Consider two students with equal intelligence and equal skill at studying.
One lives in a rich suburban neighborhood where schools are well-funded and the parents have the time and money to supply constant extracurricular attention to their children.
The other lives in a single-parent household in a historically redlined urban neighborhood where the school budgets are peanuts and he has to work a part-time job on the side to help support his family.
Which one is going to have the more impressive transcript in college applications?
It’s not that people will be exactly equal but rather you can validate admission criteria by comparing graduation rates and GPA’s.
If men and women graduate at similar rates and have similar GPA’s then your admission criteria are presumably reasonably unbiased. If men have lower GPA’s and graduate at lower rates then presumably their admission criteria should be raised to account for biases you aren’t aware of.
If however you underrepresent men relative to the general population you may want to focus on attracting more of them through advertising.
From an outside perspective this might seem unfair. Why is the school spending so much money mailing to young men while requiring more extra curricular activists to be admitted? It’s a question of equal standards vs equal opportunity.
Consider two students with equal intelligence and equal skill at studying.
One lives in a rich suburban neighborhood where schools are well-funded and the parents have the time and money to supply constant extracurricular attention to their children.
The other lives in a single-parent household in a historically redlined urban neighborhood where the school budgets are peanuts and he has to work a part-time job on the side to help support his family.
Which one is going to have the more impressive transcript in college applications?