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.