astra_nomer | Rant. You've been warned.

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women in science

Rant. You've been warned.

I found myself offended by this story I heard on Morning Edition today.

Basically, Frank Deford argues that Michelle Wie's playing against male golfers is bad for women's sports as a whole. By playing against and beating men, she draws attention to herself perhaps, but also draws attention away from women's sports, which already suffer from lack of audiences. And he trotted out the usual arguments about smaller muscle mass and physical differences leading to women being unable to compete fairly with men.

Of course, being a woman who competes with men on a daily basis (careerwise anyway), I felt like he might as well have said that since women's brains are smaller, they can't fairly compete again men intellectually, so why not set up a parallel women's career ladder in the sciences. Then you can systematically marginalize women scientists the way women athletes have been.

Okay, so maybe it's not a fair comparison. But the attitude about the inferiority of women's bodies is all too similar to attitudes about the inferiority of women's brains.

Grrr.

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in fact, men have a large statistical advantage over women in terms of strength and height and mass, and those are crucially important in some sports

This is very close to an important leap of logic that many people make, which is that while it's all amusing to talk about statistics, you can't make judgments about individuals with them. We're talking about professional sports, so we're already talking about individual outliers. Yes, statistically speaking, we will get more male outliers than female outliers, but statistics also tells us that some of those outliers will be female, so I'd rather see pro sports changed to be based on ability rather than gender, so when the Michelle Wie's come along, we don't go through all this foolishness.

The same doesn't hold for intellectual capacity.

Actually, there is statistical support for the "boys are on average better at math" thing, though whether that's based on inherent gender differences or cultural expectations and pressures is a harder question to answer. Assume we have rock solid proof that statistically, men are better at math than women. If we used the athlete's model, we would segregate math classes based on gender, where all women were automatically put into remedial math. I find that notion appalling. I would rather have advanced, regular, and remedial math, and place people by ability. Then if most of the people in advanced math turn out to be male, so be it.

The first sentence of the piece: "Michelle Wie, I do wish you would stick to playing against your own kind."

That's inflammatory language, and if I'm pissed off, it makes it difficult to listen to his argument dispassionately.

Once I get past that, though, his argument doesn't offend me. I may not agree with it, for a variety of reasons, but it's not offensive to me.

You can't reasonably argue that female athletes could compete fairly with males in golf, tennis, soccer, basketball, etc. They will never be able to, and the "usual arguments" are completely true.

You've tagged your entry with "women in science", and that's where I think you're making a grave error. Women are definitely physically inferior to men in many ways. Mentally, almost certainly not. If you start to compare the absolutely correct beliefs about athletic ability with horribly sexist beliefs about cognitive ability, you're setting yourself up for a disaster. Drawing parallels between realistic people and sexist bucketheads is not just an unfair comparison, it's actively destructive to what you want to achieve.

But most sports don't have gender parity anywhere near that of tennis. How many world-class female athletes can you think of outside tennis stars? I bet you can count them on one hand. Now how many males? Bet you run out of fingers.

If all sports had equivalent women's leagues that were as prominent as in tennis, then this wouldn't be an issue.

So where do you draw the line?

Fact: Women have smaller brains than men.

Fact: Women statistically score lower on standardized math and science tests than men.

Fact: There are fewer women than men at the top levels in science.

You can easily take exactly the same arguments to that Deford made and apply them to women in science. Substitute brain size for muscle mass, test scores for strength, and science professors for professional athletes. When is it an objective point of view, and when is it sexism?

The analog of a separate women's league in academia might be affirmative action. I'm not sure I like affirmative action or not, to be honest. It's already bad enough that many men believe that women get hired simply because they are women, when the truth is more likely the opposite.

I'll admit, I've been sensitized to issues of sexism because of my own career path, so perhaps I've over-reacted. And sports has this whole angle of spectatorship and corporate interests that complicate the issue more. But boy, some of those comments struck a little to close to home.

I am quite aware of that fallacy and I was taking it into account when I wrote my comment.

The key point is one you note yourself -- professional sports are a problem of outliers. There are going to be a lot more male than female outliers near the upper end of, say, the strength curve. (In fact, the question here is precisely what to do when one of the female outliers is so extreme that she finds herself in company with the male outliers.)

Normal academic classes are not at all based on that model. Except in very rare situations, we are not dealing with a population of outliers in classes; we are dealing with perfectly normal people, where individual differences do in fact swamp statistical differences, and sex-segregation on that statistical basis would be ridiculous. There is not a parallel.

(Mind you, as a teacher in a single-sex school, I think there are instances where single-sex education can be beneficial, but they are unlike your hypothetical.)

If all sports had equivalent women's leagues that were as prominent as in tennis, then this wouldn't be an issue.

Well, yeah. That's back to my "in an ideal world." So one question is whether women playing in the men's leagues when they aren't equal prominence pushes things towards or away from the ideal world, and after thinking about it more, I think it pushes *towards*.

The LPGA has much less publicity and money. Wie playing in the PGA gets her tons of publicity, which bleeds into publicity for golf for women, which perhaps brings LPGA tournaments more publicity and money, which then perhaps eventually means that Wie doesn't *have* to play in the men's leagues.

I'd rather see pro sports changed to be based on ability rather than gender

That seems like a step backwards, for all those sports in which there are big differences (which really is most of them). Now instead of men's leagues and women's leagues, you have generic leagues, which are comprised entirely of men. Or major leagues (comprised of men) and wussy junky leagues (comprised of women and junky men).

Well, to be honest, I'd rather see the whole pro sports thing abolished completely. I kind of lose sympathy for the argument "Hey! Men get to have stupid, useless, overpaid jobs playing sports! We women want to have the stupid, useless, overpaid jobs playing sports too! Equal rights for being a parasite on society!"

Or I guess if you have to have pro sports, since I hear there are people out there that like viewing this sort of foolishness, just have the major leagues if those are the only things making money, and nuke the wussy leagues, even if that makes things unequal from a gender standpoint. I mean really, you're totally getting away with something if you're a professional athlete. It offends my work ethic to tip the scales so even more people can mooch.

> If we used the athlete's model, we would segregate math classes based on gender, where all women were automatically put into remedial math. I find that notion appalling.

Okay, that's not right at all. The purpose of math class is education, not competition. The point is not to determine who the best person at math is, but to get the students to a certain level of proficiency. If athletic competition was about getting people to a more-or-less objective benchmark (run this distance in this time, average this number of successful free throws in basketball, etc.), then there wouldn't need to be gender differentiation in sports, either. It's the element of competition, especially at elite levels, that drives gender-separation. Even standardized tests like the SAT and AP exams aren't trying to be competitive.

Now, I'd be interested to know if actual math competitions (Math clubs at the high school level, AHSME, AIME, the Putnam exams) do overall and gender-separated rankings. I don't think they do (they certainly don't give separate tests), but it's possible. I'll ask my mother how her school's math club works. =)

I have more comments on gender disparity in sports, but I'll post those separately, I think...

It's not being a parasite on society to get paid for doing things that people are willing to pay you to do. (You could argue that sports franchises shouldn't get any help from the government, but that's an entirely different argument.)

To wander to farther extremes:
Should we abolish the Special Olympics, because guys in wheelchairs don't run as fast as guys not in wheelchairs? Or just fold them in to the non-wheelchair people races? Should we not have Little League, because eight-year-olds don't play as well as grown men? There's more to sports than just having the top people in all of humanity play each other, and nothing else. Sure, the Special Olympics and Little League get less publicity and money than the big leagues, but they're not "getting away" with anything.

To wander to farther extremes:
Should we abolish the Special Olympics...

That's not a farther extreme, that's a different case entirely. The Special Olympics and Little League are amateur sports. If anything, the participants pay an entrance fee to participate, but they definately don't get paid. As I said, I was talking about pro sports. I'm not objecting to sports as hobbies, I'm objecting to try to force gender equality in an institution that is fundamentally supported by spectators. You can't force people to like to watch things.

You can't force people to like to watch things.

Sure. Can we agree that sports in general are funded by people who like to watch them? If so, there's no point to abolishing anything with spectators who will pay for it. People watch women's tennis - even if the men could beat the women if they played against each other instead of in separate tournaments. But people don't watch the Tour de France Femenin. I hadn't even heard of it before I asked

justom.

The question is, is there a way to convince people to watch things that they don't currently? (for those people who care about the issue, at least. Like you, I don't really watch sports.) You can't watch sports that aren't on TV, so it's somewhat self-reinforcing. And, to tie it back to the original issue, will Wei playing in the Masters cause people to watch more or less women's golf? :)

Well, yeah, obviously. My only point was that simply not being as good as the men doesn't relegate women to lower public profiles. Simply playing at a lower level doesn't explain why the women's side of a sport is so much less popular.

You're probably right, but I think it would be reasonable to say that Michelle Wie playing in the PGA means that the LPGA can't benefit as much from her star value. I don't happen to agree with that, but it's not a crazy argument to make.

The question is, is there a way to convince people to watch things that they don't currently?

That sort of sounds like there's a problem with the current way people choose what to watch and thus what is popular, which some posters clearly think is the case, but I'm less convinced. Does it really make you a bad person if you enjoy watching men's sports rather than women's sports? There could be a lot of reasons why someone does, some of which are more socially acceptable than others. They could be chauvinist, and dislike watching women in traditionally unfeminine roles. They could be male and enjoy having a same sex hero/role-model to emulate. They could find male athletes more attractive. They could want to watch the best athletes, regardless of gender. They could want to have something to talk about at the water cooler, so watch whatever's popular. Changing the behavior depends on what's causing it, which I don't think we really know. Once we know why people are behaving in such a way, then we can decide whether that behavior is bad and if so, try to affect it.

Though the bit about people only being able to watch what's televised is a good point. Clear case of the values of a few people (TV execs) deciding what the wider population should be viewing.

I find it particularly funny that

firstfrost and I are the ones debating this particular thread, since neither of us would be watching these sports regardless of how they're structured. :)
I reserve the right to hate all forms of golf, regardless of the gender of the player!
(Though I concede that Tiger Woods is hot. :)

I'm sorry, but that's ridiculous. I don't know where to draw the line, but between athletics and science there are several orders of magnitude difference between the male-female gaps. Men are three times stronger than women, but not three times better on the SATs. There's a 300 to 1 ratio of men to women in the PGA, and there's no field of science with that kind of lopsidedness.

Muscle mass equals strength and speed. Brain size has no relation to test scores. Strength and speed are excellent predictors of success in athletics. Test scores are only weak predictors of success as a professional scientist.

If I give a speech where I suggest that biological differences might play a part in explaining some of the achievement gap in science, I get ripped a new orifice. If I gave a speech in which I suggest that maybe women aren't strong enough or fast enough to be NFL linebackers, no one would show up to listen to such a boring and obvious statement.

There might be some borderline cases in something like NASCAR where mostly you just sit in a comfy chair, but for athletics in general vs. science, it's blindingly obvious that one is a settled question and the other is not.

I think your concern born from your career experience is a very important thing, and worth all the attention it can get. If you let it bleed over into totally unrelated questions, you go from being an admirable crusader for justice to sounding like someone whose ideology has divorced you from reality.

Are we going to eliminate the stupid, useless profession of acting, too? Was it a giant step backward to allow women to play the female parts instead of having men be all the parasites?

Or should we just leave the major leagues (Hollywood) alone, and nuke the community theaters?

To divert into minutae:

Men have smaller brains than elephants, too. Something that I've seen quoted elsewhere is that humans have the highest brain/body size ratio. Since women tend to be substantially smaller, do women have a higher brain/body ratio than men?

I still maintain that you can make the analogy, at least in the particular case of pro golf. If you have separate women's and men's leagues, have unequal payoffs between the leagues, and insist that all women have to play in the women's league even if they do have the ability to successfully compete in the men's league, that there is a glass ceiling.

There's a 300 to 1 ratio of men to women in the PGA, and there's no field of science with that kind of lopsidedness.
That's not a fair comparison either. A better one would be to include the LPGA. And I'm too lazy to actually look up those numbers, but I'd guess that that ratio would be closer to parity than, say, physics.

I could be wrong, but I seem to remember reading somewhere that the brain/body ratio is actually lower for women. We just use our brains more efficiently. :)

American white males age 35: average brain mass 1347g, average body mass ~80Kg
American white females age 35: average brain mass 1223g, average body mass ~65Kg

I think the discussion is about drawing an analogy between arguments about physical differences and arguments about mental differences, and the consequences for relative performance.

No one is agitating for a rule saying that women can't play in the PGA. There's no glass ceiling. In fact, people are excited about the possibility that a woman could be competitive with the best men. If there were another woman who could do the same thing, she'd be in a PGA event in a heartbeat.

If we're trying to draw an analogy, well, there is no separate physics league for women, so there's no analogy.

The 300:1 comparison is completely fair. The PGA is a fairly accurate representation of the tippy top of golf regardless of sex. It's perfectly fair to compare it to, say, all full professors of physics. Including the LPGA would be the equivalent of making a set out of all male full professors and all women with the word "professor" in their title.

No one is agitating for a rule saying that women can't play in the PGA.

Actually, lots of people object to women playing in the PGA. And yeah, most of them are pig-headed sexist bastards. And it's those attitudes that I'm fighting.

The PGA is a fairly accurate representation of the tippy top of golf regardless of sex.

I simply don't buy that. Surely you'll agree that there is some overlap between the tippity-top of the LPGA and the middle-of-the-pack PGA. Heck, Michelle Wie missed the cut-off for the PGA Tour by *one* stroke. And she's currently tied for 23rd in the LPGA tour. I think the reason why women are excluded from the PGA is simply because there is a separate LPGA, and so they're all directed to go play over there.

Actually, lots of people object to women playing in the PGA. And yeah, most of them are pig-headed sexist bastards. And it's those attitudes that I'm fighting.

None of those wackos are here, and Frank DeFord isn't one of them, as is clear from his piece. "[I]t would be nice if Michelle Wie qualified for the Masters and made the cut on a PGA Tour."

I think that your energy would be infinitely better spent fighting sexism in a field a) that matters and b) where there's no obvious reason to expect women to be worse. E.G., science.

Can we at least agree that women are at a disadvantage in strength, size, speed? That there may be differences in the way men and women think, with advantages and disadvantages for each, but that women have no inherent biological advantage in any sport?

If we can agree on that, then I would say that the implication is that statements about the physical inferiority of women are qualitatively different from statements about mental inferiority. They are not exemplary of the same underlying attitude.

....he might as well have said that since women's brains are smaller, they can't fairly compete again men intellectually, so why not set up a parallel women's career ladder in the sciences.

I am going to make the assumption that you don't want a parallel career ladder. If you really believe that "he might as well have said", etc., then it would seem that you're arguing for the abolition of sex-based segregation of any kind, including in sports. I don't think you actually believe this, but it would be the logical conclusion. Otherwise "the attitude about the inferiority of women's bodies" is not at all "similar to attitudes about the inferiority of women's brains".

Fascinating discussion, and I hate to sound like I'm dissing it, but my sister-in-law just called to let me know that she's having contractions (nine days early), so I'm probably pretty busy for a while.

Oh, I just remembered that the ratio usually used is actually log(brain)/log(body), which would work out to 0.64 for both men and women.

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Size isn't everything

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