In late 1973 the graduate admissions department at UC Berkeley discovered that for the forthcoming year it had awarded places to 44 per cent of male applicants and only 35 per cent of women. Concerned about possible lawsuits or bad publicity, they approached Peter Bickel, a professor of statistics, to analyse the data in more detail.
Looking for patterns of prejudice, Bickel broke down the data by university department. He was suddenly presented with a contradictory picture. Department data suggested Berkeley was mostly even-handed in admissions. Stranger still — though a minority of departments exhibited some gender bias, it was more likely to be a preference towards female candidates than the other way about.
Eh? How so? I mean a 44:35 ratio seems clear-cut, no? In total, of 8,442 men who had applied 3,741 were given a place; for women those figures were respectively 4,321 and a meagre 1,312. Prejudice, surely?
Yet among the largest six faculties, the results were as follows:
If there is anything to investigate here, it is not prejudice against women, but a reasonable suspicion that the head of Department A might be a bit of a lothario.
But which figures should we believe, and why are the two pictures so different? Well, for one thing, it makes more sense to look for bias at the level of individual departments — since that is where admission decisions are made. Next, if we want to understand what is skewing the overall result, we need to look not only at ratios but overall volumes. It turned out that applications from women were far more numerous to those departments where the proportion admitted was low (courses in the humanities typically turn away many more applicants than courses in pure mathematics or engineering).
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