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

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2024-08-27/caltech-long-male-bastion-to-enroll-majority-women-for-first-time

by voisin • 2 years ago

51 150 2 years ago

latimes.com

KingOfCoders2• 2 years ago

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.

stackghost2• 2 years ago

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

What is the intent of your comment?

xhkkffbf• 2 years ago

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.

KingOfCoders2• 2 years ago

"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...

indoordin0saur• 2 years ago

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.

klipt4• 2 years ago

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.

duggan• 2 years ago

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.

klipt4• 2 years ago

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.

tdb7893• 2 years ago

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.

rangerelf• 2 years ago

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

klipt4• 2 years ago

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.

alfiopuglisi• 2 years ago

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

riffic2• 2 years ago

Caltech didn't even admit women until 1970.

EasyMark2• 2 years ago

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

ghaff17• 2 years ago

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.

riffic2• 2 years ago

no, it really wasn't that long ago.

tdeck• 2 years ago

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

throwway1203852• 2 years ago

So probably statistical noise.

vsuperpower20214• 2 years ago

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

yeeetz• 2 years ago

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

g15jv2dp4• 2 years ago

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

jeffwask2• 2 years ago

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.

FredPret2• 2 years ago

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.

creer2• 2 years ago

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.

ghaff17• 2 years ago

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.

skybrian• 2 years ago

Why?

ghaff17• 2 years ago

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.

FormerBandmate4• 2 years ago

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...

ghaff17• 2 years ago

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.

tines3• 2 years ago

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.

EasyMark2• 2 years ago

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.

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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.

lotsofpulp2• 2 years ago

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.

throwway1203852• 2 years ago

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.

HideousKojima6• 2 years ago

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

lawlessone• 2 years ago

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.

Prove it.

HideousKojima6• 2 years ago

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.

foobarian• 2 years ago

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.

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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.

caddemon3• 2 years ago

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?

yergi2• 2 years ago

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.

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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.

yergi2• 2 years ago

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.

add-sub-mul-div• 2 years ago

hackernews.txt

Jtsummers2• 2 years ago

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 **.

lukas0993• 2 years ago

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.

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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).

TheRoque• 2 years ago

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.

pseudosavant• 2 years ago

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.

nickpeterson• 2 years ago

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 ;)

onetimeusename4• 2 years ago

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_...

jimt12342• 2 years ago

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.

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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?

kjkjadksj3• 2 years ago

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.

fckgw• 2 years ago

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?

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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.

rexpop2• 2 years ago

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.

scottyah• 2 years ago

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.

eigenket3• 2 years ago

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.

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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.

g15jv2dp4• 2 years ago

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.

Aunche2• 2 years ago

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.

sagarm2• 2 years ago

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.

switchbak2• 2 years ago

"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.

klipt4• 2 years ago

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.

disentanglement2• 2 years ago

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.

onetimeusename4• 2 years ago

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.

ghaff17• 2 years ago

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.

thedman9052• 2 years ago

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.

jamesmontalvo3• 2 years ago

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.

isotypic• 2 years ago

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?

FormerBandmate4• 2 years ago

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...

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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.

ghaff17• 2 years ago

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.

FormerBandmate4• 2 years ago

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....

lief792• 2 years ago

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

snarf21• 2 years ago

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.

tines3• 2 years ago

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.

onlypassingthru• 2 years ago

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.

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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.

foxyv4• 2 years ago

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.

mchannon16• 2 years ago

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.

tzs• 2 years ago

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.

blacksmythe• 2 years ago

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

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

creer2• 2 years ago

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.)

photochemsyn• 2 years ago

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.

bfrink2• 2 years ago

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

jimt12342• 2 years ago

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

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

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