<p>@2coll: Can you post the links to where your statistics come from? Though they are plausible, I would like to seem them in context. I find it a little suspect that no one with under a 1200 SAT score even applied and that there would be a 150 point difference in the lowest score based on sex.</p>
<p>Your comment about the test score range doesn’t explain much anyway because we know the highest score will always be 1600 and the lowest score doesn’t necessarily correspond to the mean score at all. Overall, I think the assertion that the average female applicant is so much better than the average male applicant is pretty tenuous without strong evidence. We are talking about a 17% vs. 35% acceptance rate, which is an astronomical gap.</p>
<p>@Greekfire: I am going to qualify my comments by saying: I am not pursuing STEM and I am not female. I cannot relate to your personal experiences. However, I think you are exaggerating the severity of the situation.</p>
<p>It is in no way true that, “the social barriers that girls these days experience make it almost prohibitively difficult to enter STEM fields.” The fact that COE accepts female applicants at twice the rate it accepts male applicants indicates that this couldn’t be further from the truth.</p>
<p>The fact that female students are a minority in science classes is simply an issue of interest. I know several girls who chose to take Choir over AP Physics this year who would have been in the top of the class, and as a result there are more males in the class (and more males receive the top grades). Did they do so because of invisible social pressures? Are the other girls in the class who aren’t doing as well at a disadvantage because of their sex? Hardly. It’s extremely unfortunate that this happens because I view it as a loss of potential, but it is entirely their personal choice.</p>
<p>The fact is, science is not as popular an interest for females as it is for males. Personality types that are associated with interests in science and math tend to occur more often in males. Certainly the media does portray fewer women in science, but there is no cultural bias against women on an individual basis. The main problem is fostered at an early age and cannot be solved through affirmative action later on.</p>
<p>Affirmative action is not necessary: women who have the talent can succeed just as well as males without affirmation action. The reason that fewer do is very likely because they simply choose to do something else. More importantly, and I cannot stress this enough, the is no practical difference between affirmation action in favor of one party and active discrimination against all others. If female students are being accepted to COE with lower stats than male applicants, and based on the extreme difference in the acceptances rate I think this is highly like, than the program losses out on better students and better students lose opportunities.</p>
<p>If the acceptance rates were the same and the percentage of female students in the program were much lower, it would not indicate bias against females. It only would indicate that fewer females were interested in the first place. Accepting more female students is not going to help COE get the top female students that are missing. The reason they’re missing isn’t because they had lower stats because of some imaginary discrimination, it’s because they didn’t apply for engineering. The College of Arts and Sciences gets more female applicants than male applicants and accepts them at roughly the same percentage. A great many top LAC’s get far more female applicants than males.</p>
<p>I strongly believe that more women should be encouraged to pursue STEM simply to benefit society as a whole by bringing more of the top minds into practical fields. However, affirmative action is absolutely not the way to do it. All it does is reinforce the notion that women really are at a disadvantage while discriminating against male applicants in favor of women who wouldn’t have a chance to get into the program if their more-qualified peers actually pursued those fields.</p>
<p>If there is solid statistical evidence that shows that the female application pool to COE is more than twice as qualified as the male application pool, I am willing to change my mind. However, it looks to me like some more of discriminatory admissions is be practiced. As it stands I think you are both making the wrong conclusion about why the data is the way it is. I am very interested in seeing the data that you have discussed by not provided because though your comments are certainly plausible they do not seem to line up. If what 2coll says is entirely true then the most reasonable conclusion is that women are far superior to men in math and science, which I profoundly doubt is the case either.</p>
<p>I hope you’ll understand that I’m not narrow-mindedly dismissing your case like some posters have. The absence of women in scientific fields is a serious problem, but both of your views seem lead to problematic (and contradictory) conclusions. 2coll’s points would lead me to believe that women in math and science are much better than men, while Greekfire would have me believe that they are worse off but only because of discrimination. These conclusions at at least certainly not both true.</p>