Some of it is probably a matter of deliberate policy choices. Other aspects include an organic shift away from engineering disciplines (like mechanical engineering) that were historically very heavily male dominated. I don't know the exact current ratio at MIT without looking up (pretty close to equal) but it was something like 1:7 50 years ago even though women were admitted since I think its founding.
I doubt, for whatever reason fewer men are going to college and more women are seeking the freedom that a college education can give them better odds at, while me go into the heavily male dominated “trades” and still make a pretty good living after a similar number of years it would take in college.
Also there are way more women applying, to the point where you’re more than double as likely to get in as a man than as a woman. There’s a huge argument about this but no one actually looked up the data for some reason:
https://www.clarkecollegeinsight.com/blog/how-to-get-into-ca...
Good Lord. I'd never get into any of these schools these days. (Three people from my 59 person high school class got into MIT and we weren't a high-powered school.) Though I guess if it's any consolation a bunch of the great professors would never get tenure either because they were more tinkerers than theoreticians.
> You're less than half as likely to get in as a man.
This is a bit of a misunderstanding of how statistics works. This does not reflect your personal chances of being accepted, only the chances of the subset of men who applied. You are assuming that all the men were equally qualified as the women and there were no other distinguishing characteristics between the two groups.
For instance, if there is a pre-selection process for one group that there was not for another it could skew the numbers significantly and make one group much smaller with a higher acceptance rate.
While the percentage differences could indicate bias against men, it could also indicate something else.
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.
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.
