<p>Olin gets a lot more male applicants and since they force a 50/50 balance it will naturally be a bit harder for males to get in. We have several females in our program that were accepted to Olin.</p>
<p>Ill - </p>
<p>Statistics complied by the NYT and Time Magazine prove you wrong. But I guess your anecdotes should trump… </p>
<p>I’m dead serious. Generally speaking, women have higher scores. No statistician would say that this would therefore apply to all schools, but it does apply to the overall pool. Some schools are trying to force a ratio that is disproportionate from the pipeline; some are considered to not be “housebroken” for women and therefore have a lower percentage of women who apply… but that doesn’t change the overall numbers.</p>
<p>You just don’t like the numbers. Many people do find it absolutely unbelieveable that women can be good at math - but some of us are.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This was reprinted in the NYT. </p>
<p>Here’s the link: <a href=“http://www.ncsu.edu/awf/graymatter.html[/url]”>http://www.ncsu.edu/awf/graymatter.html</a></p>
<p>Will find a more comprehensive link when I have time.</p>
<p>Ill wait… and Let becky help me here, but Olin aint no walk in the park to get into.
you have two rounds of admission one of which is normal admission thing
then if you make it past there (which only about 1/3 - 1/2) of 400 people who apply do, you come here to interveiw and spend a weeekend. </p>
<p>I have talked to one of the major feminists on campus, she will even comment that girls are not given preferance over guys. We had a long discussion about this during our work this semester on gender and engineering. The whole admission process and females in it came under fire. Olin is trying to do a lot to change education, and we can only go so far out on the ice and still have people walk through these doors expecting a good education. Right now we only have about 300-400 people applying for 75 spots, so the odds are good. </p>
<p>eh, its finals time… Im going to go to bed. Ive got a project, 2 major quizzes, and one design notebook to finish. Its going to be an amazing weekend.</p>
<p>“I have talked to one of the major feminists on campus, she will even comment that girls are not given preferance over guys.” You say it as you would expect the opposite. I don’t at all know the truth of her statements, but based on her status of ‘feminist,’ then I would expect her to be less likely to admit female preference.</p>
<p>ariesathena, instead of posting the most indirect of evidence, why not post something direct?
Women having higher scores on average does not indicate anything. If you admit from two groups on the same standards, their proportions will vary by their numbers and their merits. So, in effect, there is some ‘natural’ proportion. One can alter this proportion by changing the standards for one group or another. Specifically in this case, women do score higher, but what if they only make up 20% of the applicant pool but 50% of the enrollment (as a hypothetical). Their over-representation is due to their over-achievement, relative to males. If they marginally over-achieve, then they should be, if equal standards are applied, similarly marginally over-represented. I read somewhere the national average for female proportion is 15%. I sincerely doubt that women score so high as to achieve an enrollment rate of 46%. To be sure, some colleges attract females more than others. But female preference may still lurk. And after all, colleges, promote affirmative action type policies to ameliorate a relative under-representation of one group or another.</p>
<p>The SAT’s underprediction for females is only 21 points according to my link. Pinker considers the underprediction as due to the combination of greater conscientiousness among women and more grade inflated classes (ie. humanities versus engineering). That’s why, as he says, the College Board advises that it be combined with high school grades, so that the underprediction of females and overprediction of males, is evened out (as high school grades I assume, overpredict female performance and underpredict male performance).</p>
<p>I never said that girls have lower test scores. I know theirs are usually higher and they are more involved in school activities and have a greater number of valedictorians and saludatorians. I think you missed my main point. Just because all that is true doesn’t mean that they apply to engineering. It is vastly the opposite. I love girls that can deal with numbers and science but the number that can as opposed to the number that actually want to (for fear of being the breadwinner, too smart for guys, considered nerdy, spend prime years of life doing problem sets, I’m not making stereotypes but this is a conscious descision that is far more prevalent in accomplished women than their male counterparts) is a much higher ratio than guys who can deal with those things and those that actually want to.</p>
<p>I’m not saying that is women’s place at all. Recent studies prove that many women still hold these values of a housewife/home-maker higher than that of their careers (<a href=“http://alternet.org/story/28621/)%5B/url%5D”>http://alternet.org/story/28621/)</a>. So this would largely translate to a career like engineering which is seen as male-dominated and not even the good type of males. Also many girls have finding a husband in mind (front or back) or even husband material when they go to college more often than guys finding a wife. I know many more girls upset about being single more than guys. So factoring that into a descision about a major that will take up a lot of that time that can be spent with a boyfriend or having fun (latter applies to both genders) is limited more than say, an English major.</p>
<p>Also I want to point out a couple things to tomboy, Olin is a specialized college of math, science, engineering/technollogy, am I right? The girls applying there definitely have their minds set on academics and technology type things. At U of I or the topic title UPenn, there are a lot more options available which means there is a lot more different types of people and different types of majors. Which also means there is a lot more temptation to switch out of engineering once you see how much fun others are having or how hard your major is compared to others that you might like more and know they are easier (again this applies to both genders, but they are already uneven so if the major drops the same amount of girls & guys, it becomes even more disproportionate). So at a large Public University there may be different obstacles than being at a specialized technologically-aligned smaller school. So comparing that to the situation we’re talking about isn’t the best comparison.</p>
<p>Also your article may even prove a point. Although universities may let women in with lower scores (keep in mind that they applied to engineering b/c they wanted to [the right reasons] as opposed to guys who applied because they could [wrong reasons]) they often end up doing better than the men (those that stay) because they will work harder and care more. How many times have you seen a guy freaking out or crying over a grade? Not often. Women care more, I know this because of the girls in my class. Overall they care more and probably do better. The foreign students. Mostly female. This will often lead to better scores even with the same amount of intelligence.</p>
<p>Alright I think the genders are equal in all areas of study just to throw that out there but if what your saying is true about higher scores than why aren’t many women researching out there? Why don’t I have more women professors? I’m not being sexist at all with these questions. My point: Girls often want to do other things with their time than go to school forever and become academic more often than guys. It’s true. Girls want to settle down sooner and more often than guys. Girls are often more affected by settling down in the workforce than guys. These aren’t sexist statements. At all. I think women are highly capable of being just as good in the academic world as men but it is up to them to prove that they can do that. For those like Aries and tomboy that are. More power to you.</p>
<p>So my point is that as long as there are different motives for different genders, regardless of test scores, there will be an inequality among the ratio of males and females which is why engineering programs at public universities recruit females the same way they would recruit an under-represented minority.</p>
<p>Asherm,</p>
<p>Not to be completely mean, but did you read what I wrote?</p>
<p>I will dig up the more precise information when I find it.</p>
<p>Now, what 46% are you talking about? Last time I checked, only about 15% of engineering students are female. While 46% of MIT students are female, they are, last time I checked, not all engineers and not representative of the general population. </p>
<p>And now…
</p>
<p>There’s NO POLITE response to what I want to say to that. Would you EVER, IN YOUR LIFE, TELL A MAN TO PROVE HIMSELF???</p>
<p>Hell no. Men are presumed competent. But us women, according to you, have to prove ourselves - it’s part of our job.</p>
<p>Maybe women get tired of those attitudes - and leave engineering (I can tell you that’s why I got out of the field - why suffer there when I can make more money as a patent attorney?). </p>
<p>Maybe there’s discrimination at every stage of the process. Someone did an experiment in which identical resumes were sent out to dep’t chairs at engineering schools, asking their opinions of the “candidate.” Resumes with male names were considered to be better. </p>
<p>Maybe it’s because professors are the people who were students about 30 years ago, and there weren’t many women then. </p>
<p>Maybe the tenure system screws any woman who wants a family - only in the past few years have colleges allowed extensions to the tenure track for people who take family leave. </p>
<p>…but noooo, it must be that women aren’t as good. </p>
<p>Are you completely incapable of rational thought, or do you just see fewer women and assume that our maternal instincts override our brainpower?</p>
<p>Reading this thread. . . .I can understand another reason why women are discouraged from entering the engineering field. And, then the thread sometime back about looking for “hot” female engineering students. . .</p>
<p>Are there similar threads on the boards here about law and medical careers?</p>
<p>ariesathena, I failed to specify 46% at a specific school like Olin and MIT. That’s what I meant. Here is a simple illustration of what I said before. Example: Asians. Asians score higher than others and do disproportionately well. Assume (even though this isn’t the case) that their current proportion in the ivies is a result of their being admitted under standards similar to other groups, their merits and their numbers. They comprise say, 20% of the students. To raise that to 30, 40 or 50 percent, you would have to either lower the standards for Asians, or start a massive recruiting drive (which I doubt the efficacy of, especially when other colleges do the same). This point alone does not at all demonstrate whether women recieve preference or not. I am just trying to demonstrate a how higher average score among women may still translate into preference with below 50% representation.</p>
<p>Fellow women… I quit reading this thread long ago because it cheesed me off so completely and royally. I recommend you do the same.</p>
<p>-Amy</p>
<p>(Stats: VP of Chi Epsilon Civ Eng honor society at Rice, got accepted to every single top-ten grad program applied to, 800 GRE math, 700s for all SATs, 5 job offers from 5 of the top ten structural firms in the country, about to graduate with a masters from UIUC in structural engineering, on full scholarship, about to go work for Wiss Janney Elstner doing both design and forensic work with a 54K starting salary… if you tell me to “prove” myself, I’m going to tell you to go screw yourself.)</p>
<p>(LOL… Also, an “amihotornot” rating of 8.6. Stick <em>that</em> in your pipe and smoke it.)</p>
<p>If you want to know why women drop out of engineering and dont go into it, google the leaky pipeline.
I just wrote a 10 page paper on it, and I had bearly even gotten into it. There are many many reasons it exsists, and many many reasons women drop out of science at higher levels.
How to keep women in can be figured out from why women drop out. </p>
<p>and with that note, im leaving this thread since everything i say is twisted.</p>
<p>Ariesathena what you said about the resumes doesn’t surprise me at all. What does surprise me is that you would say that colleges would still grade women harder while knowing this information. I’m sure they could do the same study for black and hispanic resumes plan and simple because discrimination still and will always exist as long as it is socially important to document race and gender the census, in applications for colleges, etc.</p>
<p>Aries, you are overreacting, I am a Hispanic male in engineering. I know what it is like to be discriminated against and looked down on. I’m the only Hispanic male in my acc chem classes. And for you to get offended by asking someone to prove themselves is ridiculous, especially when that phrase was taken out of context. For your info, I would ask a guy to prove himself. I don’t assume a guy is competent, you assumed that. In fact I’m more likely to think a guy is arrogant and just will pretend he knows it (you know the ones you hate, why women in engineering quit? Guess what? I hate them too for thinking I’m stupid just because I don’t look like a freak or whatever). Gender doesn’t create competence in my eyes in addition to you misreading point of the phrase in the paragraph.</p>
<p>I know in a hot button issue, one important, like feminism for yourself, it is easy to not read into the actual meaning and pick out certain sentences and statements that can be used against someone. My point with that paragraph that is that it is easier for a man to get lost in school and work b/c it is more socially acceptable to do so and until women recognize that it’s okay to continue their education, and dont care if they aren’t married or dating, I think that things would change very quickly with more females teaching at higher levels or becoming increasingly academic. With men becoming academic it is not only okay for them to become weird, nerdy, and socially inept, but even somewhat accepted in the scientific community. So I was saying that women have more societal pressure put on them than guys (and most often from their own gender, how often do women hear it from their fellow girl-friends and mothers that you should find a guy and settle down, ridiculous and sexist I know but true, am I right?).</p>
<p>That was the point of that paragraph and why women need to “prove themselves” not because I need them to for my self-satisfaction, but for themselves to show that they have what it takes and to provide role models. There have been plenty of women in science, Curie, Hodgkin, Grace Murray Hopper for starters. By prove yourself I really meant actually doing what YOU girls are doing. And for all you women who have completed or are currently on your way to getting an engineering degree that’s “PROVING YOURSELF”. I’m surprised out of all of the lines in that post that was the one you took offense to.</p>
<p>Just so you all know I have girl-friends (engineering and non), a sister who goes to the same college as me, and a mother and if you think for one second that I am chauvinist you are nothing but a crazy person for not listening for what I have to say and starting arguments where there is nothing being contested. Aries, I am especially disappointed in you, seeing your tendency no to jump-to-conclusions and thoughtful mannerisms on other forums. When it comes to your own gender you obviously don’t share that same intelligent restraint that you show numerous other subjects that don’t cause mouthing off over a phrase. You should know that only causes uprisings and blind followers on threads when you focus on a single worthless phrase that meant nothing to the overall idea of the paragraph.</p>