Hacker News Reader

I was told a story about someone who applied to a school of engineering somewhere or other, in the latter part of the 1950s.

She had a sterling high school record, but they wrote a rejection letter explaining that they already had a woman attending the institution.

The punch line, as it were, as I recall it, was that "a woman" did not mean one undergraduate woman, but just one, period.

So, she went to a much less prestigious and well-known school, majored in math, and ended up being a programmer instead of an engineer.

I am not sure if she was bitter about it.

Happens all the time in sports.

And really we do it for college too. Except it is “we already have enough comp science majors”.

Discrimination happens when you treat equals as unequal, or unequals as equal. There is a world of difference between "we already have enough asian compsci majors", and "we already have enough compsci majors, but there is room for a sociologist".

Surely you're aware that this literally and explicitly happens in the context of college admissions. "We already have a couple tuba players, try Yale."