[310] in Discussion of MIT-community interests
women & success at MIT
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jimmy_B,MajMoola,MechWarrior,etc._)
Sat Apr 28 21:49:38 2001
Message-Id: <200104290151.VAA08154@MECHWARRIOR.MIT.EDU>
To: mit-talk@MIT.EDU
cc: spa-discuss@MIT.EDU
Date: Sat, 28 Apr 2001 21:51:30 EDT
From: "Jimmy_B,MajMoola,MechWarrior,etc._Chien-ta Wu" <jimmbswu@MIT.EDU>
A friend of mine just pointed this out to me. It seemed interesting, so I am
posting it here.
In the past Tuesday's issue of the Tech, there was a special edition on women at
MIT. In it, there is a graph in the center page, left upper corner, titled,
"Percentage of Women in Student Body". The graph shows two data series, over
the years: 1, the percentage of women in the [undergrad?] student body, and 2,
the percentage of women in the frosh class.
If you use the "ruler method" to perform a linear regression on the data, you
can see that the gradient for women frosh class is about 100%, while the
gradient of increase over the years for total women [undergrad?] population is
about 77%. [Yes, the "ruler method" is faster :-p ]
This means that, consistently since 1978, MIT has been trying to admit more
women into MIT, but many more women drop out of MIT over their 4 years here than
men. Therefore, even though the gradient for frosh class is 100% increase in
women, we still only have a 77% increase for overall women [undergrad?]
population. And just think about how many fewer women there are in the
graduating class, to drag down the gradient increase for overall, from 100% !!
This also has several implications [MIT professors call on women less often?
Date rape at MIT is too under-reported, contributing to women drop-out rate? Or,
as the Extropians might say, affirmative action is eroding the overall quality
of the incoming female frosh?]
Let the flame war begin anew! :-)
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So that was that,
B, crackpot and defender of the status quo
-----------
http://www.mit.edu/~jimmbswu "Who Dares, Wins."
--UK SAS
"It is good that war is so terrible,
else we should grow too fond of it."
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