Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tzs | Hacker News Reader

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> For example, you can widen the diversity of your applicant pool by reaching out to the groups you want to increase. If a company makes sure to have a booth at the major Society of Women Engineers job fairs, is that discrimination? Men are only being hurt in that there are more people applying for the same positions.

That's how Caltech got from about 15% female undergraduates when I was there (early '80s) to 44% female nowadays.

They treated qualified high school girls the way schools with big highly rated athletics programs treat star high school athletes. They would identify prospects, and then put a lot of effort into convincing them they wanted to come to Caltech.

For boys you only got more than lukewarm recruitment attention if you looked like you might be the next Arthur Rubin or Peter Shor.

The girls that did apply were judged using the same standards that were used for the boys, so they didn't have any advantage or disadvantage in actually getting admitted (except possibly in the case of ties...not sure how they handled those).

>They treated qualified high school girls the way schools with big highly rated athletics programs treat star high school athletes. They would identify prospects, and then put a lot of effort into convincing them they wanted to come to Caltech.

Shouldn't motivation count? Shouldn't liking something, wanting something count? Would you do a good job if you don't like your job, think it was sold to you? Or, would you do a good job because you can't wait to go to job every morning?

Isn't what you say exactly what Damore's claim is? It's not like Caltech was rejecting women, but that women were not chasing education at Caltech. It was their decision, their choice to not go to Caltech. They were making choices on their own that had impact on how numbers at Caltech panned out. It's good to advertise to new potential candidates to join the college.

Has anyone spoken to women who joined Caltech only because of the hard sell that they did, later to drop out and do something else?

Why can't we trust women to make the decision about their career?

Amazon hired someone from car manufacturing to build the data centers. https://www.wired.com/2013/02/james-hamilton-amazon/ I can get behind that completely, it makes sense. Google wanting more of certain gender doesn't make sense to me.

They were all girls who had shown a strong interest in and aptitude for math, science, or engineering.

There are a variety of reasons someone interested in a career in math, science, or engineering might not consider Caltech.

1. They might not have heard of it. Among top science institutions, Caltech is one of the smaller ones. It makes quite a few more than its proportional share of discoveries, but in total number quite a few others are in the news more.

Also, Caltech is generally only in the news for science and engineering. Some of the larger schools, such as Harvard, are also in the news for business, medicine, history, and other fields, which further raises awareness of them.

2. Caltech has a relatively small undergraduate class. It's about 1/5th the size of MIT, 1/30th the size of UC Berkeley, 1/7th the size of Stanford, 1/7th the size Harvard.

This means it is much less likely that they will know someone who is at Caltech or who went to Caltech. There might have been no prior students from their high school who went there, and so the guidance counsellors might not know much about it and recognize students who would be a great fit.

3. They might think they won't be able to handle the load. Caltech is either the hardest science school in the US, or it is #2 just behind MIT. This can easily scare away people who would actually do fine there.

More power to them. I thank them for what they do.

Thank you for taking time to reply in detail.

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