So today I was talking to someone who works in admissions for an economics PhD program. The way they do admissions is that they go through every folder and give it a numerical score that’s as objective as possible, based on grades, GRE scores, quality of recommendations, undergrad research, etc. Then they go through all the folders, looking at the scores, and decide who to admit.
In the second step they always practice explicit affirmative action in favor of women; the score required to get in as a woman is significantly lower than the score required to get in as a man. And yet, consistently their female students do better on average than their male students.
I thought that was really interesting.