The year Sadie was admitted to MIT, women were slightly over a third of her class, but somehow, it felt like even less than that. Sadie sometimes fel… - Gabrielle Zevin

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The year Sadie was admitted to MIT, women were slightly over a third of her class, but somehow, it felt like even less than that. Sadie sometimes felt as if she could go weeks without seeing a woman. It might have been that the men, most of them at least, assumed you were stupid if you were a woman. Or, if not stupid, less smart than they were. They were operating under the assumption that it was easier to get into MIT if you were a woman, and statistically, it was — women had a 10 percent higher admittance rate over men. But there could have been many reasons for that statistic. A likely one was self-elimination: female applicants to MIT might have held themselves to higher standards than male applicants. The conclusion should not have been that the women who got into MIT were less gifted, less worthy of their places, and yet, that seemed to be what it was.