Easier for girls to get into top engineering schools?

[Anonymous]

Beyond the specific schools named in the original post, this student might benefit by looking into Bucknell or Cornell.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As an MIT alum interviewer, let me shed some light on the MYTH of easier admittance for girls.

Yes, a higher % of female applicants gain admission. What you don't see is the noticeable fraction of unqualified applicants (e.g., kids who like video games and are encouraged by clueless relatives to apply to MIT). This misguided group is virtually all male. Bizarre phenomenon.

Those video game males are bottom applicants and irrelevant. What matters is the top 2% of applicants. Top 2% of male applicants are extremely strong at math. Look at who is winning the hardest math and programming competitions.

You are missing the point. DP. PP was explaining that the whole pool is different. Admitting 2% of the male applicants when a significant portion of them are noticeably unqualified, yet admitting 3% of the female pool when almost none are unqualified means the admission rates of the qualified males v females is about the same, depending on the size of the unqualified male subset. The "listed" % admission for male v female does not tell the story.
PP is not the first one I have heard explain the same, and it correlates with the local stem magnet. About 1/3 are females. They apply in 8th. The male v female SAT range total is the same (median is 1500 so it is a highly skewed group of students, they are all very intelligent). The females dominate the top 25%, which is announced senior year.

You say that the male and female median SAT is the same and also that females dominate the top 25% of a stem magnet school. But those facts don't support the conclusion that there are more females in the top 2-3% of stem students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiad_participants

The male dominance of children's math competitions doesn't necessarily relate directly to "top STEM students" in college. As I understand it, a lot of arcane coaching goes into becoming one of these prodigies. And I bet home geography (do you live near tutors and teams) plays a big role. Then on top you get gender and racial effects from people deciding whether an activity is of interest to them based on norms and visible participation.

I view these math competitions as essentially pretty esoteric. Like being an Olympic class javelin thrower. There's a lot to groundbreaking STEM beyond cracking crazy math problems. I know the profs at Caltech and MIT really want these kids to attend. But frankly that might almost just be affinity bias because they are similar types of math geeks.

When I read this thread, and see how common women are getting in the programs, it makes me believe that you could, in the right environment, find and grow female talent to be competitive at these competitions. But they'd have to be nurtured and encouraged and actually care about participating.

And, in the current environment, a lot of the girls in STEM programs for kids are going away or morphing into.open access.

The International math Olympiad is a children's math competition? Really? Wow!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Denied for in-state UVA, VT. Coming from FCPS. Female 720 SAT Math, AP Physics C, AP Chem, AP Calc BC, unweighted 3.8, President Science Honor Society, elected Homecoming Court, 2 Varsity Sports, Employed.

I think it's BS our country wants more female STEM professionals.

720 Math is not good. Something like 20% of asians get higher scores on their math.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As an MIT alum interviewer, let me shed some light on the MYTH of easier admittance for girls.

Yes, a higher % of female applicants gain admission. What you don't see is the noticeable fraction of unqualified applicants (e.g., kids who like video games and are encouraged by clueless relatives to apply to MIT). This misguided group is virtually all male. Bizarre phenomenon.

Those video game males are bottom applicants and irrelevant. What matters is the top 2% of applicants. Top 2% of male applicants are extremely strong at math. Look at who is winning the hardest math and programming competitions.

You are missing the point. DP. PP was explaining that the whole pool is different. Admitting 2% of the male applicants when a significant portion of them are noticeably unqualified, yet admitting 3% of the female pool when almost none are unqualified means the admission rates of the qualified males v females is about the same, depending on the size of the unqualified male subset. The "listed" % admission for male v female does not tell the story.
PP is not the first one I have heard explain the same, and it correlates with the local stem magnet. About 1/3 are females. They apply in 8th. The male v female SAT range total is the same (median is 1500 so it is a highly skewed group of students, they are all very intelligent). The females dominate the top 25%, which is announced senior year.

You say that the male and female median SAT is the same and also that females dominate the top 25% of a stem magnet school. But those facts don't support the conclusion that there are more females in the top 2-3% of stem students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiad_participants

The male dominance of children's math competitions doesn't necessarily relate directly to "top STEM students" in college. As I understand it, a lot of arcane coaching goes into becoming one of these prodigies. And I bet home geography (do you live near tutors and teams) plays a big role. Then on top you get gender and racial effects from people deciding whether an activity is of interest to them based on norms and visible participation.

I view these math competitions as essentially pretty esoteric. Like being an Olympic class javelin thrower. There's a lot to groundbreaking STEM beyond cracking crazy math problems. I know the profs at Caltech and MIT really want these kids to attend. But frankly that might almost just be affinity bias because they are similar types of math geeks.

When I read this thread, and see how common women are getting in the programs, it makes me believe that you could, in the right environment, find and grow female talent to be competitive at these competitions. But they'd have to be nurtured and encouraged and actually care about participating.

And, in the current environment, a lot of the girls in STEM programs for kids are going away or morphing into.open access.

The International math Olympiad is a children's math competition? Really? Wow!

Before college = children. The point of this forum is how to get into college. Is this really an important distinction?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As an MIT alum interviewer, let me shed some light on the MYTH of easier admittance for girls.

Yes, a higher % of female applicants gain admission. What you don't see is the noticeable fraction of unqualified applicants (e.g., kids who like video games and are encouraged by clueless relatives to apply to MIT). This misguided group is virtually all male. Bizarre phenomenon.

Those video game males are bottom applicants and irrelevant. What matters is the top 2% of applicants. Top 2% of male applicants are extremely strong at math. Look at who is winning the hardest math and programming competitions.

You are missing the point. DP. PP was explaining that the whole pool is different. Admitting 2% of the male applicants when a significant portion of them are noticeably unqualified, yet admitting 3% of the female pool when almost none are unqualified means the admission rates of the qualified males v females is about the same, depending on the size of the unqualified male subset. The "listed" % admission for male v female does not tell the story.
PP is not the first one I have heard explain the same, and it correlates with the local stem magnet. About 1/3 are females. They apply in 8th. The male v female SAT range total is the same (median is 1500 so it is a highly skewed group of students, they are all very intelligent). The females dominate the top 25%, which is announced senior year.

You say that the male and female median SAT is the same and also that females dominate the top 25% of a stem magnet school. But those facts don't support the conclusion that there are more females in the top 2-3% of stem students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiad_participants

The male dominance of children's math competitions doesn't necessarily relate directly to "top STEM students" in college. As I understand it, a lot of arcane coaching goes into becoming one of these prodigies. And I bet home geography (do you live near tutors and teams) plays a big role. Then on top you get gender and racial effects from people deciding whether an activity is of interest to them based on norms and visible participation.

I view these math competitions as essentially pretty esoteric. Like being an Olympic class javelin thrower. There's a lot to groundbreaking STEM beyond cracking crazy math problems. I know the profs at Caltech and MIT really want these kids to attend. But frankly that might almost just be affinity bias because they are similar types of math geeks.

When I read this thread, and see how common women are getting in the programs, it makes me believe that you could, in the right environment, find and grow female talent to be competitive at these competitions. But they'd have to be nurtured and encouraged and actually care about participating.

And, in the current environment, a lot of the girls in STEM programs for kids are going away or morphing into.open access.

It's not really a matter of coaching - AoPS books are cheap and anyone can buy it. It's a matter of inclination to put in the time. Generally, young boys are more likely to have the motivation to put in the work in competition math, hence why boys outperform.

The fact that even you agree these kids are future math professor material is telling.

You can look at Caltech demographics before and after they discriminated based on gender to get a 50/50 class, the way MIT has been doing for decades. Prior to switching to a 50/50 class, Caltech was gender-blind, and as you would expect the vast majority of their admitted class was male.

Generally all the objective evidence supports the conclusion of the applicant pools at these elite STEM schools being mostly similar between gender with the top 2-3% being mostly male, while the only arguments in favor of the top 2-3% of the applicant pool being 50/50 depends on unverifiable narratives with no evidence to back them up.

Do young boys have the motivation or do their parents give it to them/require it of them/coach them to have it?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Denied for in-state UVA, VT. Coming from FCPS. Female 720 SAT Math, AP Physics C, AP Chem, AP Calc BC, unweighted 3.8, President Science Honor Society, elected Homecoming Court, 2 Varsity Sports, Employed.

I think it's BS our country wants more female STEM professionals.

720 Math is not good. Something like 20% of asians get higher scores on their math.

lol at 720 not being a good math score. It's excellent.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I am seeing and hearing is all high stat students are applying to the same schools..

Michigan
Chicago
Cornell
Vandy
Duke
CMU
Penn
MIT
UVA

Boys girls, public private high schools , engineering, pre law, pre med, everyone I know is literally applying to these schools..all high stats.

At one child's private as well as my other kid's stem-magnet public, we can get data on where females v males apply: males interested in stem apply to MIT, CMU and the big state schools much more than females. Females interested in stem apply to Ivies, Chicago(they have molecular engineering), Duke as much or more than the males and most top stem females do not apply to UCB Mich GT. We toured every ivy but one as well as MIT. All but one of them had female tourguide for the interested-in-stem applicants.
There are just so many top females interested in Engineering in our area: there have been robotics teams half female for at least 6 years and there are multiple girls who code groups. The last four valedictorians have all wanted Engineering, four have been women. Valedictorians are easy to pick out on SCOIR which narrows by year: The SATs were all 1550+. The women getting admitted to engineering at the ivy-level are not any level lesser than the guys. For whatever reason, the females tend to prefer the non-tech-y schools, they want engineering within a liberal arts environment, they want to be able to continue theater, orchestra, singing that they did in high school. That type of mixing of interests is much harder to get at a super tech or large public. For any slight female boost, target GT, Mich, CMU, UIUC. The very top females often leave them off the list.

Your view is DMV-centric. I posted upthread about Michigan. It is very much in-demand by our top female in-state engineering candidates for obvious reasons. And there are a lot of females pursuing engineering because the biggest feeder county (similar to MoCo) has lots of dual STEM career parents. Which makes for mom role models.

At Michigan, there are a ton of extracurriculars. University theater and some music ensembles are nearly professional so not very accessible but there is marching band, a student pops orchestra, a gamelan, amateur theater clubs, quidditch, two Model UN teams, multiple fantastic a capella groups, etc. I don't think there are any issues with attracting female applicants who want to continue extracurriculars. Maybe the options are just trickier to research if you don't know the school well.

It's also an easier Public for admission OOS then say Georgia Tech which is at 9% which also admits a much smaller class. Michigan admits over twice as many freshman. Georgia Tech's breakdown for for last class for admissions Male 55% Females 45% (large majority engineering majors)

[Anonymous]

A student with 720 math is certainly good enough to study engineering at schools outside the top 10 in engineering such as Virginia Tech or Maryland. However, the student likely won't be consistently getting A's in their engineering classes, especially classes that are test-heavy.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:As an MIT alum interviewer, let me shed some light on the MYTH of easier admittance for girls.

Yes, a higher % of female applicants gain admission. What you don't see is the noticeable fraction of unqualified applicants (e.g., kids who like video games and are encouraged by clueless relatives to apply to MIT). This misguided group is virtually all male. Bizarre phenomenon.

Those video game males are bottom applicants and irrelevant. What matters is the top 2% of applicants. Top 2% of male applicants are extremely strong at math. Look at who is winning the hardest math and programming competitions.

You are missing the point. DP. PP was explaining that the whole pool is different. Admitting 2% of the male applicants when a significant portion of them are noticeably unqualified, yet admitting 3% of the female pool when almost none are unqualified means the admission rates of the qualified males v females is about the same, depending on the size of the unqualified male subset. The "listed" % admission for male v female does not tell the story.
PP is not the first one I have heard explain the same, and it correlates with the local stem magnet. About 1/3 are females. They apply in 8th. The male v female SAT range total is the same (median is 1500 so it is a highly skewed group of students, they are all very intelligent). The females dominate the top 25%, which is announced senior year.

You say that the male and female median SAT is the same and also that females dominate the top 25% of a stem magnet school. But those facts don't support the conclusion that there are more females in the top 2-3% of stem students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_International_Mathematical_Olympiad_participants

The male dominance of children's math competitions doesn't necessarily relate directly to "top STEM students" in college. As I understand it, a lot of arcane coaching goes into becoming one of these prodigies. And I bet home geography (do you live near tutors and teams) plays a big role. Then on top you get gender and racial effects from people deciding whether an activity is of interest to them based on norms and visible participation.

I view these math competitions as essentially pretty esoteric. Like being an Olympic class javelin thrower. There's a lot to groundbreaking STEM beyond cracking crazy math problems. I know the profs at Caltech and MIT really want these kids to attend. But frankly that might almost just be affinity bias because they are similar types of math geeks.

When I read this thread, and see how common women are getting in the programs, it makes me believe that you could, in the right environment, find and grow female talent to be competitive at these competitions. But they'd have to be nurtured and encouraged and actually care about participating.

And, in the current environment, a lot of the girls in STEM programs for kids are going away or morphing into.open access.

It's not really a matter of coaching - AoPS books are cheap and anyone can buy it. It's a matter of inclination to put in the time. Generally, young boys are more likely to have the motivation to put in the work in competition math, hence why boys outperform.

The fact that even you agree these kids are future math professor material is telling.

You can look at Caltech demographics before and after they discriminated based on gender to get a 50/50 class, the way MIT has been doing for decades. Prior to switching to a 50/50 class, Caltech was gender-blind, and as you would expect the vast majority of their admitted class was male.

Generally all the objective evidence supports the conclusion of the applicant pools at these elite STEM schools being mostly similar between gender with the top 2-3% being mostly male, while the only arguments in favor of the top 2-3% of the applicant pool being 50/50 depends on unverifiable narratives with no evidence to back them up.

Do young boys have the motivation or do their parents give it to them/require it of them/coach them to have it?

The type of parent who would encourage or even push their kid to do advanced math would do so regardless of their kid's gender. So that doesn't explain the difference in top end math achievement by gender.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:What I am seeing and hearing is all high stat students are applying to the same schools..

Michigan
Chicago
Cornell
Vandy
Duke
CMU
Penn
MIT
UVA

Boys girls, public private high schools , engineering, pre law, pre med, everyone I know is literally applying to these schools..all high stats.

At one child's private as well as my other kid's stem-magnet public, we can get data on where females v males apply: males interested in stem apply to MIT, CMU and the big state schools much more than females. Females interested in stem apply to Ivies, Chicago(they have molecular engineering), Duke as much or more than the males and most top stem females do not apply to UCB Mich GT. We toured every ivy but one as well as MIT. All but one of them had female tourguide for the interested-in-stem applicants.
There are just so many top females interested in Engineering in our area: there have been robotics teams half female for at least 6 years and there are multiple girls who code groups. The last four valedictorians have all wanted Engineering, four have been women. Valedictorians are easy to pick out on SCOIR which narrows by year: The SATs were all 1550+. The women getting admitted to engineering at the ivy-level are not any level lesser than the guys. For whatever reason, the females tend to prefer the non-tech-y schools, they want engineering within a liberal arts environment, they want to be able to continue theater, orchestra, singing that they did in high school. That type of mixing of interests is much harder to get at a super tech or large public. For any slight female boost, target GT, Mich, CMU, UIUC. The very top females often leave them off the list.

SAT scores are insufficient for distinguishing between the "level" of students admitted to schools like MIT - tons get 1550+, including plenty of rejects. Acceptance rates are a better metric when comparing between two groups that are similarly qualified at the top end.

To give an analogy, if MIT decided they wanted more gingers, they could accept tons more gingers with ~3.8+, ~1550+ stats who would otherwise have been rejected. In this scenario, it would be easier to get into MIT as a ginger than as a non-ginger despite admitted gingers having similar stats to admitted non-gingers.

This is also the case for athletes at MIT, to a much greater extent. All athletes at MOT have similar stats to admitted non-athletes, yet the acceptance for rowers with coach support is 40% - way more than the average. Despite the similar stats, being a rower with coach support clearly makes it easier to get into MIT (if you ignore the difficulty of developing that rowing skill in the first place)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Denied for in-state UVA, VT. Coming from FCPS. Female 720 SAT Math, AP Physics C, AP Chem, AP Calc BC, unweighted 3.8, President Science Honor Society, elected Homecoming Court, 2 Varsity Sports, Employed.

I think it's BS our country wants more female STEM professionals.

720 Math is not good. Something like 20% of asians get higher scores on their math.

+++ my NON stem female child got a 750M (770R) no problem and is at an ivy for history, took BC, APphysC, chem for the challenge of it and got more 5s than 4s on the stem APs.
For a Stem kid you need the 780-800 Math if you want the ivies/stanford, and yes even UVA in-state would see 720 math as low for engineering. SAT math is a cakewalk for any serious stem student male or female. If it is not, then target much lower schools.
720 is within admit range for VT (engineering math SAT average is around 700-720) so the PP with the 3.8UW from FCPS was not VT range based grades more than that mediocre math SAT.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Denied for in-state UVA, VT. Coming from FCPS. Female 720 SAT Math, AP Physics C, AP Chem, AP Calc BC, unweighted 3.8, President Science Honor Society, elected Homecoming Court, 2 Varsity Sports, Employed.

I think it's BS our country wants more female STEM professionals.

720 is very low. There are so many females who easily get 800 or close! DD is at an ivy, 800 math, all 5s in those plus phys1, Bio, more.
UVA may not require that but they can easily meet whatever female ratio they want by focusing on the females with 800s who do not get into Ivy JHU Duke engineering. Two of Ds high school friends who were also close to the top and high scoring are at UVA engineering after WL at higher ranked schools. They also thought the SAT math was easy. You underestimate how many top of the class brilliant stem girls who score 770+ are in high schools across the virginia, nevermind NY, MA, Bay Area,

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:As an MIT alum interviewer, let me shed some light on the MYTH of easier admittance for girls.

Yes, a higher % of female applicants gain admission. What you don't see is the noticeable fraction of unqualified applicants (e.g., kids who like video games and are encouraged by clueless relatives to apply to MIT). This misguided group is virtually all male. Bizarre phenomenon.

This has been my experience as well. Young men seem overconfident in their stats and apply where they have no chance, where as young women tend to not apply to the toughest schools thinking they'd never get in even with perfect stats

[Anonymous]

To summarize the whole thread:

Girls are smart; Boys are stupid.

[Anonymous]

Most girls in engineering would eventually work as admin or similar non engineering position. It is rare to see women engineers doing engineering in the real world.