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> 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 thin
by 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 agoUnfortunately 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.