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

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

#111

Post by klipt »

rangerelf wrote: post #35
klipt wrote: post #5

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.

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

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.

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

#112

Post by abeppu »

wannacboatmovie wrote: post #98
g15jv2dp wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They do exactly this if they intend to grow into a well-rounded, functioning human. This attitude is how we end up with individuals at 40, alone, hoarding cats, and having no functional social skills. Dating is necessary to develop skills to survive in the real world and for humanity to propagate.

This is unhinged. You think women go to university to date? In this country with the cost of higher ed?

- when women were mostly or entirely excluded for higher ed, they still participated in society and courtship and had "functional social skills"

- men and women today who never go to college still participate in society, date and have functional social skills

So maybe women go to university to learn or to launch their career or to appease their parents just like everyone else? And commenting on their growing numbers in terms of the benefits to straight male students looking to date is fundamentally objectifying people who are just trying to live their lives? And when someone points this out you imply that women who have the attitude that universities are for something other than dating are on some track to be broken non-social loners, that's failing to account for the broad opportunities to (a) date someone outside your school (b) defer dating until later because you're focused on learning and paying a huge amount to be at this institution or (c) being open to the possibility that people who don't date aren't doomed to be lonely cat ladies b/c there are other kinds of valuable human connection and the people that perpetuate this myth are invested in continued oppression?

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

#113

Post by g15jv2dp »

Aunche wrote: post #92
g15jv2dp wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 se…

> 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 li…

> 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.

This is about acceptance rate. We were talking about number of applicants. Where are the numbers for applications?

> 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.

Your anecdote is supposed to beat data...?

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

#114

Post by alfiopuglisi »

rangerelf wrote: post #35
klipt wrote: post #5

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.

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

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

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

#115

Post by lotsofpulp »

onetimeusename wrote: post #82
pseudosavant wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 me…

> If that holds for Caltech applicants, which is reasonable to assume

Caltech is an outlier if there ever was one, so why would it be reasonable to assume Caltech’s applicant statistics reflect broad population SAT statistics?

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

#116

Post by disentanglement »

ghaff wrote: post #94
disentanglement wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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 sta…

> For one thing, just admitting more people almost certainly decreases the access to quality education overall

Why would that be the case? There are many much larger universities all around the globe and also in the US that manage to provide quality education to their students.

To me, the statements that colleges make about their admission procedures always seem hypocritical to me. The colleges claim that the goal is to advance gender equality and provide education to underrepresented groups (which would not require a small student body) when their main goal seems to be in fact to create a small in-group of people who have made the right connections during their studies (which absolutely does require a small student body).

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

#117

Post by jimt1234 »

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

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

#118

Post by mchannon »

lukas099 wrote: post #45
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…

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.

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).

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

#119

Post by foxyv »

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.

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.

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

#120

Post by Aunche »

g15jv2dp wrote: post #113
Aunche wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 li…

> 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. This is about acceptance rate. We were talking about number of applicants. Where are the numbers for applications? > In my personal experience, it was actually the opposite. I self censored my…

> Where are the numbers for applications?

It basic math. You divide the numbers of people accepted by the acceptance rate. And before you nitpick my data some more, enrollment is a a fair proxy for acceptances because there is no reason to believe that accepted men are twice as likely to reject the top STEM universities than women.

> Your anecdote is supposed to beat data...?

This is ironic coming from someone so willing to dismiss the data that challenges their worldview without providing of their own. My anecdote beats your pure speculation. Applying to an optional promotion isn't the same as applying to colleges.

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