Caltech Tries Out New Sexual Equation : Education: More women are being admitted, and that’s changing the school’s male-dominant image.

In most discussions about social life--or the lack of it--at Caltech, the issue of “glomming” comes up.

Glomming, in campus slang, is the unnerving tendency for a group of young men to hang around a young woman, bothering her, competing for her attention. At Caltech, where male students outnumber females 5 to 1, glomming has been a tradition along with the school’s world-famous academic programs in science and engineering.

This year, however, Caltech began a new admissions policy that promises to ease the glomming problem and, more seriously, to tap a new reservoir of brainpower for the nation’s technological needs. The school offered enrollment to all female applicants meeting basic entrance requirements, even if that meant rejecting equally qualified males.

It is too early to tell how well the social and career goals of the change will turn out, administrators say. But they are encouraged. After all, the percentage of women in Caltech’s freshman class increased from 17% last year to 30% this fall. That means 66 out of the current 215 freshman class are females while 338 of Caltech’s 1,821 undergraduate and graduate students are women.

“While the numbers sound abysmal to outsiders, we see it as a wonderful trend,” said Jeanne Noda, assistant vice president for student affairs at the Pasadena campus.

Part way into the fall semester, students say they welcome relief from the old stereotype of Caltech undergraduates as nerdy young men who have better relationships with their computers and microscopes than with anyone of the opposite sex.

“In the past, things could get pretty ugly for a woman at times, with five or six guys hanging outside her room. It was not a pretty sight,” said senior class President Clifton Kiser, a materials science major from Illinois. “But a lot of those social tensions are toned down in this freshman class. It’s a lot better than it’s been in the past.”

However, Caltech officials say it will be extremely difficult to raise the percentage of first-year women much higher in the next few years. The same is true at most other highly selective science and math-oriented schools around the country.

Recruiting and admissions changes cannot undo generations of sexual pigeonholing in education away from science or ease fears that technical campuses and careers are inhospitable to women, university officials say. Also, some young women scientists feel more comfortable at a general education campus, where social life is at least more normal even if the physics classes are dominated by men.

“All of us have the problem that there are not enough women in the pipeline, coming out of high schools with an interest in math, science and engineering,” said Henry Riggs, president of Harvey Mudd College. At that esteemed technical institution in Claremont, women constitute only 14% of the freshman class, a figure Riggs hopes can be raised to 30% in five years. “We’d have to have a lot of societal changes before we get to 50%,” he said.

Compared to Caltech and Harvey Mudd, Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers more majors appealing to women, including architecture, economics and political science. Yet enrollment of freshman women at MIT has declined to 33%, after peaking at 38% in 1986. According to the admissions director, Michael Behnke, increasing numbers of women entering MIT in the early 1980s ironically backfired by making the school more attractive to men.

“It does take special efforts to recruit those women and get them to think about a place like MIT,” Behnke said. Since young women often receive little encouragement in science, especially when it comes to applying to difficult colleges, “the ones who do persevere and apply are a pretty impressive lot.”

Still, MIT judges women differently from men on college entrance examinations scores. Critics long have charged that the Scholastic Aptitude Test is slanted toward the strengths of white males, an allegation SAT creators deny. Behnke says the tests slightly over-predict the classroom performance of male students and slightly under-predict that of women. So in choosing freshmen, MIT and other schools in effect boost the average woman’s score by up to 20 points on an 800-point portion of the SAT, he explained.

Caltech generally does not do that, said Marcy Whaley, assistant admissions director. But under its new affirmative action policy, every “clearly qualified” woman was approved; that was not true for all qualified men. Such a method, she said, seemed to be the best way to increase the percentage of women, which had hovered around 17% since Caltech began to admit female undergraduates in 1970.

Caltech’s general floor for admission is the ceiling for many other schools: about 1250 SAT points out of 1600 total (achieved by only about 5% of all who take the test), a 3.7 high school grade-point average and other indicators of strength in math and science. Yet there is some grumbling on campus that standards were lowered for women, said Jon Hamkins, a senior electrical engineering major from Kentucky who is president of one of the seven dormitories on campus.

“A certain section of undergraduates believe that there is a relaxation of standards,” he said. “I am divided myself. I do like the idea of more women on campus, but I certainly hope it’s not at the academic expense of anything.”

The school, which denies any such bending of standards, wooed women and minorities ardently. For example, Caltech offered to pay travel expenses for women, Latinos and blacks to a recruiting weekend--an offer that was not routinely made to white and Asian men.

With only two blacks and 11 Latinos in the freshman class, Caltech officials concede that they have tough recruiting work ahead in those minority areas. In contrast, nearly a quarter of the freshmen are Asians.

Claudine Butcher, a freshman from Colorado, said women students, teachers or alumni telephoned her once a week last spring, pitching Caltech. “They really pushed,” she recalled. The effort paid off. Butcher enrolled at the Pasadena campus, passing up an admissions offer from MIT and overcoming her mother’s fears that there were too few women at Caltech.

“She was just worried that I wasn’t going to have a good time and I wasn’t going to have any girlfriends to talk to,” Butcher said.

There are no fraternities or big-time sports at Caltech and no one expects or even wants a social life to match, say, USC’s or UCLA’s.

Still, most Caltech people did want more women around. In the past, Caltech men took electives at nearby Occidental College, Pasadena City College and the Art Center College of Design in hopes of finding romance. And Caltech women felt pressured to quickly and very publicly latch onto a boyfriend as a way to discourage glomming. “In chemistry terms, it’s called filling the valency,” said sophomore Abshire, referring to the capacity of an element to combine with another.

Nevertheless, some women see benefits in being so outnumbered. Many feel more comfortable at Caltech, surrounded by smart young people enthusiastic about molecular bonding, than they did in high schools dominated by football games and parties. And there is some sense of getting ready for male-dominated careers.

“It now seems very normal to be in a situation where there are so few women,” said senior engineering student Elaine Lindelef of Santa Clarita. “Maybe this way I’ll be more prepared for what I’m going to face in an engineering firm.”

Sharon Schuster, president of the American Assn. of University Women, said the increased number of women at Caltech can have a snowball effect in producing new role models for girls.

There is certainly room for more. Nationwide, women received less than 12% of the doctoral degrees in engineering, mathematics and physical sciences in 1987. Of the 1,536 members of the National Academy of Sciences, only 52 are women. Of the 327 members of the Caltech faculty, 27 are female.

Caltech hopes that its larger group of first-year women will survive the academic and social rigors ahead.

“We don’t know for sure yet if this is the right group,” said Noda, the student affairs vice president. “The real story will be written at the end of the year. Will we have happy and successful sophomores?”