According to the article, there is an investigation regarding the possibility of gender discrimination when it comes to entering college. This could be due to the fact that women are the dominant group in most colleges, verifying that a 3 to 2 ratio of women to men are present nationally in higher education. This type of judgment is on the basis of ascribed status.
The schools being experimented represent different types such as public or private, religious and secular, moderately to highly selective, and historically black.
Investigated schools that favor women to men include Georgetown University, and University of Delaware. An investigated school that has somewhat of an even split with the gender ratio is Gettysburg College. It seems like Gettysburg College is trying to maintain value neutrality in the case of keeping the gender ratio consistent. There is evidence that admission officials may participate in women discrimination because of their overcrowding and large percentage compared to that of the opposite sex.
I think that this type of discrimination is due to the fact that some schools want their percentages, whether on the basis of race or gender, to be consistent. You can account that this type of discrimination related to race, which deals with “visible physical characteristics” (Parrillo). Since there are 60% of women to 40% of men who are taking nationally higher education, their statistics will not be consistent (Even though the article states that more men than women are accepted in Georgetown University when it comes to the graduate programs such as law, business, and medicine.
The in-group in this case would be the perspective schools that have admissions officials deliberately favoring the acceptance of men over women, despite even higher credentials. The out-group would be the women who are being compared to men that may previously not have been able to be accepted to the school because of academic issues.
I think that this type of discrimination is harmful, because these officials are creating men as a reference group to allow the consistency of statistical gender ratio. This could instill in a sense of ethnoviolence. Such ethnoviolence behavior would include a woman attacking or harassing a man who has less academic potential and requirements but was granted matriculation into the school based solely on his ascribed status as a male. Another example would be a man harassing a woman because he believes he has jurisdiction and a higher status since he was able to be accepted for his grades that are not superior to the woman.
Given the inevitability of these types of conflicting behaviors, a result could be marginality, where one is living under in two cultures (in this case, male and female) simultaneously. Perhaps the fact that admissions counselors will be able to associate their work on increasing their admittance of males than females, the unintended result could be reputational method, where people are asking others how others are compared to them (given the sense of insecurity as not establishing the goal of being admitted to their “dream” school with all the necessary requirements for admission or benefits
Source: http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20091217/ap_on_re_us/us_colleges_discrimination
