Rant. You've been warned.

[astra_nomer]

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.

Comments

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

yes, men and women differ physically. Men are going to win in terms of strength and size, but not all sports are about purely strength and size.

And men and women *think* differently, too. I think that's been pretty well documented. But just because your approach to problem-solving is different, doesn't mean you're wrong. So the parallels are still there -- men and women have different strengths, both mentally and physically. Perhaps it's just that the physical differences are more obvious.

[veryhappykayla.livejournal.com]

But physical strength and size, while certainly affected by environment (quality of practice and training), are quite directly a function of genes and gender. On the other hand, intellectual abilities, while certainly affected by genes and gender (which chemicals we've each got soaking our gray matter), is much more influenced by environment. The average difference math scores between males and females certainly exists, but it is very much dwarfed by the difference in math scores between rich and poor kids.

I'm never going to be able to successfully wrestle my 6'4"" brother -- and believe me, it's not through lack of trying. But he and I can go head-to-head (pun not *really* intended) on thinking stuff and it doesn't matter in the slightest whether I've got a Y chromosome or not. And I'll cheerfully wrestle anyone, 6'4"" or not, who suggests otherwise.

I'm not sure exactly what I feel about the actual issue with the NPR guy. But while I don't think one needs to, or should, make the jump from physical differences of ability to intellectual, denying that they and their resultant level consequences exist simply because one might (accurately) fear others doing so... seems not quite right either.