Despite claims of meritocracy, many universities continue to favor male applicants over more qualified female peers in the name of “gender balance.”
Imagine a female student with a perfect SAT score, 4.0 GPA and a rigorous extracurricular resume carefully crafted for her college applications. She’s invested years of hard work to meet the demanding standards of elite institutions. Then, she gets the letter. Rejected. Meanwhile, a male applicant from her same school with slightly lower grades and test scores, less involvement in extracurriculars, and a less compelling overall application is accepted. Why? Because he was a man.
The recent Supreme Court ruling striking down affirmative action in college admissions was heralded as a victory for “merit-based” selection. The ruling has, however, left an implicit discriminatory practice intact: Male applicants continue to be prioritized over female applicants when needed to balance out the student population. This is no coincidence. It’s the result of a deeply ingrained, albeit often unacknowledged, bias in the admissions process that dates back decades.
Title IX—legislation that prohibits sex-based discrimination in any federally funded education program or activity—was introduced in 1972, a time when women faced markedly higher expectations than men for admission to universities, if they were permitted to attend at all. At the time the legislation was proposed, Yale capped female enrollment at only 250 in their first-year undergraduate class, accepting 1000 men, and the Cornell School of Agriculture required women to have an SAT score of at least 30 to 40 points higher than the average male admit. Universities feared that by accepting more women, their alumni donations would decrease as would their academic standards.
As Princeton University explained in a letter to Rep. John Erlenborn, the university would be unable to “maintain and advance academic standards” if they were subjected to Title IX. Dartmouth, Harvard and a collection of other elite institutions participated in similar lobbying and used their congressional connections to exempt private universities from gender-blind undergraduate admissions under Title IX.
Today, the impacts of this exemption go largely unnoticed but are widely practiced. Coeducational private institutions continue to prefer and admit a relatively equal ratio of male to female students. On paper, this seems equitable. In reality, it is troubling that the ratio is not budging when women are consistently outperforming men in secondary schools. Since the 1970s women have outnumbered men in gifted and talented programs, women are around 25 percent more likely than men to participate in Advanced Placement (AP) classes, and female students on average have consistently higher grade point averages.
Moreover, more women are applying to and enrolling in college to begin with. In 2021, 8.9 million women pursued college degrees as opposed to 6.5 million men, with female students making up 58 percent of the undergraduate population. Some universities reflect this statistic. Women make up 58.5 percent of Oberlin College, 61.4 percent of Tulane University, 57.8 percent of the University of Georgia, and 60.5 percent of the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), to name a few. For many, it’s a crisis, and for others, it’s dryly ironic.
Is it that universities such as Dartmouth, whose alumni once begged, “For God’s sake, for Dartmouth’s sake, and for everyone’s sake, keep the damned women out,” are again discriminating against women, this time by practicing affirmative action for men?
Leelila Strogov is the founder and CEO of Atomic Mind, an educational consulting company that specializes in helping high school students get into their dream university. Speaking on the impacts of elite private universities trying to produce gender balance, she explained, “I think that this is an area where the unintended consequence is that women are being held to a higher standard, and I think that schools need to recognize that this is true and then decide what, if anything, should be done about it.”
A 2014 survey conducted by Inside Higher Ed found that of private university admissions directors surveyed, 11 percent admitted their university accepted male applicants with lower grades and test scores than female applicants for the case of “gender balance,” whereas only 2 percent believed this to be the case for women.
Jason Weingarden, a former University of Pennsylvania admissions officer, told Ivy Coach, “The ratio of women to men would be closer to 60-40 [in the Ivy League] if gender weren’t a factor, rather than the current norm, which is close to 50-50.”
For the Brown University class of 2028, 4.2 percent of women were accepted in comparison to 6.8 percent of men, almost double. In fact, 11,984 more women applied to the university— but 14 more men than women were accepted.
Some believe that the school system is failing young boys and this is why the gender discrepancy in academic success exists. Yet as Strogov explains, “I feel like the world is still sending the message that you need to be exceptional if you’re a girl, and you will do just fine if you’re doing pretty much the minimum of what will suffice if you’re a boy.”
Girls must work harder to have the same success, as undergraduate admissions prove—and so they do. “At the end of the day what messages do we want to send our kids,” Strogov asks. Do we really want to send our boys a message that ‘it’s going to be easier for you but that’s fine’?”
While universities often claim to promote gender balance on campus, the reality is that this practice rarely extends beyond the classroom. There are no legal safeguards to ensure gender equality in the workplace. Women make up just 38 percent of managers, 33 percent of directors, 28 percent of senior vice presidents and only 21 percent of C-suite executives. Yet, despite these glaring disparities, corporate institutions rarely express the same level of concern about gender imbalances as some private universities do when faced with the possibility of a reverse gender gap. In a survey conducted by software company HiBob in 2022, 22 percent of surveyed women were promoted compared to 35 percent of surveyed men and 15 percent of women received benefits compared to 23 percent of men.
This disparity is not just an issue in the workplace—it’s a systemic problem that starts well before graduation. Colleges, while offering admission benefits to men, often fail to acknowledge or address the ongoing discrimination women face in professional settings, where the real consequences of these inequalities unfold. Merit-based undergraduate admissions may help address these discrepancies.
Without change, we risk perpetuating a cycle in which generations of women are systematically denied the opportunities they deserve, reinforcing a world where their potential is restricted not by their ability, but by their sex. While the removal of affirmative action in college admissions reshapes the landscape, universities must now reckon with discriminatory practices that continue to favor men. If they fail to address these inequalities, they could face legal action. Despite the outlawing of affirmative action, gender-based favoritism for male students remains a persistent issue and it is essential that institutions reevaluate their policies to ensure true merit-based justice and equality.
