I agree with @JBStillFlying
“At this point, there’s almost certainly some advantage for any student who looks committed to hard-core humanities. The fancy universities care about those areas, and have huge investment in them. They don’t want to have a situation where their 8-10 tenured Classics professors have no undergraduates to whom to teach advanced courses. And they also don’t want to have female departments and male departments. I’m not suggesting that they will reach down and admit underqualified boys who like poetry. It’s more that they reject fewer highly qualified boys who like poetry compared to highly qualified girls who like poetry.”
This is my thinking as well.
@Marlowe1, currently UChicago is about 51/49 male-to-female (based on College Navigator). Over the past couple of years - since I’ve been following the admit rates - they appeared to be shooting for an evenly divided admitted class. As more women apply than men (by something like 1,500 or so) this means that the women have been facing a lower admit rate. Class of 2020 matriculated at about the same yield between the two groups; however, Class of 2021 saw a higher yield among the men than the women. Perhaps that’s more the historical norm - not sure. In any event, the matriculated Class of 2021 was split 52/48 favoring the men.