"[S]eeking gender balance is particularly important because neither male nor female prospective applicants prefer a campus with a large majority of women..."

"... and, thus, it harms the school’s ability to recruit desirable students.... In equal-protection analyses under the Fourteenth Amendment, the Court has indeed allowed more leeway for using gender, but, in order to be constitutional, the use of gender must be substantially related to an important interest. The question, then, would be whether colleges’ interest in having a gender-balanced student body is so important that it justifies holding women to higher admissions standards than men...."

Writes Jeannie Suk Gersen, in "What Would Sandra Day O’Connor Have Thought About Affirmative Action for Men? For decades, college-admissions offices have quietly imposed higher standards on female applicants" (The New Yorker).

Juxtaposing women’s persistent underrepresentation in public life with the practice of affirmative action for men in college admissions puts into relief the sometimes perverse vicissitudes of laws prohibiting discrimination....

The logic of [the Supreme Court's recent affirmative action case] has the potential to provide a path for legal challenges to admissions practices that advantage men because of their gender. The political rub, though, is that liberal civil-rights advocates, such as the A.C.L.U. or the National Women’s Law Center, seem unlikely to embrace an argument that, even if helpful to women’s interests in this instance, would expand the reach of the case that killed race-conscious affirmative action and render affirmative action for women unlawful....