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by simonsarris 2392 days ago
A bit of "wait a minute, something else is going on here" comes with the mention that Physics has a even higher % women, yet there's no mention of curriculum changes for that major. This wouldn't happen to be a very small school with a very low acceptance rate, would it?

It is: less than 900 students and less than 13%. They can have whatever gender ratio they want, more or less, with essentially no effort. I'm not sure they have cleverly solved "insidious bias", more than they are simply selecting for the gender ratio they want as they send out acceptance letters. It would be nice if a much larger school with a much higher acceptance rate adopted identical curriculum, so we could have real data on the idea. But until that happens I would be somewhat cautious about declaring success here.
1 comments
nwallin 2391 days ago
23% of the women who apply to Harvey Mudd are admitted. 10% of the men who apply to Harvey Mudd are admitted. It sounds like they have one admissions process for women, and a different one for me. That's one way to get 50/50 I suppose.

That wouldn't fly in the workplace. I'm surprised it's acceptable under Title IX.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/2016/03/1...

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filoleg 2391 days ago
There could be plenty of non-malicious natural explanations for this.

What if there are way more males applying to Harvey Mudd, thus, assuming equal ability levels of people in both groups, resulting in a higher women admission rate?

What if the women applying to Harvey Mudd are, on average, more competent than males applying for whatever reason? E.g., women being less confident about applying to schools like MIT, so a bunch of them would apply to Harvey Mudd instead, while all MIT-capable males wouldn't apply to Harvey Mudd.

I am not claiming whether that specific situation they have at Harvey Mudd is acceptable or not under Title IX, but the numbers your bring up should not be problematic on its own under Title IX imo, it is how those numbers were arrived at and other numbers in the context that make all the difference.

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