[ghaff]

Of course, you don't know what the distribution of applicants looks like. Though I do strongly suspect that some groups (by gender, geography, even athletic credentials, etc.) almost certainly have a better shot than others all other things being equal.

[ghaff]

MIT these days is about half men and half women undergrad. Pretty consistently, about twice as many men as women apply. So you can do the math. There are some other factors like I believe a slightly lower percentage of women accept than men and, of course, you don't know the relative quality academically of the applicant pool (which MIT doesn't publish any data on).

However, it would be really hard to believe the curves for the two populations are that different even if I can certainly believe men are a bit more likely to roll the dice by applying just in case they luck out.

I suspect an admissions officer, if they were candid, would probably say something like: Look, all the students with absolutely impeccable credentials applying are probably getting admitted. Those that are unqualified are not. So we're now figuring out what's most important to us as an institution from the middle tier of applicants especially given that we're dealing with a lot of noisy signal. And, yes, one of these things is that MIT decided years ago it wanted a reasonably balanced gender ratio which we didn't used to remotely have.