Comparing math scores of males and females in such a narrow band does not enable an outsider or an admissions officer evaluate a highly talented STEM applicant. 75% of MIT’s accepted class scored above a 750M and an 800 Math II SAT score only puts you in the 79th percentile. On the old SAT one wrong answer dropped your score from perfect 800 to a 770. Testing is a money making business and just a necessary step for candidates able to apply to these highly selective programs, not a yardstick to differentiate one exceptional candidate from another.
http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/stats
https://secure-media.collegeboard.org/sat/pdf/sat-subject-tests-percentile-ranks.pdf
Admissions officers are building a living/learning community. Each university population is unique in the ways students are taught, socialize and the types of opportunities they are seeking. No one is discounting the need to have an ethnic and geographically diverse student population, so I’m very surprised that an even male/female ratio is frowned upon. As a female engineer in one of the fields with less than 15% female undergraduates (today’s data, lower in the 1980’s) raising both a girl and boys, I’m happy to see that there are campuses where our children can dive into their STEM fields and also have a balanced social experience. Let’s face at a total cost of $75k/year x 4 years, I’m paying for the educational depth and the social emotional growth. I remember the first years of engineering school with a ratio pf 7 to 1; lots of antics by a predominantly socially immature male population. UGHHHHH…
I still see what we call “the lowest common denominator” behavior when too many high school boys are together at one time. And yes, a corporate environment will not be necessarily equal, but it is drastically improved from the late 1980s when the large majority of male engineers, programmers, managers, executives, members of the board had never worked with or interacted with female counterparts in college or at work.