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.