The number of women seeking higher degrees started soaring in the 1960s and ’70s, and by the early ’80s, more women were attending college than men. The trend continued upward, so much so that by 1999 some universities had admissions policies that explicitly favored men. At the University of Georgia, admissions officers automatically gave male candidates an additional 0.25 points (out of a possible score of 8.15). In doing so, the school managed to maintain a ratio of 45 percent men to 55 percent women. That year, three white women filed suit against the Georgia university system’s Board of Regents, claiming that the school had discriminated against them on the basis of gender and race. (The university gave nonwhite applicants an extra 0.50 points.) The young women’s lawyers argued that the extra points for men violated both the equal-protection clause and Title IX, which guarantees equal educational opportunities for men and women. The district court overseeing the case ruled the policies unlawful, and although the school appealed its race-based policy, it dropped its policy on gender. Other state schools with similar policies followed suit.

But Title IX does not prohibit gender-based affirmative action in admissions at all schools. In 1972, when the details of Title IX were still under discussion, the presidents of some of the country’s most elite private universities persuaded legislators to exempt their admissions policies from the law. In a 2021 Duke Law Review article, Katie Lew, then a law student, explains that they worried that high numbers of women, right away, might render the school unrecognizable to the male alumni whose donations were so crucial. Such high female enrollment would even make fund-raising harder, they argued — how was the development team supposed to track down women who changed their names upon marriage? Threats to academic integrity were conjured: The president of Princeton, in a letter to the panel working on the legislation, expressed the fear that the school might be forced to “dilute” the academic offerings made to men if they had to build separate departments to accommodate what he assumed to be women’s interests.

That Title IX exemption still stands, allowing private colleges and universities to privilege men during the admissions process. Marie Bigham, the executive director of ACCEPT, a group that works to improve equity in college admissions, said that until the pandemic, when many schools stopped requiring standardized tests, she considered the boost for being male to be about “equal to an extra 100 points on their SATs.” Angel B. Pérez, who ran enrollment at Trinity College until 2020, told me that it wasn’t unusual for the initial selection rounds there to skew heavily in favor of women. “There were some years when it was in the extremes, and I’d say, ‘We just can’t do this,’” says Pérez, who is now chief executive of the National Association for College Admission Counseling. “I can’t come up with a class of 20 percent men — that’s just not good for the campus.” At that point, he said, the team would go back and seek more men to balance the class.

“There was definitely a thumb on the scale to get boys,” says Sourav Guha, who was assistant dean of admissions at Wesleyan University from 2001 to 2004. “We were just a little more forgiving and lenient when they were boys than when they were girls. You’d be like, ‘I’m kind of on the fence about this one, but — we need boys.’” Jason England, a professor of English at Carnegie Mellon who worked in admissions at Wesleyan from 2004 to 2006, says the process sometimes pained him, especially when he saw an outstanding young woman from a disadvantaged background losing out to a young man who came from privilege. “The understanding is that if we’re going to have close to a 50-50 split, then we need to admit men, and women are going to suffer,” he says of that time.