Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women | Hacker News Reader

Caltech, long a bastion of male students, enrolls first class of majority women

latimes.com

51 pointsvoisin168 comments

Some of it is probably a matter of deliberate policy choices. Other aspects include an organic shift away from engineering disciplines (like mechanical engineering) that were historically very heavily male dominated. I don't know the exact current ratio at MIT without looking up (pretty close to equal) but it was something like 1:7 50 years ago even though women were admitted since I think its founding.

Also there are way more women applying, to the point where you’re more than double as likely to get in as a man than as a woman. There’s a huge argument about this but no one actually looked up the data for some reason: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

Good Lord. I'd never get into any of these schools these days. (Three people from my 59 person high school class got into MIT and we weren't a high-powered school.) Though I guess if it's any consolation a bunch of the great professors would never get tenure either because they were more tinkerers than theoreticians.

What? No. From your link:

> The overall acceptance rate for women was 4.5%, and the overall acceptance rate for men was 1.9%.

You're less than half as likely to get in as a man.

Transfer acceptance rates are even more skewed towards women.

Of course, you don't know what the distribution of applicants looks like. Though I do strongly suspect that some groups (by gender, geography, even athletic credentials, etc.) almost certainly have a better shot than others all other things being equal.

MIT these days is about half men and half women undergrad. Pretty consistently, about twice as many men as women apply. So you can do the math. There are some other factors like I believe a slightly lower percentage of women accept than men and, of course, you don't know the relative quality academically of the applicant pool (which MIT doesn't publish any data on).

However, it would be really hard to believe the curves for the two populations are that different even if I can certainly believe men are a bit more likely to roll the dice by applying just in case they luck out.

I suspect an admissions officer, if they were candid, would probably say something like: Look, all the students with absolutely impeccable credentials applying are probably getting admitted. Those that are unqualified are not. So we're now figuring out what's most important to us as an institution from the middle tier of applicants especially given that we're dealing with a lot of noisy signal. And, yes, one of these things is that MIT decided years ago it wanted a reasonably balanced gender ratio which we didn't used to remotely have.

> You're less than half as likely to get in as a man.

This is a bit of a misunderstanding of how statistics works. This does not reflect your personal chances of being accepted, only the chances of the subset of men who applied. You are assuming that all the men were equally qualified as the women and there were no other distinguishing characteristics between the two groups.

For instance, if there is a pre-selection process for one group that there was not for another it could skew the numbers significantly and make one group much smaller with a higher acceptance rate.

While the percentage differences could indicate bias against men, it could also indicate something else.

I doubt, for whatever reason fewer men are going to college and more women are seeking the freedom that a college education can give them better odds at, while me go into the heavily male dominated “trades” and still make a pretty good living after a similar number of years it would take in college.

Most colleges and university are majority women. The one I went to had 2 women for 1 man. This was unambiguously a mistake.

at least it makes dating easier for guys at schools like caltech now which is a non-trivial plus

Women don't go to university to enter your personal dating pool.

Actually, the parent didn't say their personal dating pool, did they? They spoke generically.

They also didn't say men would even ask anyone out, are you being sexist, and assuming men always ask, and women do not?

And unless 20 year olds have changed dramatically, everyone is looking for new dating pools.

Or are you suggesting women don't have a sex drive, and should be chaste?

> They also didn't say men would even ask anyone out, are you being sexist, and assuming men always ask, and women do not?

Not remotely related to what I said.

> Or are you suggesting women don't have a sex drive, and should be chaste?

Not remotely related to what I said.

Why do you feel the need to make stuff up?

I'm responding to your direct personal attack on the parent, demonstrating what such assumptions look like.

And for your initial assumption to be true, men would have to be doing the asking. Otherwise, why white knight to save the poor women? Yet if women did the asking, there's no downside for them, yes?

Your post was wrong.

While I get your point but it's short sighted to not view college as a place where both men and women learn and grow as humans outside of formal study. Learning to navigate relationships, discover your sexuality, and generally learn to work with and collaborate with people of different backgrounds. In an environment where the population is radically unbalanced there is less opportunity especially for the people who need to learn about these things the most.

Yes, a lot of growth and exploration of various kinds happens at college. Diversity in the university is probably good.

But, in the context of a society which historically denied women a place in higher education, and an institution which did not admit women, and then had disproportionately few women, to react to higher numbers of women with "this is good for men looking to date" is a really bad take. It frames more women in corners of higher ed where they were previously underrepresented in terms of how it's good for men, and specifically in framing women students as romantic opportunities for men.

You pretending that yeeetz's comment is part of some broader appreciation of a diverse college environment is kinda bs, b/c yeeetz did not say anything about learning from/working with people of a different background -- just that it makes dating easier for guys.

Similarly if you advocate for more women in STEM jobs so straight men in those jobs can date in their workplace more easily ... maybe HR should keep an eye on you and you shouldn't consider yourself to actually be supporting real equality.

I don't support "real equality" and never have.

in a nutshell, this is why men dropped out and stopped talking to women at all

They do exactly this if they intend to grow into a well-rounded, functioning human.

This attitude is how we end up with individuals at 40, alone, hoarding cats, and having no functional social skills.

Dating is necessary to develop skills to survive in the real world and for humanity to propagate.

This is unhinged. You think women go to university to date? In this country with the cost of higher ed?

- when women were mostly or entirely excluded for higher ed, they still participated in society and courtship and had "functional social skills"

- men and women today who never go to college still participate in society, date and have functional social skills

So maybe women go to university to learn or to launch their career or to appease their parents just like everyone else? And commenting on their growing numbers in terms of the benefits to straight male students looking to date is fundamentally objectifying people who are just trying to live their lives? And when someone points this out you imply that women who have the attitude that universities are for something other than dating are on some track to be broken non-social loners, that's failing to account for the broad opportunities to (a) date someone outside your school (b) defer dating until later because you're focused on learning and paying a huge amount to be at this institution or (c) being open to the possibility that people who don't date aren't doomed to be lonely cat ladies b/c there are other kinds of valuable human connection and the people that perpetuate this myth are invested in continued oppression?

Pearl clutching and shrieking about objectification is so 8 years ago. Doesn't really work anymore because it doesn't drive an emotional reaction; people just roll their eyes and move on. This appears to be your special interest but you're responding to normal, healthy men as if they just killed your dog.

Having attended a school in the 90's with a 7-1 male to female ratio, I concur. A strange culture and negative behaviors are reinforced on both sides in such an unbalanced environment.

It's nice for the guys to have it easy for a couple of years, but it's bad for all of us if an entire generation of women find it almost impossible to date because they want to date men with degrees and those don't exist in large enough numbers.

Maybe. I've gone out with women with advanced degrees and women without undergrad degrees. They've all been smart and I pretty much didn't care about their educational resume. Historically, that simply wasn't an issue in general.

Not for you - I'm saying it's an issue for them: many (most? all?) university-educated women want to date their peers - men with degrees. This is a huge problem for them when the ratio of graduates are two women for each man.

Fair enough. I'd just argue that "peers" is not solely determined by degrees. Of course, it's easy for me to say I don't care; I have too many of them. But I know a lot of people care a lot.

They can just date down? A lot of the times those degrees don’t pay better anyway

At least according to surveys and other stats, women are far more reluctant to date down than men.

Then they adjust or don't date.

Men drop out of college; women most affected

Caltech was / is not a school in the middle of nowhere. It's in a big city next to a metropolis. Caltech students who want to find people to date can find people to date.

An even-ish ratio is probably a plus. I went to a very male-heavy school (as a guy) at the time which wasn't ideal. (Though, at the end of the day, it was fine.) But I'm not sure I'd have wanted the flip side either for a variety of reasons.

Why?

Caltech's gender makeup was 45% female a decade ago, although the school did only started admitting women in 1970. A more interesting question would be the ratio of debt-burdened to free-and-clear graduates from Caltech, which reflects on parental wealth. Not that the LA Times would want to take the focus off identity politics and onto class politics.

32% of 2023 graduates had any debt at all; the average total indebtedness (over all four (or more) years) of that 32% was $15,896[0]. Not bad for a school that costs $86,886 _per year_[1].

One should also note that "[s]tudents from families making $90K or below, will receive a no loan financial aid package (package will consist of grants and work-study)" and "[a]t least 20% of first-year students in the past three incoming class were Pell eligible students." [2]

[0] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/typesofaid/loans/disclosure

[1] https://www.finaid.caltech.edu/documents/25301/2324_tuitionf...

[2] https://www.admissions.caltech.edu/afford

Caltech didn't even admit women until 1970.

That was a half century plus ago though? 50 years is a long long time.

And even some of the top tier engineering schools that have admitted women for an even longer time generally had a pretty minuscule number until relatively recently.

no, it really wasn't that long ago.

I'd like to think that 55 years ago isn't really that far in the past but, at the scale of undergraduate academic institutions it sort of is. Although I think it was always coed going back to the 1800s, I think MIT still had just a handful of women in a class into the 1960s.

My boomer mother started her career in accounting/bookkeeping, working in payroll for a large company back in the 70s. The company decided to migrate their payroll system onto a fancy new mainframe computer, so they sent my mother to college to learn COBOL. The stories she tells about being the only female in the college courses, and then most of her career as the only female programmer - those stories are almost incomprehensible compared to today's standards. So, when I read about things like this (Caltech enrolls more females), I think of my mother and the countless other women who paved the road. Not all heroes get Hollywood movies made in their honor.

Now, if I could just get Mom to stay off the stupid Nextdoor app, complaining about people's trashcans being in the street or someone's dog pooped in her yard. LOL

This is a third rail of conversation, regarding gender equality and equity, so please hold your downvotes if you differ from my positions. Some might value the perspective, and I feel we all could learn something here.

I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did. That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in.

This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus (the top 100 of say 20000 is going to be more qualified than the top 100 of say 7000). In pursuing equality, the admissions group has achieved the greatest inequality in school history from a different perspective.

I submit this also is unfair to women. Imagine yourself with a case of impostor syndrome and having the mathematical understanding to back it up. I’d want to know I earned it and deserve to be there just as much as anybody else there. Some do and have, and there’s no way to know who those some are.

Is it worth sacrificing merit for optics? Maybe it is, but we ignore this double-edged sword (even and especially one of its edges) at our peril.

Until equal numbers of men and women apply, deviating from the application gender percentages will disadvantage everybody.

How does this premise:

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did.

lead to this conclusion:

>That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in.

I think they're arguing from the statistical "spread" of capabilities in a group of women as compared to a group of men. Not sure if it's a valid conclusion but that's how I read it.

Unless the pool of females applying was significantly more qualified than the males, it is almost certainly true. Just a matter of statistics.

I think it's feasible that the females were significantly more qualified than the males. The fact that going to Caltech is seemingly against the gender norm for women may actually cause them to self-select for only the most qualified and dedicated to STEM to apply. Whereas a lot more men may have applied 'just because'.

Also, women are just doing better in school right now. The average female college applicant is better than the average male college applicant. So it's not hard to imagine this it true for CalTech too.

Prove it.

Unless the pool of female applicants was way more qualified than the male pool (i.e. by several standard deviations) this is true as a simple matter of statistics.

Then lets see your statistics

Suppose there are 100 female applicants and 200 male applicants, and there is an even distribution of GPAs and ACT scores (or whatever criteria is used) in both the male and female pools. If Caltech takes the top 10 females and the top 10 males, the bottom 5 females of the 10 selected will be less qualified than all 10 of the males that were selected.

We would need more data from Caltech about total applicants and their qualifications etc. to say for certain, but barring some significant aberrations or selection effects what the OP said is going to be true.

Edit: overall acceptance rate for women at Caltech is 4.5%, 1.9% for men (as of 2022): https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

So unless the female applicant pool is significantly more qualified than the male pool, OP is correct.

You made my point. A lot of assumptions, no data. The female pool could very well skew higher in their stats. My assumption is that the pools aren’t any different as you are randomly selecting from a general population of people above a threshold level of qualification. Given that you can easily take in more females that have the same qualifications as the males. Given how stuff like the act is scored there will be a lot of people with the same score at every score level.

It seems quite likely that this is the case. We know a bunch more men than women are applying, and a reasonable prior is that an average woman is about as good a candidate as an average man. Therefore there seem to be a bunch of women who aren't applying who would have applied if they were equivalently qualified males.

I don't disagree with your conclusions. However, keep in mind what problem we are trying to solve here. The problem being that there is a positive feedback loop in gender participation in the disciplines such as Caltech focuses on, which we would like to fix. This feedback loop stretches horizontally across societal institutions way beyond just Caltech, and vertically across time and generations. Put on your engineering hat and see how you would solve this problem?

The current push is to attack it from many leaf nodes, the Caltech example being one of them. The hope is that if this is done in many places, we will dampen the feedback loop and end up with a more equitable representation.

Whether that problem is the problem we ought to be solving is another debate entirely.

The problem I’m trying to solve is reducing the amount of ignorance associated with this milestone, and not much more than that.

I don’t have a problem with the Caltech admissions organization doing what they do as long as everyone isn’t afraid to acknowledge every aspect of what’s going on and are content with it. Caltech is a private college, and if they want it to be a private women’s college, or a women’s-first college, that’s fine if they want to admit to it.

I abhor cognitive dissonance, particularly when weaponized, and the linked article smells like that to me.

I don't think it's purely an optics thing. College is a community not just school. Do you want all your social groups, living area, etc. to be 75+% male as a college student?

WHAT. You're far off base. You go to school to learn a skill or trade. Go to the bar, church or anywhere else to socialize if that's your goal.

Whether you like it or not, schools are communities. They have a shared identity and set of experiences that people outside the school don't have. Whether this should be the case or not is a separate matter, but it is the reality of today (and for pretty much all schools since they first started).

Starting anything with “whether you like it or not” is a sure sign you’re not arguing to learn or teach but arguing to win (win what? the internet?)

Schools are not communities, they have communities within them, but they are more than just communities.

Your high school homecoming court also has a shared identity and a set of experiences that people outside the court don’t have. How is either important?

A lot of people paid $75 to become one of those data points, and the majority of them didn’t pick Caltech because of the social opportunities (because Caltech is not anywhere near the top of that list unless you’re talking social opportunities strictly for people north of 180 I.Q.).

In Caltech we have an exclusive and highly desirable learning institution with a finite and insufficient number of seats. Rigor or optics, you can’t have both. If you’re choosing optics, own it and don’t be ashamed of it.

In the case of a large university in smaller/to medium towns, there frequently won't be much of a change in ratio unless you're really willing to travel. It's the same community feeding all the places within walking distance or a short drive.

Relatedly, a selective school means that the peers are likely to be similar. Those connections can last a life time, and socialization can greatly broaden your knowledge base and lead to a potentially more interesting skill set and/or a more complex trade.

Nah, sorry you had a shit college experience, but college is the place I made most of my close, lifelong friends. And had an awesome time. While also learning, they're not mutually exclusive. It's a shared experience you can't replicate just going to the bar.

It's not like they're taking women that can't hack the coursework. They could replace the entire incoming class with select people amongst the rejected and the class would still be successful. College admissions is partly a crap shoot. If they tilt the crap shoot part in a way that makes the community better, who cares?

> If they tilt the crap shoot part in a way that makes the community better, who cares?

Everybody's all for tilting the crap shoot until they start tilting away from Asians.

Given the option as an 18-yo male I’d probably opt for 5% male, but that’s strictly a matter of personal preference, and not a basis for admissions.

I endured 75+% male and didn’t particularly enjoy it, but that’s not why I attended my similarly-sized engineering college. I went for the education and rigor.

Caltech is and has always been about hardcore study. It’s not a cotillion. At least it didn’t used to be.

You don't need to sacrifice the rigor to have a more balanced community, at least not at the total size Caltech is. There's a large component of college admissions these days that is somewhat arbitrary. High school resumes (at least the type that applies to these schools) have become absolutely cracked. Like it used to mean something to have a research internship, now it's weird not to.

I think you do need to sacrifice some rigor to reach a level of perfect balance, or at least sacrifice the appearance of rigor. So let's agree to differ on that one.

I think we would agree about most aspects of college admissions being flawed.

Flawed is probably technically correct. But you're basically optimizing for a good blend of student body and I think admission committees don't get things "right" but who knows what that even means? They probably mostly do well enough given there are lots of opinions on what the targets should be.

It's pretty clear to me that you don't want to just admit the highest SAT scores, the best athletes, or the best musicians (unless maybe you're Juilliard).

It's very VERY bad for women if you REALLY think about it from a perspective where life and death are on the line. Think about it: You need brain surgery to remove a tumor. You have a slim chance of surviving the procedure. Maybe your doctor is there in that position ONLY because they are the best. But, MAYBE they are only there based purely upon some non-skill based factor as well. Do you take that chance? No. You don't. You seek out that Asian or White male brain surgeon because there is no doubt that they are there ONLY because they are skilled and not due to some other indelible physical quality. This DEI stuff only hurts the talented women who ARE there based upon merit: because you have to stereotypically assume that they aren't the best of the best. It sucks, but this is what they have done to the workforce by pushing this backwards ideology.

hackernews.txt

You don't have to SHOUT so much like an angry uncle sending rants via their still active AOL account. From the guidelines:

> Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.

asterisk is italicized when surrounded by single asterisks on either side, and if you want your asterisks back use \* or **.

How do you know that, of the Caltech applicants, there weren't just more qualified women than men? Women are outperforming men in education across the board.

Because I googled it. 58:42 ratio of applicants.

While I could accept that the bottom 16 of males and bottom 0 of females are joke applications, these each included a substantial application fee ($75).

They wouldn’t have to be joke applications, just worse than the ones that were accepted.

It wouldn't be the slightest bit shocking if, on average, men were somewhat more overconfident than women on their ability to get admitted and to the work at an elite technical school.

Of course, that doesn't mean the school doesn't also have their thumb on the scales to adjust demographics in various ways.

How can you guarantee this ? From the article, it was the result of campaigns, not affirmative action. Not saying you're in the wrong, but it would be nice to provide proof from what you're assuming.

It is funny how you take as a default fact that the male students (and even rejected applicants) are smarter and more talented than female students without a single shred of data.

One big problem in their theory is it assumes that men and women have an equal opinion of themselves, but that’s seldom true. The numbers tell us that many more men believe themselves qualified to attend caltech, not much more ;)

We don't know the specifics of the Caltech students unless they publish all the data. I am not aware of any school that does that or breaks down data by gender even. (I could be wrong).

But here[1] there is a gender gap in SAT scores on average across all test takers, especially for mathematics. If that holds for Caltech applicants, which is reasonable to assume, then male students were more qualified. The article mentions that men are not better at math than women are and talks about a long quest for gender parity but doesn't seem concerned at all when men are accepted less than women so I am curious how that is consistent.

[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/u8ok2w/oc_...

> If that holds for Caltech applicants, which is reasonable to assume

Caltech is an outlier if there ever was one, so why would it be reasonable to assume Caltech’s applicant statistics reflect broad population SAT statistics?

Precisely. I think almost everyone who applies has a 1500+ SAT score and ~3.8-4.0 GPA

They did publish all (or a sufficient subset of) the data, most schools do publish that and break it down by gender, and you’re wrong.

I recognize the hurry to get a comment in, but an appeal to ignorance instead of googling it and using what you find to shape your opinion really sells yourself short, and diminishes the discussion to follow.

By data I meant, applicant data not enrollment data. I haven't seen schools publish admissions data broken down by gender. I can find the number of male and female applicants for a year but AFAIK they do not publish things like GPA and SAT or other performance measure of applicants broken down by gender. That's the only way to compare these two. I have googled for it and I don't see it. (https://www.google.com/search?q=caltech+SAT+by+gender)

AFAIK schools don't generally publish detailed statistics of applicants like that. They do publish enrolled student data. So is it possible that women outperformed men at Caltech? Yes. Is that more likely that what I implied? No, I think using the average SAT scores by gender, it's more likely men outperformed women at Caltech. But there is a degree of uncertainty.

Also I think you are making assumptions about what my motives were and why I posted. Guidelines:

Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

I submit you're looking for the wrong thing. We can assume every person at the top of both piles has a perfect GPA and a near-perfect SAT score, so this is not likely to help us figure anything out.

The real figure of merit in this discussion is simply the thickness of both piles.

With regard to the rest, I interpreted what you wrote differently than how you meant it, I appreciate the explanation, and I apologize for the confusion.

> We can assume every person at the top of both piles has a perfect GPA and a near-perfect SAT score

actually that's a very fair point and you're right. We do know how many are in each pile. thanks and sorry for the confusion.

I'm not gonna downvote, but I am gonna challenge this premise: "...the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented..." That's just not necessarily true. If me and a bunch of my bros try out for the Lakers, and LeBron and a bunch of his highly-skilled friends also try out, and LeBron and all his friends make the team, and none of me and my bros make the team, that doesn't mean me or my bros got screwed, or that the team is now full of under-qualified players, it just means that LeBron and his friends or A LOT better at basketball than me and my Average Joe friends.

Interesting perspective, so I should just assume all these get-girls-interested-in-STEM initiatives should instead be focused on boys, since your argument means that boys suck so much more at STEM?

This only makes sense if you assume you even can discretely bin a gaggle of high school applicants. Really its the same situation as anything else whether it be university or jobs or whatever other display of talent: the talent pool is both larger than the number of slots and it is also more or less equivocal.

Your argument starts from the standpoint of "obviously women are inferior to men, so for there to be more women admitted than men it must reason that the scales were tipped in women's favor and good men are being left behind"

You see how flawed that argument is, right?

In the event you're not just trolling (the downvotes seem to make it clear most people think that) and you actually believe what you wrote, I suggest you consider the possibility that I'm arguing something else entirely.

> a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman

I am not sure that "talented and impressive" is the metric by which we should be admitting students into higher education. On the contrary, I submit that we should be admitting the least impressive candidates who can matriculate in order to "train our weaknesses." Women's disenfranchisement has long been a hand tied behind our back, and it's high time that we free ourselves to be maximally productive.

That's what State Schools are for. CalTech is where we send all the giant-brains so they're not held back and can produce things for society that us small-brains could never comprehend.

I don't subscribe to your eugenicist ontology.

> 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.

Unfortunately 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.

Did you reply to the wrong comment? This doesn't appear to have anything to do with what I wrote.

No, yours. I think it does, though it’s not as to the point as it could be.

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did.

You cannot guarantee that. Show some data or don't say anything.

> That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in.

This doesn't follow. If women self-censor (not sure how to say it in English correctly) their applications in such a way that only top women dare applying, while men don't, then no, it's not true that the men who didn't get in are more talented than the women who didn't get in. I'm not speaking in hypothetical, this is what actually happens - see e.g., Bosquet C., Combes P-P., García‐Peñalosa C., 2019, « Gender and Promotions: Evidence from Academic Economists in France », Scandinavian Journal of Economics, 121 (3), 1020-1053 or https://lejournal.cnrs.fr/nos-blogs/dialogues-economiques/pl...

The rest of your comment is based on faulty premises so I won't bother replying point by point.

> Show some data or don't say anything.

https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2023/10/2/gender-parity-a...

> At Caltech, there has been an average gap of 10 percentage points between the acceptance rate for male and female applicants since 2003-04. Women were accepted at more than double the rate for men for the 2022-23 school year.

It's worth noting that men have it easier time getting into liberal arts universities like Brown or Yale.

> If women self-censor (not sure how to say it in English correctly) their applications in such a way that only top women dare applying, while men don't

In my personal experience, it was actually the opposite. I self censored my application to MIT because I noticed that they rejected all the men from my high school and accepted all the women who applied, despite the men being equally or more qualified.

This is about acceptance rate. We were talking about number of applicants. Where are the numbers for applications?

> In my personal experience, it was actually the opposite. I self censored my application to MIT because I noticed that they rejected all the men from my high school and accepted all the women who applied, despite the men being equally or more qualified.

Your anecdote is supposed to beat data...?

> Where are the numbers for applications?

It basic math. You divide the numbers of people accepted by the acceptance rate. And before you nitpick my data some more, enrollment is a a fair proxy for acceptances because there is no reason to believe that accepted men are twice as likely to reject the top STEM universities than women.

> Your anecdote is supposed to beat data...?

This is ironic coming from someone so willing to dismiss the data that challenges their worldview without providing of their own. My anecdote beats your pure speculation. Applying to an optional promotion isn't the same as applying to colleges.

As a group, girls outperform boys in school. By this simple model, men are statistically unqualified for every job. Seems a little unfair to men, but those are the facts.

All models are wrong; some are useful.

"As a group, girls outperform boys in school" - but is that true in science and engineering, as we're discussing here?

Regardless, I think most folks would disagree with the conclusion that: if group $X outperforms $Y, then every instance of $X is more qualified and competent than every instance of $Y. The OP did very much not say "$X are statistically unqualified for every job" as you're saying, they said effectively: "on average, a member of $X is more qualified to be there than an instance of $Y". That's a very different statement.

What we're talking about is taking the top N from an applicant group where the sizes of those two groups are very lopsided, that's a different discussion. I don't believe that the OP has proven that the quality of applicants between those groups are equivalent though (in either direction), which is important for comparing apples to apples.

(Edit): As a parent commenter said, we also don't know the raw numbers of people who applied from each group. So if we don't know the applicant quality nor the number of applicants, I don't think you can make objective statements about the average/median quality of the students that made it through this process.

"group A is on average more qualified" and "group B is statistically unqualified" are similar statements, IMO.

More importantly, this overly simplistic model clearly does not lead to useful conclusions. The fact that you appear to be taking the argument seriously is confusing.

That depends entirely on what's meant by "statistically unqualified", I can't say I even know what's exactly meant by that.

This overly simplistic model (and I agree it's oversimplified) is what's being debated here, and someone threw up a strawman, which I identified, and which you have apparently conflated as being the same thing.

The teaching profession also happens to be female dominated and there are studies showing girls get graded higher for the same work as boys, so probably the bias starts at a young age.

Coming from a country where the sort of super selective universities like Caltech don't exist, the fierce debates about equality of admissions to these sort of places never made sense to me.

If Caltech, Harvard, MIT or wherever really were committed about advancing gender inequality, why not just raise the numbers of students and admit more people? The number of students is mainly limited artificially and there's no reason they can't educate both men and women who apply.

I think the prestige matters. I agree with you but in the US we deliberately create bottle necks and then award people who make it through with the most powerful jobs. The powerful want to perpetuate this.

I don't think this is a healthy situation, it is creating a zero sum game and a tiny class of people whose children have an edge getting accepted. There is such a gap between the average high school student and the people who can get into high ranked schools that it's very bad for the nation's health overall.

For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall (as well as introducing pragmatic difficulties like housing). Schools do tweak who they admit outside of largely artificial measures like SATs. But, within reason, that's not a bad thing. You probably don't want to admit a class of students from top prep schools who had college test prep classes and helped starving children in Africa.

> For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall

Why would that be the case? There are many much larger universities all around the globe and also in the US that manage to provide quality education to their students.

To me, the statements that colleges make about their admission procedures always seem hypocritical to me. The colleges claim that the goal is to advance gender equality and provide education to underrepresented groups (which would not require a small student body) when their main goal seems to be in fact to create a small in-group of people who have made the right connections during their studies (which absolutely does require a small student body).

Schools can be arbitrarily large I guess, e.g. some of the large state schools in the US. But private universities decide on their missions--which are often to have a smaller and more focused student body to your point. Making connections through my studies was mostly never a big deal but having a (somewhat) smaller school was. There are plenty of larger (and cheaper) universities if that's what you're looking for.

The prestige of these schools is a significant, if not the main part of their appeal. Admitting too many students would cheapen their name. It's an open secret that the admissions processes for the elite US schools is far from meritocratic. They do admit many top performers, since it's part of their image, but also prioritize children of the wealthy and powerful, children of alumni, and other prospects with traits good for their image. For example there was a recent scandal where these schools were found guilty of handicapping Asian applicants because there were so many who were high performing. If they admitted all of those who qualified academically they would become "the school for Asians" and that's not the image they want.

I don't know where you're getting your data from, you're probably referring to the Harvard lawsuit.

Caltech in particular is race-blind, and the majority of people attending Caltech are Asian.

My daughters, in 2024, still hear “you’re a girl, you can’t be good at math”. My 10 year old is the best programmer on her school’s robotics team, but she hears words like these regularly and she’ll be told she’s not good enough throughout school. My 17 year old is a straight A student, triple varsity athlete, and talented musician, but in applying to colleges she’s repeatedly told me “I couldn’t get into $eliteSchool”. So maybe if there are 20k male and 7k female applicants, those are just the females who fought the societal forces telling them they can’t. Maybe there’d be 70k female applicants otherwise.

> I can guarantee you that way more men applied to Caltech than women did

Actually, my understanding was that women typically apply to higher education at higher rates than men. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.econedurev.2004.09.008 has some data supporting this, but it is an older paper - has this changed in recent years, or is it different for Caltech specifically?

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus

Given the article has a difference of 4 students (109 men to 113 women) I have a hard time believing there is a significant difference in abilities of the students. The small class size only further emphasizes this - when the applicant pool is around 13000 students and you are selecting the top 200 or so, you are selecting the high tail of the applicants, where differences in relative ability are marginal (unless you believe the ability distributions of men to women are vastly different.) Why can't it be the case that the top 500 applicants are all roughly equal in ability, and so no matter what distribution of men to women is picked you have low variance in the ability of the class?

It seems like there is actually some affirmative action for men going on at Caltech, the exact opposite of what he claimed. Check out the acceptance rates, it’s double for men

https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

"The overall acceptance rate for women was 4.5%, and the overall acceptance rate for men was 1.9%."

I think you misread this?

Edit: the transfer acceptance rate is even more imbalanced in favor of women

I spent a few seconds googling Caltech admissions (we’ll table the topic of how many commenters can’t google the actual number before accusing me of assuming wrong).

Google’s AI assistant (which is often wrong) cited a 58 male:42 female applicant ratio for a recent Caltech class.

It's a gross oversimplification of course but the next tier of admissions might be missing some proven athletes and some people with particularly noteworthy accomplishments (or donor ties) but most of them would do just fine at any of the elite schools.

Actually it’s the opposite, it’s harder for women to get into college. 4.5 vs 1.9% for Caltech lmao

https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca....

You seem to have read that backwards. A greater percentage of woman were accepted.

I think you are missing the point that this is the way you get equal numbers of men and women applying. Mechanical engineering is currently 90/10 in the US. It takes extraordinary measures to create change and change is a pendulum. You can't ride the break to make it not go past equilibrium, you have to push it further past so that it will eventually move in the direction you want. If you want more women applying, give them role models that are engineers. Make them aware of the profession their whole life, not at an 11th grade career fair.

This kind of perspective strikes me as "not fair". What percentage of qualified candidates don't get into Harvard because rich legacies get in? Are you just as outraged at that? I also seen no proof that the women admitted are incapable of the work. At these top schools, lots of highly qualified students don't get in for random reasons and test scores and grades are not a great predictor of career success. As in most things, you get what you optimize for and Caltech is optimizing for more women graduates.

> this is the way you get equal numbers of men and women applying

I don't think this is the only way, it's just the easy/lazy way. Being sexist during admissions is a proximal way of getting more women graduates, but it's also unfair. Focusing on distal methods can be more fair and also get the outcome we all want.

Things like helping girls out in elementary school and high school by, say, requiring STEM courses for everyone and giving plenty of help to the low-performing students, along with plenty of encouragement to enter the field, and plenty of good examples to show girls that they're individuals and might be good at STEM, are ways to avoid being sexist while also advancing toward the goal. The fact that it's a slower method isn't a good argument; we could just ban boys from doing STEM at all and that would make women 100% of the graduates. But that's not fair, so we don't do it.

IMO the university is not the place to try to achieve these balances, because they only have gross methods that can't be applied fairly, it's way too late in the process. Intervening earlier is the correct and fair way.

> That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in.

That is a hasty generalization fallacy. That presumes the applicant pools were comprised of the same quality of applicants.

It could also be that there are simply more young men than young women willing to go to a tiny, expensive and boring undergraduate program.

To the contrary, it presumes that the right edge of the curves for both applicant pools do _not_ connect at n - ~100. Given the size difference between cohorts, I argue the curves would never meet at all. If the sizes were identical or close, then you could argue I'm using the fallacy.

Your second guess is correct.

I had zero interest in Caltech for reasons I probably couldn't tell you years later from when I was a young man. Ended up at a different engineering school somewhat by default and it was good for me. (Never even went on campus before I started.) No regrets.

> That means the most talented and impressive young man who applied and didn’t get in is objectively more talented and impressive than the least talented and impressive (though still extremely talented and impressive) woman who applied and got in.

This is almost a statistical certainty no matter how many women are admitted. Not because of any preferential treatment of women or men, but because the admissions process is not perfect. If you reverse this statement, that the least qualified man accepted to the college is less qualified than the most qualified woman who was denied, you are also probably right.

Another way to look at it is that only the most qualified women even bother applying. The number of filters on women in technical fields is absurd. When I was studying Physics there were only five women in the entire program of 200 students. My graduating class for Physics was 5% women. We were all there because we loved physics. Otherwise we would have dropped out 10 times over after being stuck in a male dominated program for 4+ years.

Disagree. In my argument I used “talented and impressive” to mean as the admissions group saw them. It’s subjective, it’s likely inaccurate, but it’s consistent with itself.

Essentially the admissions group stack-ranked a male pile and a separate female pile and pulled the top 100 off each. Having to stack rank #100 from the thin pile and #101 from the thick pile would reverse their order using the organization’s stack ranking rubric.

Filters for women aren’t high-pass or low-pass, they’re bandpass. Many of the top tier women with the background for Caltech simply have no interest in the school or the doors it can open, versus Stanford or Harvard or MIT, so that self-imposed filter is not a barrier to their qualifying.

You thrived in Physics as a minority not because you were lucky but because you worked hard. If luck got you here you’d see more women dropping out than men over the course of the program, and I’m sure you’ll let me know if you have numbers to show that happened.

As a guy, I just never had an interest in Caltech not because I probably saw it as more of a stretch than other schools I applied to and some of which I was admitted to. For one thing, it was in California which was probably more of a practical barrier from the East than it would be today.

But it's probably fair to say that the other schools you list (including MIT) are probably seen as more "normal" than Caltech is.

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus

You make a lot of assertions, however I think you would be better off finding evidence. For instance, 93% of women graduate, while only 91% of men do. This would seem to indicate that women are more qualified to be there by at least one metric.

https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/incoming-class-50-percent....

If you're going to claim numbers make your position superior, I'd suggest using more meaningful numbers. 93% vs. 91% is a rounding error. What's the p-value for that?

Makes me wonder. Was Steve Jobs qualified to attend Reed College? How about Bill Gates or Zuck for Harvard? Larry and Sergei? Would society (or their alma maters) be better off if someone took their place who ended up graduating? Or maybe the world is a better place precisely because these people got in to these colleges. Maybe the lower number for men indicates more risk-takers that Caltech will eventually get huge checks from.

Likewise, someone using similar logic might argue that a young woman who decides her junior year she wants to get married, pregnant, and be a stay-at-home mom is overeducated and her slot should have been taken by someone else. Is that career path just as meritorious as others?

For numbers, we could consider the number of Nobel laureates who had gained Caltech BS degrees since 1970: 1 total. Eric Betzig, Chemistry, class of 1983. No doubt there are more to come, but there were 10 prior to 1970. Whatever Caltech was juicing the tank with I would posit has run out, and the institution's best days are behind it. The reason may have nothing to do with this whole gender issue.

I'd like to close this tangent's discussion with the following: Women and men should be judged by their academic prowess alone. If you're going to prefer women, own it, and don't pretend you don't. I bet at least one male future Nobel laureate scratched Caltech off his list because they're biased in this way. Also at least one future male check writer.

Graduation rates have an error of zero. Unless you think the registrar didn't count properly.

That's majorly confounded by a significantly higher percentage of female students at Caltech being transfers, as opposed to beginning there their freshman year: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

Caltech accepts a tiny, tiny amount of transfers in total; less than ten per year. The imbalance in transfer admissions is not significant.

I believe you've overlooked some important factors. First, Caltech puts a lot more effort into recruiting top women than into recruiting top men.

So if you are a top man but are not considering applying to Caltech Caltech probably won't reach out to try to change your mind. If you are a top women they are much more likely to reach out to you, maybe even sending someone to visit and personally pitch applying to Caltech. This is going to tend to raise the average quality of the set of women who end up applying to Caltech, so we should expect to see a higher acceptance rate for women.

Second, Caltech has been doing this for a long time. It was an all male school until around 1970 then went coed. I don't know when they started actively trying to recruit women, but they were doing it by the late '70s when I was a student there. At that time incoming classes were around 15% women and the percentage was slowly rising. It has been a long slow rise to where they are today.

That gives us at least 45 years of data on the results of these policies and as far as I know no one has ever found any indication that the women of Caltech are any less meritorious than the men. If they had went from 15% women to 50% in a few years then it would probably require lowering standards, but doing it over 45+ years can plausibly be explained just by the recruiting efforts.

Third, wanting to have more women isn't a mere matter of optics. Most undergraduates live on campus. For the first couple of years students are generally required to do so. But Caltech is a very hard school. Most undergraduates have little to no time to have any kind of social life that is not on campus. And they are around the age of peak horniness. When the gender ratio is out of whack in such an environment it causes a lot of stress (at least for the heterosexual students), for both men and women, which can greatly affect academic performance.

Also, as far as imposter syndrome goes, a sizable majority of the men at Caltech probably have it too. Most of them were at the top of the class for their whole life, and without having to put a lot of effort into it. School was always easy. Then they get to Caltech where they have to work their assess off just to reach average. It's hard to avoid getting some imposter syndrome.

Caltech - where your best just isn't good enough.

  https://www.flickr.com/photos/pixieza/79223350

Caltech is a "different", "technical" school anyway. I don't expect as many students apply to Caltech just because everyone does it like to - I don't know - UC Berkeley or Stanford. Some do no doubt but don't most Caltech applicants apply there because seeking a specifically technical school for a technical field?

(Which means then that men/women distribution won't simply mirror university education in general.)

In case you didn't read the article, the class is 50.9% women.

So probably statistical noise.

The overall gender imbalance in American higher education is now just as bad as when Title IX was first implemented, only in the opposite direction.

What's interesting is this is deliberately excluded from many metrics of gender inequality, eg the UN defines inequality as "fewer women in college than men" so even 100% women and 0% men would be graded as "more equal" than 51% men and 49% women. Pretty Orwellian.

> eg the UN defines inequality as "fewer women in college than men"

Do you have a reference for that definition? I can't find it.

Sorry the one I'm thinking of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report#Criti...

I misremembered World Economic Forum as a part of the UN but it's a separate agency.

But many reports have that bias. For example a report on gender inequality in European Union makes no mention of multiple EU countries conscripting only men.

Women in a lot of places are barred by legal or cultural methods from going into higher education in a way that men just aren't. Especially in the US less men go to college but they definitely aren't barred from it in the same way. This isn't to say that specific interventions targeting young men aren't important, just that it's not really the same concern at all.

I'm sure you can produce a link to that Orwellian metric's definition somewhere, right?

Sorry the one I'm thinking of is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Gender_Gap_Report#Criti...

I misremembered World Economic Forum as a part of the UN but it's a separate agency.

But many reports have that bias. For example a report on gender inequality in European Union makes no mention of multiple EU countries conscripting only men.

Look for the Global Gender Gap Report of the World Economic Forum, it uses exactly that metric.

I think The Last Psychatrist wrote, when women move in, it's a sign that power has moved on.

[Edit]

Found the quote:

"when more women enter a field, it means less men did, and if the men stopped going there, where did they go? [...] I don't want to be cynical, but boy oh boy is it hard not to observe that at the very moment in our history when we have the most women in the Senate, Congress is perceived to be pathetic, bickering, easily manipulated and powerless [...] I know it's not causal, I am saying the reverse: that if some field keeps the trappings of power but loses actual power, women enter it in droves and men abandon it like the Roanoke Colony. Again we must ask the question: if power seeking men aren't running for Senate, where did they go?"

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2013/01/no_self-respecting_w...

Wow, what a disservice to women to keep up the charade, didn't think there were so many women haters on HN.

Do you reference that quote to imply that Caltech has somehow become diminished?

What is the intent of your comment?

I can't speak for the original commenter, but it's been widely noted that the university system isn't a very exciting or innovative place to be. Between the strict dogma and the high costs, many are moving on. Google, for instance, claims it doesn't look at your undergraduate degree. The best startups have long been run by dropouts.

My guess is that the school has trouble finding capable students of any gender that want to pay the expensive tuition. State schools like Michigan, Maryland and Berkeley have top notch programs that cost a fraction of Caltech's.

Are parents of girls more likely to buy into the Caltech dream? Perhaps. I suppose this batch of statistics might be said to prove that claim. But in general, females are much more risk averse and so are their parents. This suggests that Caltech is a "safe" choice. Not a bad thing to be, but it's not where the innovation and the exploration happens.

"The move comes just months after accountancy firm Ernst & Young, one of Britain’s biggest graduate recruiters, made a similar announcement, saying in August that it would no longer consider degree or A-level results when assessing potential employees."

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2016/jan/18/penguin-ditche...

And so you're suggesting what, exactly?

By his Last Psychiatrist quote "when women move in, power moves out" he was probably suggesting the more widespread decline some are observing in elite institutions, not Caltech specifically. Though I disagree that this has much to do with gender ratios.

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