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<p>Although self-selection can certainly raise the female admission rate, there is no form of self-selection that could equalize the male and female SAT (math) score distributions in the applicant pool. For instance, the females would need to be especially shy about applying when their SATs are low but become overconfident (compared to men) about applying when their SATs are high, and it’s not likely that both are true. If females require a higher SAT minimum than men to be convinced to apply, this would affect the number of applicants but it would not influence the 2-to-1 ratio of men to women at the higher scores. If females set higher thresholds than men on other factors, such as grades or level of professional interest, when deciding whether to apply to MIT, these barely correlate with SAT at all once you set a high cutoff, and cannot overcome the escalating gender disparity toward the top.</p>
<p>At the levels beyond SAT 800, you would need to impose “radical self-selection” by preventing most of the male USAMO qualifiers from applying to MIT in order for some sort of statistical parity of applicants to be theoretically possible.</p>
<p>All this is of course even more true of the credential distribution of URM versus non-URM applicants, as one can infer from national data.</p>