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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

#131

Post by mchannon »

jimt1234 wrote: post #52
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'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…

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?

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

#132

Post by mchannon »

foobarian wrote: post #41
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 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 engineer…

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.

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

#133

Post by mchannon »

eigenket wrote: post #127
mchannon wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Did you reply to the wrong comment? This doesn't appear to have anything to do with what I wrote.

No, yours. I think it does, though it’s not as to the point as it could be.

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

#134

Post by mchannon »

foxyv wrote: post #119
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…

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.

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

#135

Post by mchannon »

Jtsummers wrote: post #74
yergi wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Starting anything with “whether you like it or not” is a sure sign you’re not arguing to learn or teach but arguing to win (win what? the internet?)

Schools are not communities, they have communities within them, but they are more than just communities.

Your high school homecoming court also has a shared identity and a set of experiences that people outside the court don’t have. How is either important?

A lot of people paid $75 to become one of those data points, and the majority of them didn’t pick Caltech because of the social opportunities (because Caltech is not anywhere near the top of that list unless you’re talking social opportunities strictly for people north of 180 I.Q.).

In Caltech we have an exclusive and highly desirable learning institution with a finite and insufficient number of seats. Rigor or optics, you can’t have both. If you’re choosing optics, own it and don’t be ashamed of it.

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

#136

Post by Jensson »

klipt wrote: post #10
riffic wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Have humans fundamentally changed since 50 years ago? Was there something fundamentally wrong with women 50 years ago that we "fixed"?

> Was there something fundamentally wrong with women 50 years ago that we "fixed"?

Women used to be pregnant or with a lot of small kids for most of their early adulthood, that changed about 50 years ago with hormonal contraceptives.

Edit: I wouldn't say that either way is wrong here, but hormonal contraceptives and hormonal medicines in general is certainly a very fundamental change to a human.

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

#137

Post by mchannon »

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…

They did publish all (or a sufficient subset of) the data, most schools do publish that and break it down by gender, and you’re wrong.

I recognize the hurry to get a comment in, but an appeal to ignorance instead of googling it and using what you find to shape your opinion really sells yourself short, and diminishes the discussion to follow.

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

#138

Post by ghaff »

tines wrote: post #130
FormerBandmate wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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.

Of course, you don't know what the distribution of applicants looks like. Though I do strongly suspect that some groups (by gender, geography, even athletic credentials, etc.) almost certainly have a better shot than others all other things being equal.

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

#139

Post by EasyMark »

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.

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.
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