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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

#101

Post by onlypassingthru »

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…

> 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.

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

#102

Post by mchannon »

jamesmontalvo3 wrote: post #75
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 $eliteSchoo…

[flagged]

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

#103

Post by lief79 »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #83
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…

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.

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

#104

Post by ghaff »

FormerBandmate wrote: post #89
ghaff wrote: post #23

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.

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

#105

Post by thedman9052 »

disentanglement wrote: post #70
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…

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…

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.

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

#106

Post by dennis_jeeves2 »

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…

[flagged]

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

#107

Post by switchbak »

sagarm wrote: post #65
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…

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.

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

#108

Post by abeppu »

abeppu wrote: post #93
jeffwask wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 n…

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…

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.

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

#109

Post by klipt »

sagarm wrote: post #65
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…

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.

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.

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

#110

Post by ghaff »

FredPret wrote: post #97
ghaff wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.
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