<p>I have read many articles about the ratio of women to men in the STEM field, and all say that if you're a woman applying to a college with the intended major of anything in the STEM field, you have a much greater chance. Is this true? </p>
<p>I'm a female and will apply to Georgia Tech early decision soon with the intended major of Aerospace Engineering and minor in music technology. I'm also interested in the mathematics, computational media, and business administration majors. Because I am a female and have a passion for technology, will this boost my chances? </p>
<p>Being female probably does increase your odds over a male with same stats. But it’s still important to think through a variety of schools. You have of interests. Make sure your guidance counselor agrees with your early decision (ie binding choice) intentions. </p>
<p>Good advice from Colorado Mom. Female status helps, but at a highly regarded STEM university such as GaTech you’ll have lots of female competition in the admissions process. Cast your net wider and you’ll find that several STEM universities will find you a very attractive admissions candidate.</p>
<p>@RedUmbrella I will work extremely hard to get the degree. I’m not expecting any benefits or anything. I’m just curious about the application process and how a student’s gender may influence decisions. </p>
<p>Looking at the 2013 common data set for Georgia Tech (Google “Georgia Tech Common Data Set”, there is lot of interesting stuff in those common data set documents), it looks like overall 37% of male applicants were admitted and 50% of female applicants were admitted. However, you can’t see the score breakdowns by gender – doesn’t answer whether the female pool is more self selecting and only girls with high stats (esp math & science scores) chose to apply to start with. But my guess is that a female applicant probably does have a slightly better chance than a male one at Georgia Tech.</p>
It depends on the college and the STEM field. For example, being female in biology isn’t going to help at most colleges since the ~60% of biology majors in the United States are women A similar statement could be made for most life science related majors, including biomedical engineering. However, women are very underrepresented in most other engineering fields such as electrical, mechanical, aerospace, etc. A few selective tech-focused colleges do seem to treat women as underrepresented group, similar to URMs, in college admissions. MIT is a good example. If one looks at admit rates for students with comparable stats and backgrounds, non-URM females applicants at MIT appear to have a similar boost to URM males. Most colleges with higher admit rates or less holistic admissions do not show this degree of a boost. </p>
<p>You mentioned GeorgiaTech, so I’ll focus on that school. If you look up a particular stat range on Parchment, there appears to be a statistically significant difference in admit rate for comparable stat students between men and women. For example, if I look at applicants with a 3.4-3.6 GPA and 1800-2000 SAT, the admit rate was 83% for women vs 55% for men. I don’t know enough about GT admissions to know how a specific major declaration influences chance of admission.</p>
<p>@DrGoogle This year the acceptance rate decreased by around 20%. I think it was 33% overall or something like that so I am a little concerned as to whether or not I will be accepted. </p>
<p>One unique thing about GT is that they don’t admit by major. They just admit you to the school. Your intended major has no consequence on admission. This is interesting to me since not everything there is necessarily a STEM major. </p>
<p>Their published acceptance rate is 33%. Their initial numbers that were posted on the waitlist page (applied vs admitted only) worked out to be slightly over 10% for regular decision if I remember correctly, so I would advise applying early action and seeing how it works out. Not sure if being female will give you an advantage or not.</p>