"When it comes to college admissions decisions, there is one factor that influences the decision-making process that college hopefuls may not realize: gender.
‘I have seen that gender does come into play in college admissions,’ Kristen Moon, an independent college admissions consultant and the founder of the MoonPrep.com admissions consulting firm, wrote in an email. ‘The majority of universities are striving for diversity and to maintain roughly a 50/50 balance between men/women. When a university has a significant skew in either gender, being the minority can certainly work in your favor.’
Among the 478 ranked national undergraduate institutions which accept both men and women and reported admissions data to U.S. News, the average discrepancy between the male and female acceptance rate was a 2.6 percent advantage for female applicants." …
Always check the common data set for admission rates by gender. The difference is often quite large, and illuminating. Female applicants should note the many, many schools where their admission rates are substantially lower than their male peers ( and vice versa, though there are far fewer of those ).
Interesting! For most of the schools on my DS’ list, (LACs) the student body is skewed female. I’ll have to tell him, because right now as an unhooked, un-athletic, white male, he’s feeling like he’ll be at the bottom of the pile! (And no flaming please, we both realize that as a white male he has many advantages in this world…I think it’s good for him to experience this even if it’s on the whole quite minor and impersonal).
What we seemed to see was that most LACs skewed female and any school with ‘tech’ in the name skewed male. A boy who is into humanities/arts or a girl into STEM has a bit of a leg up.
A bit, maybe. But there seems to be a lot of schools where the majority of applicants overall get in, but their CS and engineering programs have ivy-like acceptance rates. So a 2.6% boost for being female doesn’t feel like it is going to tip the needle much. A reach is still a reach, a match is still a match.
Once again, “STEM” covers majors with very different characteristics, including gender ratio. While some STEM majors like CS and mechanical engineering skew male, biology majors skew female (although only slightly more than the aggregate of all bachelor’s degrees skews female). So a female applicant applying to a gender-aware college with an intended major of biology may find that to be to her disadvantage.