<p>As it happens, yes, I do have citations. </p>
<p>People who sat on Caltech admissions committees have confirmed in other discussions (here) that their female applicants are, as one might expect from the national data, weaker than the male applicants by the usual objective measures such as test scores and math/science competitions, but stronger on some subjective factors such as self-selection, perceived maturity, focus, or clarity of goals. </p>
<p>Similar reasoning is used in MITChris’ discussion of minority applicants to MIT and their admission rates, in his recent postings (these applicants are really, really, really focused on being nuclear physicists, etc). </p>
<p>In addition to those postings, which are repeating obvious information but are URL-locatable if you want to pursue the issue, I have read and heard any number of comments from MIT personnel, including some on CC, that are essentially the same as the positive half of the Caltech remarks about the supposedly decisive intangible or subjective strengths of the female applicants at MIT, with this advanced as a full or partial explanation of the gender disparity in admission rates. I can’t say that my memory of any of the last five times I’ve heard that one is as specific as for the first two items or that I could locate such an instance on request, but it is, again, pretty much the party line from admissions when pressed on the issue. Caltech is just more forthcoming, so far. </p>
<p>At any rate, the upshot of those sociological observations, if you take admissions people at their word, is that women at any given SAT range will, on average, have higher admission rate than men with the same SAT’s (since in comparison to those men they tend to also have other subjective attributes desired by Admissions and that Admissions says are influential — attributes that may or may not include being female). This is all just the standard statistical assertion that if your probability of selection is positively influenced by two factors A and B (e.g., SAT and maturity, or SAT and female gender), then having A and having B will be negatively correlated among those with any given probability of selection. The application of this principle to the MIT admissions table is as I said: if admission rate, for both men and women, rises with SAT, then mixing the two pools together will tend to mask the effect of SAT on admission rate within each gender separately.</p>