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>That's the kind underhanded, unconscious sexism that we're trying to avoid here

I'm interested in facts, not political correctness. Were admission rates loosened to accomplish the goals, or were they not?

>It sounds like you've lost sight of the forest for the trees.

Or have you? To me, the forest is graduating the best CS students, regardless of colour, race or gender.

> Were admission rates loosened to accomplish the goals, or were they not?

They were not. The class of 2014 (admitted in 2010) consisted of 101 women and 95 men, having more women than men for the first time in the college's history. The following year it swung back the other way, with only 42% of the incoming class being female. In both years, the same percent of admitted students were valedictorians or salutatorians at their high schools. In both years, the 75%ile SAT and ACT scores remained the same. Admittedly, I don't have access to all of the data, but the numbers I have show that there was no loosening of admission rates.

> graduating the best CS students, regardless of colour, race or gender.

I maintain two counterpoints to this argument:

* Especially when you're talking on the scale of admitting 200 students a year (only ~40 of whom will be CS majors) the difference between the best 200 men in the country and the best 200 women in the country is exceedingly small, if it exists at all. So given that the school is going to admit 200 equally qualified people no matter what, it might as well admit them in the ratio that it chooses.

* That statement has an implicit assumption that individuals are the best CS students. With a few notable exceptions, this is not true in the wider worlds of academia or professional industry. Teams with diverse skill sets, view points, knowledge, and experience perform the best in both academia and industry. So rather than trying to produce the 40 best individual computer scientists every year, Mudd tries to produce the 40 best team players who will succeed and make their chosen teams better by a multiplicative factor, rather than just an additive one.

EDIT: s/colleges/highschools/ when speaking of valedictorians

The linked article mentions nothing about reducing standards. Nor do any of the other articles I found in a quick Google search.

The only thing I found is the acceptance rate for women is higher than for me. BUT! The application numbers are skewed, with 3x as many men applying as women. The SAT scores of both genders are similar.

> the absolute number of people -- men, women, and otherwise -- who qualify is so much larger than what HMC can support that it could admit a class of 0 men and not have to worry about "lowering its standards".

If it's admitting women it would not otherwise in order to meet its CS quotas, then it is lowering the standards. The only question is how much. By the way, if you believe that, that also implies that if they are changing or lowering standards, then you will have a hard time showing it with the very coarse statistics that elite universities tend to report, especially given the ceiling effects (things like the median or 75th percentile are not very informative when you're that far out on the tail of applicants).

> Sure, maybe Mudd isn't doing as much as it could, or is spending more money than it should.

They are spending an enormous amount of money. When I looked at other coverage the last time I saw a self-congratulatory puff piece from Harvey Mudd, the raw numbers implied they were spending something on the order of $100k per additional woman in their CS program, a number so high I couldn't understand what they could possibly be spending it all on (taking scores of students to conferences is clearly part of it, but even conferences can't soak up that much money).

Success based on enormous per capita expenditure and changing admissions criteria is not something that could be rolled out on any kind of national scale, and is consistent with primarily poaching from an existing static pool of women, in which case their example proves nothing of interest to anyone, and the burden of proof is on them to show that this set of methods will get "more women into technology careers" and we do in fact "need more initiatives like this in academia and industry" and "We can" "change things". Instead, what we get from OP is a paucity of any kind of rigor like randomized experiments (who is better placed to try that than Harvey Mudd?), heavy reliance on anecdotes and correlational results, non-discussion of budgets and admissions, and emotive rhetoric.

> If it's admitting women it would not otherwise in order to meet its CS quotas, then it is lowering the standards.

I disagree. Say your standard is "I will only date people that are over 6 feet tall". Statistically, there is a smaller percentage of women who meet that standard than men. However, there are more men over 6' tall than you could date in a single lifetime. There are also more women over 6' tall than you could date in a single lifetime. So if you choose to date 50% men and 50% women, you're not "lowering your standards". You're just using additional criteria -- like the idea that you might want more variety than only dating people of one gender all the time -- to weight your decision making beyond drawing random lots.

You can say that the analogy doesn't apply. "I don't want to date people over 6' tall -- I want to date the tallest people". I challenge you to apply "the best" to academic criteria that are available during the admissions process. There's simply not enough resolution available to construct an absolute ordering over all applicants, so you have to bucket people somehow. And the top bucket contains more than enough people to select from without having to lower any standards.

You're right that I can't conclusively show that standards weren't lowered using coarse statistics. I'm working with the numbers that I have, and with the knowledge that Maria Klawe and the professors of the HMC CS department are acting in good faith. Their end goal is not "get more women into our CS program". Their end goal is "make the CS profession a welcoming place for everyone", and bringing more women into HMC is a stepping stone towards that goal.

> spending something on the order of $100k per additional woman in their CS program

I would love to see that piece. It goes against my expectations, but honestly you might be right. Can you try to dig it up again for me?

> randomized experiments (who is better placed to try that than Harvey Mudd?)

Actually, Mudd isn't well-placed to do randomized experiments. The population is too small. Also, you're suggesting conducting sociological experiments on sentient populations without their express knowledge or consent. That's something I -- and the school, I expect -- would like to steer clear of.

That doesn't preclude Harvey Mudd from lowering admissions standards for women and they did not state admission standards were not lowered.

It is an obvious approach that Harvey Mudd would be foolish to not consider if their aim is to increase the ratio of female students.