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.
Why don’t they bias things even more in favor of women? This seems like the sensible response.
That’s what they have been doing recently–every year they lower the score cutoff for women a bit and every year it still happens. The guy I talked to was like “… yeah we’ll probably make it even lower this year.”
(They have the opposite problem with Asians: they currently have a higher score cutoff and still consistently do worse than the white students. In this case the obvious solution–discriminate against Asians even more–feels a bit ickier.)