UC Berkeley Gender Bias

One of the best-known examples of Simpson's paradox comes from a study of gender bias among graduate school admissions to University of California, Berkeley. The admission figures for the fall of 1973 showed that men applying were more likely than women to be admitted, and the difference was so large that it was unlikely to be due to chance. However, when taking into account the information about departments being applied to, the different rejection percentages reveal the different difficulty of getting into the department, and at the same time it showed that women tended to apply to more competitive departments with lower rates of admission, even among qualified applicants (such as in the English department), whereas men tended to apply to less competitive departments with higher rates of admission (such as in the engineering department). The pooled and corrected data showed a "small but statistically significant bias in favor of women".