Berkeley admitted 44% of men and 35% of women. Look inside the departments and the gap flips.

12,763 people applied to graduate school. The campus-wide numbers looked like clear evidence of bias against women. This page lets you take the same data apart in three steps.

In how many of the six biggest departments did men have the higher admission rate?

Same applicants, two ways of counting

The small grey figure under each department letter is its number of applicants. Percentages are the published, rounded figures for the six largest departments (4,526 applicants).

Women applied where it was hard to get in

Departments A and B admitted about 63% of everyone. Departments E and F admitted 25% and 6%. Men mostly applied to the easy ones, women to the hard ones. Slide to move the women's application mix toward the men's mix, keeping each department's own rates for women.

One number can hide the group that matters

When a third factor (here, which department you apply to) is tied to both the group and the outcome, a pooled rate can point the opposite way from every group inside it. The lesson is not that the pooled number is wrong. It is that it answers a different question: what happened across the campus, not how each department treated each applicant.

The data show how applications and admissions were distributed. They do not explain why women and men chose different departments.