Opinion

That’s different, though. Those schools are doing what affirmative action is supposed to do: redress deeply embedded societal discrimination that has led to persistent inequality.

A law that helped end slavery is now a weapon to end affirmative action

When a liberal-arts college lowers its standards for boys — especially White boys — it gives an advantage to a population that has not suffered historical disadvantage and continues to enjoy outsize prominence in almost every professional sphere.

Men are overrepresented in Congress, in the judiciary and law, in medicine, in technology and in finance. Women make up only 44 percent of tenure-track faculty, 36 percent of full professors and 33 percent of college presidents. At every level of academia, they are paid less than men.

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All of which raises the question: Why doesn’t educational achievement translate to professional equality?

Women have enrolled in college at greater rates than men since the early 1980s. They get better grades, drop out less frequently and are more likely to earn a four-year degree. In other words, women in higher education have long been exceeding the criteria that men established for academic success.

So why do women still earn 82 cents to the male dollar?

Here’s my theory: Girls and women excel at school, which features ostensibly objective criteria of achievement — grades, scores, classes taken, honors received. I say “ostensibly” because these criteria remain deeply unfair; literally the richer you are, the higher your SAT score. Still, measurable criteria keep unconscious bias in check.

In the world beyond school, however, unconscious bias is rarely restrained by the guardrails of, say, GPAs. When we choose our political candidates and our chief executives, we deploy non-metrics such as “electability” and “leadership” — qualities traditionally ascribed to men.

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Colleges that tip their scales in favor of boys are bringing those biases to bear four years early, overriding the guardrails to create a student body that feels desirable. In “To All the Girls I’ve Rejected,” a 2006 essay for the New York Times, Jennifer Delahunty Britz, then the dean of admissions at Kenyon College, explained ruefully: “Once you become decidedly female in enrollment, fewer males and, as it turns out, fewer females find your campus attractive.”

Maybe that’s true. I can imagine parents........

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