Sex

[nacht_musik]

Just saw this article on Writing Women Into a Corner.

I am told, for example, that there is pressure at Harvard Law School, and at other law schools, to ensure that at least half the students chosen for the law review are women. Quite frankly, it's hard to think of anything that would do more damage to aspiring female lawyers.

Over the last 20+ years, MIT has made a concerted effort to have its undergrad population be (more) sex-balanced.

We're told that MIT's applicant pool contains a large number of brilliant people whose quantitative worthiness (test scores) are so similar as to be indistinguishable, given the margins of experimental error on such tests. (Was it a poorly worded question? Were they ill that day? Was that question on their favorite topic?)

So, to some degree, MIT's Admissions gets to select from a pool of people (with similar grades/scores) on the basis of qualitative attributes -- an essay, a recommendation ... or perhaps their sex.

However, this isn't the message that was internalized by many of my female peers at MIT. Instead, many of them seem to have secretly feared that they were intellectually substandard, and were admitted to MIT "because they're a girl." Even sadder, years after graduation, some still wonder about this.

I dare not think what effect it would have on female students to be admitted to a program with an explicit mandate to select by sex first, and intellectual ability second.

(Thanks to asimplelife for pointing out this article. This post began as a brief response to a friends-locked post in someone else's journal, but after seeing how much I had to say on the topic, I decided to post it publicly in my own journal instead.)