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Comment by MengerSponge | Hacker News Reader

Schools that deliberately don't go out of their way to select for gender parity wind up with far more girls than boys. UNC Chapel Hill, for example, is 60% female. From what I understand, this does interesting things to their social dynamics.

Highly selective colleges that strive for parity must accomplish that by rejecting a few girls who would have gotten in on merit alone, and admitting a few boys who should have been the first ones out.

What incentives are you thinking of? What's the source of your data?

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It's more nuanced than that. Engineering schools have mugh higher admission rates for women, sometimes over 2x, in the case of MIT: https://www.collegetransitions.com/blog/can-your-gender-give....

Please cite a source for gender discrimination in admissions. Seems like this would be a textbook Title IX violation.

Look at the incoming class numbers. Harvard/MIT/Princeton/Yale are all within 2% of 50/50.

I don't know how they do it legally, but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Ah, that makes sense. Since those are private schools they don't need to comply with Title IX.

Title IX applies to schools that accept federal funding such as Harvard, MIT etc. see for example https://studentlife.mit.edu/titleix

I wasn't aware they accepted funding. So it seems odd they are so evenly balanced.

Another possibility: men have higher variation in performance than women. Even if the male mean were lower, a greater standard deviation would swamp that effect at the high end.

> I wasn't aware they accepted funding.

Their researchers apply for grants. That is considered "funding". Enrolling students who have taken out student loans is also considered to be "goverment funding" for the school rather than the student.

"Enrolling students who have taken out student loans is also considered to be "goverment funding" for the school rather than the student."

Do you have a source for this?

Title IX specifically does not apply to undergraduate admissions at private universities.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/20/1681

> in regard to admissions to educational institutions, this section shall apply only to institutions of vocational education, professional education, and graduate higher education, and to public institutions of undergraduate higher education

Ah, so even though the rest of title IX applies, admissions does not.

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