out in elementary school and high school by, say, requiring STEM courses for everyone and giving plenty of help to the low-performing students, along with plenty of encouragement to enter the field, and plenty of good examples to show girls that they're individuals and might be good at STEM, are ways to avoid being sexist while also advancing toward the goal. The fact that it's a slower method isn't a good argument; we could just ban boys from doing STEM at all and that would make women 100% of the graduates. But that's not fair, so we don't do it. IMO the university is not the place to try to achieve these balances, because they only have gross methods that can't be applied fairly, it's way too late in the process. Intervening earlier is the correct and fair way.

onlypassingthru 2y ago

mchannon 2y ago
To the contrary, it presumes that the right edge of the curves for both applicant pools do _not_ connect at n - ~100. Given the size difference between cohorts, I argue the curves would never meet at all. If the sizes were identical or close, then you could argue I'm using the fallacy. Your second guess is correct.
- ghaff 2y ago
  I had zero interest in Caltech for reasons I probably couldn't tell you years later from when I was a young man. Ended up at a different engineering school somewhat by default and it was good for me. (Never even went on campus before I started.) No regrets.

dennis_jeeves2 2y ago

[flagged]

foxyv 2y ago

> 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 is almost a statistical certainty no matter how many women are admitted. Not because of any preferential treatment of women or men, but because the admissions process is not perfect. If you reverse this statement, that the least qualified man accepted to the college is less qualified than the most qualified woman who was denied, you are also probably right. Another way to look at it is that only the most qualified women even bother applying. The number of filters on women in technical fields is absurd. When I was studying Physics there were only five women in the entire program of 200 students. My graduating class for Physics was 5% women. We were all there because we loved physics. Otherwise we would have dropped out 10 times over after being stuck in a male dominated program for 4+ years.

mchannon 2y ago
Disagree. In my argument I used “talented and impressive” to mean as the admissions group saw them. It’s subjective, it’s likely inaccurate, but it’s consistent with itself. Essentially the admissions group stack-ranked a male pile and a separate female pile and pulled the top 100 off each. Having to stack rank #100 from the thin pile and #101 from the thick pile would reverse their order using the organization’s stack ranking rubric. Filters for women aren’t high-pass or low-pass, they’re bandpass. Many of the top tier women with the background for Caltech simply have no interest in the school or the doors it can open, versus Stanford or Harvard or MIT, so that self-imposed filter is not a barrier to their qualifying. You thrived in Physics as a minority not because you were lucky but because you worked hard. If luck got you here you’d see more women dropping out than men over the course of the program, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if you have numbers to show that happened.
- ghaff 2y ago
  As a guy, I just never had an interest in Caltech not because I probably saw it as more of a stretch than other schools I applied to and some of which I was admitted to. For one thing, it was in California which was probably more of a practical barrier from the East than it would be today. But it's probably fair to say that the other schools you list (including MIT) are probably seen as more "normal" than Caltech is.

tzs 2y ago

I believe you've overlooked some important factors. First, Caltech puts a lot more effort into recruiting top women than into recruiting top men. So if you are a top man but are not considering applying to Caltech Caltech probably won't reach out to try to change your mind. If you are a top women they are much more likely to reach out to you, maybe even sending someone to visit and personally pitch applying to Caltech. This is going to tend to raise the average quality of the set of women who end up applying to Caltech, so we should expect to see a higher acceptance rate for women. Second, Caltech has been doing this for a long time. It was an all male school until around 1970 then went coed. I don't know when they started actively trying to recruit women, but they were doing it by the late '70s when I was a student there. At that time incoming classes were around 15% women and the percentage was slowly rising. It has been a long slow rise to where they are today. That gives us at least 45 years of data on the results of these policies and as far as I know no one has ever found any indication that the women of Caltech are any less meritorious than the men. If they had went from 15% women to 50% in a few years then it would probably require lowering standards, but doing it over 45+ years can plausibly be explained just by the recruiting efforts. Third, wanting to have more women isn't a mere matter of optics. Most undergraduates live on campus. For the first couple of years students are generally required to do so. But Caltech is a very hard school. Most undergraduates have little to no time to have any kind of social life that is not on campus. And they are around the age of peak horniness. When the gender ratio is out of whack in such an environment it causes a lot of stress (at least for the heterosexual students), for both men and women, which can greatly affect academic performance. Also, as far as imposter syndrome goes, a sizable majority of the men at Caltech probably have it too. Most of them were at the top of the class for their whole life, and without having to put a lot of effort into it. School was always easy. Then they get to Caltech where they have to work their assess off just to reach average. It's hard to avoid getting some imposter syndrome.

blacksmythe 2y ago
Caltech - where your best just isn't good enough. https://www.flickr.com/photos/pixieza/79223350

creer 2y ago

Caltech is a "different", "technical" school anyway. I don't expect as many students apply to Caltech just because everyone does it like to - I don't know - UC Berkeley or Stanford. Some do no doubt but don't most Caltech applicants apply there because seeking a specifically technical school for a technical field? (Which means then that men/women distribution won't simply mirror university education in general.)