Numbers bring an arresting perspective to ideological beliefs

From Increasingly Competitive College Admissions: Much More Than You Wanted to Know by Scott Alexander.

The exclusion of women from colleges in the 1800s is less than generally believed:

(source: unprincipled sketchy attempt to combine this with this to get one measure that covers the entire period)
For every woman in college in 1890, there were about 1.3 men; this is no larger a gender gap than exists today, though in the reverse direction. How come you never hear about this? Many of the women were probably in teacher-training colleges or some other gendered institution; until the early 1900s, none of them were at Harvard. But after gender integration, the women’s colleges were usually annexed to the nearest men’s college, turning them into a single institution. Under these circumstances, it doesn’t seem that likely that integration had a huge effect on admissions selectivity. Also, admitting women can only double the size of the applicant pool, but 1800s college seemed much more than twice as easy to get into.

Women have been the majority of college graduates since circa 1960. 59 years, more than two generations. From memory, women have been the majority of high school graduates from the turn of the last century, i.e. circa 1880-1920. More than a century, or four generations.

Numbers bring an arresting perspective to ideological beliefs.