Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

Comment by KingOfCoders | Hacker News Reader

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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