The paper did not lower the bar for entry, it lowered the bar for women winning. The correct test would be to compare the winners of the competition with the lower bar to the winners of the competition without the lower bar.
Which is the unspoken assumption in your post and Cletus' original post: if you include more women, those women are going to be dolts who couldn't make it in on their own steam.
The unspoken assumption is that lowering the bar has any effect at all. If the bar is normally at 10, but you lower it to 7 for women, then any extra women this policy lets in must be in the range [7,10). Since all numbers in the interval [7,10) are below the previous minimum, they therefore lower the average.
Which is the unspoken assumption in your post and Cletus' original post: if you include more women, those women are going to be dolts who couldn't make it in on their own steam.
The unspoken assumption is that lowering the bar has any effect at all. If the bar is normally at 10, but you lower it to 7 for women, then any extra women this policy lets in must be in the range [7,10). Since all numbers in the interval [7,10) are below the previous minimum, they therefore lower the average.