Gender advantage?

<p>okay i think we can stop this thread:
in summary
females have more competition(at mit that is)</p>

<p>more? i didn't think those fruit rolls i ate were laced with anything...</p>

<p>kevtrice -- yes, that is essentially what I meant. just like it would seem implausible that people from Kenya and people from Israel have equally good ability at running, given what we can observe about those abilities. In your earlier post, you made one of my favorite points about this issue -- nobody disputes large disparities in physical ability (between genders, say, to keep it simple), but suggesting an analogous thing about mental abilities is enough to lose you the Harvard presidency.</p>

<p>Oh wait, no, "more competitive" was not what we were implying. We were saying that although at face value the female application pool is dramatically less competitive based solely on percentages, in reality the difference is less so because girls tend not to apply unless they are very well qualified to begin with. Guys view it more like everybody seems to view Harvard - why not buy a lottery ticket? So the male pool is certainly bigger, but it arguably also dips "deeper".</p>

<p>For instance, you most likely will not be rejected from all the Ivy League schools but get into MIT because you're a girl and thus go to a highly-ranked school on a technicality. The "advantage" is not that drastic - male, female or otherwise, you must be of top tier caliber to get in. However, a male with perfect stats is more likely to be rejected than a female with perfect stats. </p>

<p>If you are already competitive at the highest level (schools like HYPS would take second glances at you), then it'll be nice to be a female in the MIT application pool. :)</p>

<p>~EDIT~ OKAY, this ended up being in response to nothing because getalife1234 deleted his two posts before this... if i may, his main point was that any time a 1:1 ratio goal is set, it feels inherently unfair (as does the lower acceptance rate of the extremely talented international pool)~ </p>

<p>I agree, and it's pretty blatantly obvious that in this case the women are the ones who end up being accepted in disproportionately high numbers... while at other, non-tech schools, the trend has reversed so much that males may actually be getting a (still small but growing) boost in admissions. </p>

<p>Honestly, I see it both ways. I personally wouldn't be comfortable at a school that was very poorly gender-balanced... my main reason for not even applying to Caltech, RPI or at the other end of the spectrum, Wellesley, etc. I simply think it's counter-productive to get used to dealing more with one gender than the other when the world is itself roughly 50-50. So I can see balancing the class not as discriminating against whichever gender happens to apply in larger numbers, but simply as acknowledging that the two are separate and most people find it preferable for them to be present in equal numbers. </p>

<p>At a typical school, one year that might tip in favor of males, another in favor of females, and nobody would argue it any more than they would comlpain that a particularly strong applicant group one year is "unfair". So in the same way that only accepting 1,000 kids as the incoming class is not discriminating against the second thousand who would have been accepted if the class was to be larger, I don't really see the 1:1 ratio at any school as unfair in theory.</p>

<p>On the argue hand, I'm arguing that somewhat to play devil's advocate, because I do understand what you're saying that it rubs wrong when a school traditionally attracts one gender much more than the other (as clearly MIT does) and the same gender keeps getting the boost. It's not really good for anyone, because males face a much lower admission rate, and females run up against the sentiment that they only got in because of their gender.</p>

<p>In a nutshell, balanced gender ratios make colleges nice places to be... and like everything, there are side effects - which in my opinion do not outweigh the benefits.</p>

<p>

The problem with this analogy is that there is significant overlap between genders in physical ability -- much as there is with intellectual ability, actually.</p>

<p>So you can say that on average, a human male is stronger (or taller) than a human female, but that doesn't mean that every male is stronger and taller than every female. And if you have a group of female professional wrestlers wrestling a heterogeneous group of men, you can't just say "Oh, on average a man is stronger than a woman, therefore these women are not actually strong and they must be winning wrestling tournaments because the tournaments are really fixed."</p>

<p>Incidentally, as a biologist I am horrified at the insinuation that there are meaningful biological differences between different races or whatever artificial divisions we human beings are using these days. We're a hugely inbred species, and there's very little actual genetic variation between any of us -- actually, there's more genetic variation between two chimpanzees in any single troop in the wild than there is in the entire population of H. sapiens. (That is to say, pick two chimps from the same troop, and they will be less genetically similar to each other than I am to any other randomly selected human on the planet.)</p>

<p>Different groups of people are different, no doubt. But don't blame that on my field. That's a 21A problem.</p>

<p>
[quote]
The problem with this analogy is that there is significant overlap between genders in physical ability -- much as there is with intellectual ability, incidentally.

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Mollie, that's not a problem with the analogy. Of course there are women stronger than almost all men, and women smarter than almost all men. But this is an argument about ratios, which hinge on distributions and not comparisons of particular datapoints. To make the point concretely: even though there are women stronger than almost all men, if you had an elite strength-training institute with selection based on prior performance, people would be entitled to wonder what's going on if the gender ratio were 50:50. People correctly surmise that men, on average, have stronger muscles in certain areas (and more capacity to develop those muscles), and therefore will excel disproportionately at certain feats of strength. The fact that people are so unwilling to admit the possibility of something analogous being true in the mental sphere is troubling.</p>

<p>As for your 21A remark, I agree that the vast majority of what accounts for "racial" (really cultural) differences in academic ability is culture much more than anything else. (But I think this isn't true of differences between genders, incidentally.)</p>

<p><a href="http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6849058/%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6849058/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p>

<p>Thank you Ben.</p>

<p>Ben,</p>

<p>Testosterone level has a positive correlation with cognitive ability?</p>

<p>Is there someone else posting under the name Ben Golub, in invisible ink?</p>

<p>If the female applicant pool is truly more competitive, I would imagine more females being accepted than males, making the almost 1:1 ratio to tilt into the female direction rather than the male direction as it is right now. Not to say that the male applicant pool is more competitive, there just seems a logic flaw.</p>

<p>One of the factors in measuring the magnitude of competition is the number of people you're put against. Obviously, males have many more competitors than females in MIT admissions, but nothing can really be implied because there are hidden variables. For example, it doesn't mean much when many males who are not qualified apply. The average female applicant is more qualified than the average male applicant, but similarly that doesn't mean much. There's probably a percentile in the male applicant pool that's as equally qualified as the female applicant pool. It's likely that this percentile is composed of as many males as females in the female applicant pool or very possibly more. Disregarding the males who are not qualified (because they're likely to not be admitted in the first place), this is a reason why it can be said that males have more competition.</p>

<p>Though I really doubt that the male applicant pool is more competitive than the female applicant pool or vice versa. It takes the same amount of "stuff" to be admitted whether you're male or female. Considering the largeness of the male applicant pool, more males have that "stuff" to get in than females, making the sex ratio slightly tilt in the male direction.</p>

<p>And "stuff" is not just stats. It's a combination of everything that's considered in admission -- who you are as a learner and how you portrayed it in your application.</p>

<p>so I woke up this morning with a mysterious gash in my left foot and have been limping decrepitly around campus all morning. needless to say, I am unworthy of this fine institution.</p>

<p>Logic and Statistics Over Mysticism and HearditFromGV</p>

<p>1-more males apply to mit than females, ratio of 3:1
2-the current sex ratio at mit is about 1:1 (53% vs. 47%)</p>

<p>Based on these, with the aid of common wisdom + anecdotal evidence, Homo sapiens with eggs will have better chance of being admitted than those without eggs.
:)</p>

<p>heh sorry kcastelle! i wrote that response and felt like it wasn't worth posting after a bit. =P</p>

<p>I am a big fan of campus-couples, especially couples from high-end universities like MIT. Therefore, for the record, I have no problem whatsoever about MIT's adminstering these gender based admission policy. And for the good of world's high-tech technology, for the good of preventing golbal warning, for the good of our country's independence from oil, and most importantly, for the good of mankind, those top quality AAA-grade eggs must be fertilized, not go wasted :)</p>

<p>well uh...</p>

<p>glad to be of service?</p>

<p>God - it's sad to admit, but Ben Golub basically owns the MIT forum in every thread he posts in.</p>

<p>i was thinking pwned. =P</p>

<p>..thus bringing him the sobriquet "pseudo-scientific gobbledygook and pontifical hooey"</p>

<p>This topic hasn't come up in weeks! I was afraid people had stopped thinking about it. :-)</p>

<p>I am leaving tomorrow for a wonderful vacation in the tropics where I'll have no access to the internet, so sadly, I won't be able to follow this thread after posting. But I'll leave you with some facts that might help the discussion...</p>

<p>Regarding the applicant pool for the class of 2010:</p>

<ul>
<li><p>Female applicants were more likely to be in the top 5% of their class</p></li>
<li><p>Female applicants were more likely to be valedictorian</p></li>
<li><p>In the subset of applicants who were in the bottom 60% of their class, there were seven times as many men as there were women</p></li>
</ul>

<p>What these things tell us is that men are a lot more likely to "throw their hat in" - in other words, to toss in an application for the hell of it. Women, on the other hand, apparently think much more carefully about whether or not they are qualified and whether or not MIT is a good match for them.</p>

<p>These facts must be considered before saying "it's impossible to fairly admit a class with a roughly 1:1 M/F ratio when many more men apply than women."</p>

<p>Let the flaming begin! I'll be on a beach sipping a drink with an umbrella in it while you guys beat this topic to death... again.</p>

<p>:-)</p>

<p>Rock on,
B.</p>