This came up recently in the UK over a similar apparent discrimination which reflected low numbers of applicants + bias towards medicine = very low acceptance rate (compared to larger absolute numbers in the other group, who also applied to thing like politics)

unintended indeed! I wonder, though, if it is an unintended consequence of the selection-procedure, or an unintended consequence of women’s selection for specific graduate programs (or both)?

Nevertheless, a replication would indeed be very interesting. I still think there is a bias amongst men and women towards specific disciplines (regarding their admissions), so this could still be present.

It seems to me that this is a nice example of an unintended consequence of a decision making process, or rather the aggregation process I was wondering how would the results look like if the study would be replicated now.

Unfortunately, there aren’t many examples given in the article. I suppose this would have to do with the ‘privacy’ of the individual departments. A table with a disaggregation to the departmental level would indeed have been very informative!

Did the article mention any examples of fields that are really hard to get into and also disproportionately sought by female candidates? I think of a lot of the most difficult, forbidding graduate programs as being in the male-dominated fields of math and the physical sciences, but then I don’t really know how hard it is to get into one graduate program or another. I’d also be interested to know *why* the programs the women were applying to tended to reject so many applicants.