especially computer science
Depends on the school. Look for those that have unbalanced numbers, I believe WPI and RPI fall into that category.
Not.a.hook. A hook is something.that would make a school want you above others with a similar profile (ex. recruited athlete, child of a huge donor.etc.). Very few people.have hooks.
It can help at schools with “too many” men - WPI, RPI, NYU-Poly, most schools with “tech” in the name , except probably MIT which gets plenty of applicants of both genders.
At other schools, applying to a CS major…maybe, it depends how much that school feels it needs more women in CS.
In general women are disadvantaged in admissions, especially at LACs but most everywhere else too, but STEM - especially the E, T and M (and S but not Bio or Chem), it can be a tip.
A good friend did off site admissions interviews for MIT and he said this summer being a female does help with MIT admissions. Not sure about CS; we were talking about a girl who was accepted into engineering.
what I believe is it does give you hook, a small one, but you have to know your stuff in able to qualify.
Absolutely, you can consider it a hook for any STEM oriented schools like MIT and Caltech. Women are severely underrepresented at both.
im pretty sure biology and math are fairly balanced fields, genderwise. so not there. but everywhere else in STEM? yes.
Not for all STEM fields, but in certain engineering schools.
@nepatsgirl
I would not call it a hook, but it can be a bump up if you apply to schools with more men than women. I think it helps the most when you are solidly in the group of good candidate anyway but you still don’t really know whether they will choose you.
As @OHMomof2 said, at many schools, and probably most, women are disadvantaged in admissions because most schools have more female applicants. It those schools it is less likely to give you a bump.
I would look for schools that are either even or male tilted in applications. So, if you are interested in Ivies, I would probably not focus on Brown, which is the most female tilted in applicants.
If you don’t like the Tech type of schools that are heavily tilted toward guys, you others like Lehigh are tilted enough toward men to help you in admissions, but in walking around campus it is unlikely you would notice it. It is about (55% male to 45% female). Case Western is similar, I believe.
Note that they may not need to lower the bar for girls in some schools, but they can offer merit scholarships to increase the yield rate of female students. My D1 has very good stat and received a pretty good scholarship that other male students with similar stat did not receive.
These days, biology is mostly women, in similar proportions as college students overall (who are mostly women). Chemistry is about evenly split, while other sciences and math are mostly men, though not to the degree that engineering and CS are.
This article has stats for male vs female admission rates in 2016:
"Here are the gaps that favored women:
Caltech: 16 percent admission rate for women, 6 percent for men, a 10-point gap.
MIT: 13 percent for women, 6 percent for men, a 7-point gap.
Carnegie Mellon: 28 percent for women, 22 percent for men, a 6-point gap.
U. of Michigan: 35 percent for women, 30 percent for men, a 5-point gap.
Cornell: 16 percent for women, 12 percent for men, a 4-point gap.
U. of Virginia: 30 percent for women, 27 percent for men, a 3-point gap.
Among the U.S. News top 30 liberal arts colleges — excluding all-women colleges — there were just two with gaps of 3 or more points favoring women. They were Harvey Mudd (23 percent female admission rate, 10 percent male rate, a 13-point gap) and Colby (30 percent female rate, 26 percent male rate, a 4-point gap)."
I wouldn’t get hung up on the word “hook.” Suffice it say that at top STEM schools like Caltech, MIT, and Mudd, women are admitted at rates > 2x those for men: Caltech (2.7x), MIT (2.2x), Mudd (2.3x)
If you have a specific university in mind, you can find the male and female admission stats broken out in that university’s CDS. There’s no need to guess if a bias exists.
Admission rates alone do not definitively tell the whole story about admission selectivity. Without knowing the strength of the applicant pools, one cannot definitively say that a lower admission rate means that it is more selective.
Sure, you will never know about the strength of the male vs female applicant pools, because no university (to my knowledge) provides that information. Nevertheless, because of the desire for gender balance, and because the admission rates are SO lopsided, it can be inferred IMO that a female applicant generally has an easier time being admitted at STEM-focused universities than does a male applicant – with roughly the same GPA, test scores, academic rigor, etc. It just doesn’t make sense that the female applicant pool would be THAT much stronger than that for men.
As pointed out by some posters the desire for gender balance leads to a big edge for men at some universities. The issue is acute at William and Mary – a 12 point edge for male applicants (average for the period 1997 to 2006):
http://collegeparents.org/2009/10/15/tough-times-girls/ (I grant that this is an old article…)
Henry Broaddus, director of admission at William and Mary quote:
“Even women who enroll … expect to see men on campus. It’s not the College of Mary and Mary; it’s the College of William and Mary.”
Perhaps even more important, recent news/controversy surrounding google indicates that there may be a hiring “hook” favoring women in computer science (because there are so many fewer of them available than men). Since a job is the goal of most getting a BA/BS in Comp Sci, that is arguable more significant than any advantage in getting into a particular school.
More than that my DD had more internships and job offers coming out of ChemE then many of her male classmates some of whom had significantly higher GPA’s.
Cornell college of engineering has a huge bump for women. I remember seeing data where it was nearly 25% acceptance rate for women and 9% for men. Their applicants to engineering seemed to be 85:15 men to women, but they class ultimately was almost 50:50.
Most schools do not report data separated by college and gender. But I think for engineering, there is a decent advantage to be a woman.
STEM includes bio kind of areas (``pre-med majors’’). The applicant pool is quite balanced and thus neither gender will have an advantage.
One can easily find out the gender ratios at engineering schools at the ASEE site.
@whatisyourquest wrote:
At the accepted students day for CMU SCS, they indicated that the bump for women was larger than this within SCS. They didn’t say how large, but they did indicate that while they were looking for CS experience in their male admits, they found that females with a top-notch math background do just as well without much prior CS experience.