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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

#161

Post by sagarm »

switchbak wrote: post #107
sagarm wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 effectivel…

"group A is on average more qualified" and "group B is statistically unqualified" are similar statements, IMO.

More importantly, this overly simplistic model clearly does not lead to useful conclusions. The fact that you appear to be taking the argument seriously is confusing.

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

#162

Post by stackghost »

KingOfCoders wrote: post #38
stackghost wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

"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...

And so you're suggesting what, exactly?

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

#163

Post by creer »

yeeetz wrote: post #26
vsuperpower2021 wrote: post #22

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

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

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.

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

#164

Post by creer »

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…

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.)

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

#165

Post by lukas099 »

mchannon wrote: post #118
lukas099 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They wouldn’t have to be joke applications, just worse than the ones that were accepted.

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

#166

Post by vsuperpower2021 »

abeppu wrote: post #108
abeppu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I don't support "real equality" and never have.

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

#167

Post by vsuperpower2021 »

abeppu wrote: post #112
wannacboatmovie wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Pearl clutching and shrieking about objectification is so 8 years ago. Doesn't really work anymore because it doesn't drive an emotional reaction; people just roll their eyes and move on. This appears to be your special interest but you're responding to normal, healthy men as if they just killed your dog.

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

#168

Post by mchannon »

foxyv wrote: post #153
mchannon wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus You make a lot of assertions, however I think you would be better off finding evidence. For instance, 93% of women graduate, while only 91% of men do. This would seem to indicate that women are more qualified to be there by at least one metric. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/incoming-class-50-percent... .

If you're going to claim numbers make your position superior, I'd suggest using more meaningful numbers. 93% vs. 91% is a rounding error. What's the p-value for that?

Makes me wonder. Was Steve Jobs qualified to attend Reed College? How about Bill Gates or Zuck for Harvard? Larry and Sergei? Would society (or their alma maters) be better off if someone took their place who ended up graduating? Or maybe the world is a better place precisely because these people got in to these colleges. Maybe the lower number for men indicates more risk-takers that Caltech will eventually get huge checks from.

Likewise, someone using similar logic might argue that a young woman who decides her junior year she wants to get married, pregnant, and be a stay-at-home mom is overeducated and her slot should have been taken by someone else. Is that career path just as meritorious as others?

For numbers, we could consider the number of Nobel laureates who had gained Caltech BS degrees since 1970: 1 total. Eric Betzig, Chemistry, class of 1983. No doubt there are more to come, but there were 10 prior to 1970. Whatever Caltech was juicing the tank with I would posit has run out, and the institution's best days are behind it. The reason may have nothing to do with this whole gender issue.

I'd like to close this tangent's discussion with the following: Women and men should be judged by their academic prowess alone. If you're going to prefer women, own it, and don't pretend you don't. I bet at least one male future Nobel laureate scratched Caltech off his list because they're biased in this way. Also at least one future male check writer.

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

#169

Post by HideousKojima »

foxyv wrote: post #153
mchannon wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sta…

> This also means that on average, a man on campus is more qualified to be there than a woman on campus You make a lot of assertions, however I think you would be better off finding evidence. For instance, 93% of women graduate, while only 91% of men do. This would seem to indicate that women are more qualified to be there by at least one metric. https://www.caltech.edu/about/news/incoming-class-50-percent... .

That's majorly confounded by a significantly higher percentage of female students at Caltech being transfers, as opposed to beginning there their freshman year: https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...

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

#170

Post by switchbak »

sagarm wrote: post #161
switchbak wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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 effectivel…

"group A is on average more qualified" and "group B is statistically unqualified" are similar statements, IMO. More importantly, this overly simplistic model clearly does not lead to useful conclusions. The fact that you appear to be taking the argument seriously is confusing.

That depends entirely on what's meant by "statistically unqualified", I can't say I even know what's exactly meant by that.

This overly simplistic model (and I agree it's oversimplified) is what's being debated here, and someone threw up a strawman, which I identified, and which you have apparently conflated as being the same thing.

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