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

latimes.com

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

#71

Post by indoordin0saur »

stackghost wrote: post #4
KingOfCoders wrote: post #2

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…

Do you reference that quote to imply that Caltech has somehow become diminished? What is the intent of your comment?

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.

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

#72

Post by ghaff »

FredPret wrote: post #55
yeeetz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

#73

Post by jeffwask »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #47
yeeetz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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.

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

#74

Post by Jtsummers »

yergi wrote: post #60
caddemon wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

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

#75

Post by jamesmontalvo3 »

mchannon wrote: post #24

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…

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.

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

#76

Post by FormerBandmate »

FredPret wrote: post #55
yeeetz wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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.

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

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

#77

Post by add-sub-mul-div »

yergi wrote: post #43
mchannon wrote: post #24

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…

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 d…

hackernews.txt

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

#78

Post by scottyah »

rexpop wrote: post #56
mchannon wrote: post #24

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#79

Post by HideousKojima »

kjkjadksj wrote: post #59
HideousKojima wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#80

Post by isotypic »

mchannon wrote: post #24

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…

> 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?

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