Welp, it only took 50 years, but here we are:
In a milestone breakthrough, more than half of Caltech’s incoming undergraduate class in the fall will be women for the first time in its 133-year history. The class of 113 women and 109 men comes 50 years after Caltech graduated its first class of undergraduate women, who were admitted in 1970.
When I was there in 1976, I lived in Ruddock House, population 100. If memory serves, that included five or six women. Add one per year and in half a century that ratio is about even. Time and persistence were all it took.
Caltech only admits 222 freshmen? I had no idea it was so small!
That was my reaction, too! And I have spent most of my career working at small colleges -- where "small" typically means something like 400-600 per class.
Me three. I went to Colgate, which is, or was, considered small and it had about 2,500 students when I entered in 1971 and now has something over 3,200 (making it one of the (or possibly the) largest of its peer elite liberal arts colleges; too large IMO.
They've had an interesting progression in coeducation as well. I entered with the second coed class and it was officially limited to 450 men and 150 women. (In order to placate conservative anti-coeducation alumni and to maintain the Division 1 athletic program, they kept male enrollment at the then current 1,800 and added 600 women.) That limit was dropped long ago (unsure exactly when) and current enrollment is now 57% female. And somehow ironically, their most successful athletics team on a national level is the women's hockey team, which lost to Wisconsin last spring in the national semifinals and finished the season ranked third in the nation. (I've been an obsessive fan of theirs for years. Unfortunately, they've lost a half dozen fifth year senior starters including their captain, a Canadian national team forward who was the third pick in the last PWHL draft and the coach who built them into a national powerhouse decamped this summer to coach the PWHL's New York team.)
(We're way off topic here, but...) I have seen the Colgate women's hockey team in person on many occasions -- although I hope you will forgive me, but I was cheering against them. When my daughter was growing up, we regularly attended the home games of one of Colgate's conference rivals.
Forgiven. As long as it wasn't Cornell; I really, really hate Cornell, whom we beat four times last year, including the ECAC playoffs and the NCAA quarters. I dislike all six of the hockey-playing Ivies for various reasons, and took especial pleasure in humiliating Harvard twice last season by the same 10-1 score, but I got my JD at Cornell and my hate burns hottest for them.
Not Cornell. And agree to agree on Harvard. 🙂
It really is like a research lab that kind of does this side gig in undergraduate education. The faculty + postdocs there are about the same size as the whole undergraduate population. (There's about 1 faculty per 2 postdocs or per 3 undergrads.)
I went to that other technical institute on the other coast, and we were at that time ~4 or 5 times bigger in terms of both grads and undergrads.
I knew quite a few Caltech alums in grad school, and visited a few times during grad school and after, and you could really notice that it was a very small, intense place. I used to tell my Caltech friends that it seemed like the "purified and condensed" form of MIT, and that was a slightly frightening concept.
If memory serves, my freshman class (fall 1974/class of 1978) was only 135. That was a bit on the small side even at the time, but they've been steadily growing, albeit very slowly, since then.
Tiny school.
The students are basically pets. They are allowed to do odd stuff like paint their dorm rooms black or flood them as long as they are cute.
More power to them.
Was there in the eighties. Seemed like someone's experimental college that had never been followed up with a re-evaluation: "Are we actually helping anyone here?"
During my campus tour, the guide, a senior, told me "Don't come here." Incredibly, I did not listen to him.
They had 500 faculty - mostly research associates, but still - and they put the entire 200-person freshman class in the same 3 big mathematics, physics and chemistry lectures, as if they were trying to save money.
They knew they had a problem, and needed to improve, but they just couldn't figure out what they were doing. The scientists were, largely, not educators, and seemingly couldn't understand that telling the students what you hope to accomplish can help them succeed.
Now THIS is what will increase the number of women in STEM careers. Companies competing for and recruiting a small pool of women will just play musical chairs with their diversity numbers. Actually increasing the number of women in the field will change the makeup for real.
EDIT: Oh, and you have to add TWO per year for 50 years to go from "four or five" to more than a hundred. Math!
The four or five Kevin mentioned referred to all classes just in Ruddock House, with a total population of 100. So his target was 50 total undergraduate women in Ruddock House, not 100 incoming freshmen in the whole school. Apples and oranges. Math!
(Of course history's Albert Ruddock has been erased from the campus for his racist leanings, so it's not Ruddock House any more, it's Venerable House after Grant Venerable, Caltech's first black undergraduate.)
"(Of course history's Albert Ruddock has been erased from the campus for his racist leanings, so it's not Ruddock House any more, it's Venerable House after Grant Venerable, Caltech's first black undergraduate.)"
This interested me, so I checked the Internet. Ruddock died in 1970, so there's not a huge amount about him available (no Wikipedia entry; the dorm shows up but not him). The most useful article about him is on Nature.com and paywalled. It appears that in Ruddock's case, "racist leanings" translates into "Eugenics movement in the 1930s," although the extent to which he personally supported forced sterilizations seems to be behind that paywall. I would differentiate between "kinda racist" and "open advocate for eugenics in 1930s" on the grand scale of things, but YMMV, I suppose.
My characterization was weaker because my memory of the details was fuzzy. Thanks for filling in the details.
remember: kevin washedout out caltech after an arson event.
I was at Caltech 1975-1980, also in Ruddock House. (I first came to this blog curious to see if the blogger was the same Kevin Drum I remembered from Tech.) I think the ratio of men to women when I started was 10:1. But they had started admitting women only five years before that, and the numbers got bigger every year. The year I graduated, the student newspaper proclaimed the good news that the incoming freshman class had a ratio of 6:1.
I don't agree that it was a bad school, but it fits a certain kind of student, which I was not. A passionate self-starter can really get a lot out of the small student:faculty ratio and the opportunities to be involved in research even as a freshman.
DarkBrandon's right, though, that with a few exceptions the teaching wasn't great. Most of my friends came out of the first freshman math lecture feeling lost, despite having all the prerequisites solid. Brilliant professors don't necessarily make great educators. I wouldn't advise my younger self to go there.
Anyway, kudos to Tech for making it finally to 1:1.
What were the acceptance rates of males vs females in 1976 compared to now? Unless similarly-qualified females were rejected at higher rates then the problem would seem to have been at the high-school level, or in the individual or family aspirations of the students themselves. Social aspects are another story - what about the (nerdy) male culture would repel females?
I think that females score as high on aptitude tests and get higher gpa's than males, but they could have been rejected on inadequate math/science course preparation in high school - not Caltech's fault.
That's a great question. Acceptance rates of males vs females is one way to look at it, another is the number of applications of males vs females. Culturally, girls were not brought up to be scientists and engineers. That's not just the high schools, that's their home life and the female models they had. Certainly a big part of the disparity is that far fewer women than men applied.
I mean, we can say not many enslaved Black people in the deep south were running for public office in the 1840s, but that's not a neutral statement. For that matter, there's plenty of moments in American history (including in the 20th century) where "Black candidate for public office" in the deep south translates into "life in immediate peril." It's accurate to claim the disparity is in applications, but without a broader scope to the answer, it's hard to generalize anything from that statement.
I know my mother graduated with a psychology degree, third in a class of several thousand students, in the mid-sixties. When she attended a job fair on campus and talked to potential employers, most ranged from openly condescending to dismissive: the team from one of the oil companies said "women can't work on the rigs" as if they were only hiring college graduates to go work oil rigs. I guarantee she did not apply for a job at that corporation.
I went to a university in the late 70s and majored in electrical engineering. As I recall we had about 80 students in my classes for electrical engineering. There was one woman.
Not sure how much that has changed, but Google AI just gave me this: "In 2022, the breakdown of electrical engineers in the US was 9.27% women and 90.7% men. The average age of male electrical engineers was 44.4, while the average age of female electrical engineers was 38.9."
This post isn't meant to be critical, much less hostile, just an open observation. Kevin is right: this is encouraging progress across 50 years. And it's quite possible that it takes that long to make this kind of change happen and stick.
But what's the "right" rate of change, especially on matters like equality? Would ending the institution of slavery in America 50 years later have been "right" especially if it avoided civil war? Or is that additional period of injustice and cruelty unacceptable and slavery should have been outlawed even earlier, regardless of the cost? How do you balance the scales out? Should the people who could not legally be enslaved in the first place be the ones to decide how fast a change is "too fast"?
And on a related question, to what extent does this change reflect heavy pressures exerted on Cal Tech across those 50 years which brought it about? Would it have happened without strident advocacy? Would it have happened for other reasons (if Cal Tech is 50/50 men to women, that's well below the average ratio for college in this country now)?
Looks like the St Louis Fed has a 2022 chart on "why do women outnumber men in higher education" (OK, charts); it's clearly indicating things were closer to 1.3 women for every man in (four-year) college. Do we chart this milestone at Cal Tech as "below average performance," or "encouraging" or "significant"? Well, that depends on the context, and the points of comparison, and most likely there's specifics related to Cal Tech which don't map onto higher education in America more generally. In some contexts, this could be a danger sign that Cal Tech has been left behind on correcting the gender gap.
It's worth celebrating success; it's also worth thinking carefully about what constitutes success. Presumably, getting those numbers to 90% women doesn't constitute success; maybe 50/50 isn't quite there yet; maybe success now relies on empowering those women to help change the programs there for the better (for future students of any gender).
If it's a 1.3 female to male ratio in colleges today, maybe we need to start looking into why the young men are not going as frequently as the young women?
Are women just naturally smarter and should we just accept that men will be left behind? Or are there issues holding the guys back that we need to address?
It's probably because men have higher-paying non-college career fields open to them. Women know that it's extremely difficult to break into male-dominated fields, and even if you do, you will probably struggle with lower pay than your male colleagues and harassment. The jobs that pay decently and are either gender-balanced or majority female tend to require college degrees. So more women go to college.
I think your assumptions about things are a little behind the times. There are not so many male-dominated non-college jobs that make much money these days aside from a few trades and perhaps the military; unionized manufacturing jobs are no longer available to young men. And aside from engineering and sciences, well, women have long since gotten in the door and are doing fine in law, medicine, and other professions...
I have a couple kids who graduated high school in the past decade and noticed that the young women tend to be well ahead of the guys these days. I think that has a lot to do with it and I want to know why (I have theories...)
I was at Tech from 98-02 (in Lloyd House) and the school was about 35% women back then, so yeah, this article definitely landed like a milestone. I'd just say that the "persistence" part probably has more to do with things than the "time" part, though -- a bunch of the women I knew during my time there had experienced some form out outreach that helped persuade them to apply (and then come, once they were there). Some of this is mentioned in the article, but there were programs leveraging alumni, high school visits specifically aimed at diversifying recruiting, communicating the experience of current students and highlighting the supports available (since being a woman at Tech was certainly even more stressful than being a guy was, at least in my day).
I mention this because during my tenure there, the administration phased out some similar programs aimed at Black and Hispanic students; as a result, the already-small numbers of such students visibly cratered in just a few years, and it took the past couple decades for them to recover (in fact a lot of the uptick for Black undergrads has happened post-2020, I suspect reflecting some of the work they did in response to the organizing that year; it resulted in changing the names of some buildings, which per others' comments was because of their namesakes' ties to a particular eugenicist movement, but there were more substantive policy changes too). Once you get to critical mass for a while, cultural shifts probably mean things become more or less self-sustaining, but this kind of progress definitely isn't automatic.
In the 1970s, when I was a grad student at CalTech, there were next to no female faculty members. There was one in the humanities department, and the biology division was looking to hire one. There were quite a few female graduate students, some of whom have gone on to fame and glory. In a similar era, MIT had about ten percent female undergrads, although there was a fairly modern dorm (donated by Mrs McCormick of the Reaper fortune) dedicated to the female students. MIT is now about fifty:fifty in the undergrad school, so things have changed markedly. The life sciences are thoroughly integrated for male v. female, whatever else is going on in engineering and physics.
Over 58% of undergraduate degrees awarded in the 2021/2022 went to women. Yet somehow it's very very important to talk about how women are underrepresented in STEM fields.
Yep. Because those are the fields with higher pay. If IT guys were paid like elementary school teachers, no one would care. Just like no one cares that most garbage haulers are male.
For context on what life was like for women scientists in the bad old days, read Kate Zernicke's The Exceptions, which covers women scientists at MIT. TLDR: it was extremely difficult to be a woman in the sciences in the 50's, 60's, and 70's. By the time I got to grad school (in chemistry late 70's/early 80's), women were still very much a minority-my class had six women (the most ever!). When I went to a reunion around 2011, the incoming class of chemistry grad students was half women. Biology, chemistry, and materials sciences (what I ended up doing) seem to be more welcoming to women than some other fields, ergo there is less of a pipeline problem. But there is also a retention problem in STEM. There is less representation the higher up the career ladder you go. Women drop out all along the way, and are also passed over for promotions. It's improving, but not as fast as it could. It's worth not only recruiting girls into sciences and engineering early on, but also taking a look at why they drop out along the way.
"... It's worth not only recruiting girls into sciences and engineering early on, but also taking a look at why they drop out along the way."
Maybe they figure out they made a mistake. They aren't talented enough or don't enjoy it or both. Lots of guys drop out for similar reasons.
I liked having 35 boys all to myself. I felt sorry for the Caltech girls who only had about seven each.
Are there any schools left where a girl can be adored for being female and doesn't have to do much else. Sure you have to pass the physics classes but that's easy.
Caltech freshman 1972, Fleming House.
In Fleming there was one woman sophomore, none junior or senior.
House had at least three female freshmen.
For the most part, the women were treated with respect (plus the overwhelming proportion of men were geeky nerds, awkward around women, definitely NOT frat boys).
They have a $3B+ endowment and class size is just 220! Why don't they expand? What a waste of resources.