Women's Sports Debate, Redux

Amanda writes about some of the pejorative things one often hears when it comes to women's team sports, and notes that those things have been less heard in the context of the Women's World Cup in soccer.  You know, the kind of stuff about girls not being able to throw a ball or how watching women's games is about as interesting as watching paint dry and so on.

In my opinion,  beach volleyball outfits or the statements of some about how female soccer players have gotten better because they now wear makeup are part and parcel of the same criticism, albeit in disguise.  How to get men to watch women's sports if too many think women aren't athletic enough to be worth watching?   Give us more tits and butts and pretty faces!

Problem solved.

Which it isn't of course, and in any case we need to have both men and women to watch women's sports if those sports are to get commercial sponsors. 

Similar opinions about the weakness of women were expressed in the comments to this article about a WNBA player reading some mean tweets aloud.  Last night when I checked the comments (won't go there again, though many also defended the female players), several pointed out that women are inferior athletes and watching women's games is boring.

I have three quick thoughts about all that:

First, most women's "professional" team sports are really recent.  Little girls have not played soccer or ice-hockey or basket ball in large numbers until quite recently.  What that means is that the foundation of some of those sports is still wobbly, especially in some other countries than the US, and that we shouldn't compare, say, women's soccer on the global level with men's soccer on the global level, given the much longer history, support and base of the latter.

Women's sports are likely to improve a lot in the very near future, and they have already improved a lot.  One coach of women's soccer pointed out that none of the medal-winning teams of the 2007 World Cup could have placed in this year's Cup, assuming that they had paid the 2007 game now.

Second,  the idea that women are inferior athletes uses an odd definition of an athlete, one which assumes that the basis one starts from (bone structure, testosterone levels etc) is what the word "athlete" means.  I have always interpreted "an athlete" to mean not only the genetic talents a person has but also the amount of work and training the person has invested in the sport.

If we used that odd definition of what makes a superior or inferior athlete, then we shouldn't have weight classes in boxing or wrestling, because clearly the heavier boxers are the better hitters.  They hit harder.

Third,  as several people have pointed out elsewhere, why is it so important to compare men's team sports to women's team sports in the first place?  Why not enjoy the good soccer or good ice-hockey in men's games and also in women's games?  My guess* is that this need for comparisons comes from us being used to watching the men's games, so those become the obvious comparison point.  But surely it's possible to get past that point.

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*Excepting those who oppose women's sports because they believe women belong in the kitchen and the bedroom and by the vacuum cleaner only.

The Peas-In-Guacamole Debacle

Humans are utterly astonishing!  I often feel like an observer at the far edges of this alien life (don't eat guacamole, love peas).  The Twitter abuzz about peas in guacamole!  At least it provides relief from the Twitter fights.

So what is your opinion on this life-changing question?  Can peas and guacamole marry or not?

Short Posts 6/30/15. On Growing Income Inequality in the US, Fifty Shades of Gray and the Way To Write About Violence Against Women

1.  This article about British convictions in violent crimes against women is interesting for all sorts of reasons, but what struck me most was the way the piece uses "people" for the offenders and "women and girls" for the victims.  For example:

There were increases in the number of successful prosecutions for sexual offences, child sex abuse, domestic violence cases and honour-based violence, while more people were charged with rape than ever before in the past year.

The bolds are mine.

2.  E.L. James, the writer of the Fifty Shades of Gray, held a Twitter Q&A session.  According to this BuzzFeed article it went horribly wrong.  From another angle it went pretty much as one would expect it to.

3.  Income inequality in the US continues to grow after the most recent recession:

The rich did far better, however. The top 10 percent of American earners, or those making more than $121,000 a year, got an even larger slice of the economic pie in 2014, capturing 49.9 percent of total income. That represents the highest share they’ve ever gained except for 2012. The top 1 percent of earners also got a boost, netting 21.2 percent of the country’s income, up from 20.1 percent in 2013. While most Americans saw income growth of 3.3 percent, incomes for the richest 1 percent grew by 10.8 percent.

When did the most recent trend in increasing income inequality begin?  The linked article suggest this happened in the 1980s and escalated during the 1990s.

A fun homework for you is to figure out what else might have changed around then, both internationally (such as the fall of the Berlin wall which reduced resistance to unbridled capitalism in international politics) and inside US politics (the push for globalism, the changes in laws which led to lowered taxes for the top 1%, the "liberation of financial markets").   This Wikipedia article (which may not be completely unbiased) suggests some additional ideas.

What I had in mind for that homework is not the details of what has happened but the wider trends:  the death of unionization (unions benefit lower income workers more, including women earning lower incomes), the "capture" of the legislative branch by the richest among us, partly because of no proper campaign financing laws, and then the fact that as income inequality increases greater differences are created among the goals and concerns of those who have lots of money and those who have less.  If the wealthier have more say in politics, through that one-dollar-one-vote, there will be further laws which tilt the playing fields towards greater inequality.

On Diversity Among Facebook Employees

Those of you who have read my opinions before might remember that I don't like the term "diversity" in hiring.  For example, it allows a big blond wheat cake to be peppered with a few specks of cardamom and a few peppers, and then we have a cake full of diversity!  At the other extreme the term tends to make a total mess of what happens when we ignore the actual population percentages of various groups.

To give you an example of the latter problem, suppose that some country has 90% of purple people and 10% of green people, and that initially 100% of all the good jobs are held by purple people and 0% are held by green people, even though green and purple people are, on average, equally good at those jobs and want them as much.

Then we get a diversity effort, and the jobs start shifting, so that at one point 95% are held by purple people and 5% by green people.  That's progress right?  But is it still progress if at a later point 80% of the jobs are held by purple people and 20% by green people?  Should more jobs shift towards the green people?

I don't think so.  Assuming that purple and green people are equally interested in the jobs and equally good at them, then the percentages should reflect the population percentages, that is 90% for the purple folks and 10% for the green folks.

Same Sex Marriage Legal In All Fifty States

The decision came after my Friday post was published.  I have nothing useful to say about it, except that it's worth watching this Colbert snippet as a summary of the majority opinion and various dissents:



As an aside, is Colbert using the term "gay" to refer to all who might consider same sex marriage (that is, gays and Lesbians and bisexuals)?  Or is this just a term for the guys?  I suspect the former, so we have the same setting as we used to have (or still have?) when using the terms "man" or "mankind"  Women are assumed to be included except when they are not.

Those usages are confusing, because you get two different messages inside your brain when only one message is being sent.

Anyway, the Supreme Court must have been taken over by aliens from outer space during the last few weeks.  That's the only way to interpret so many astonishingly reasonable and good decisions.   Well, it's really Justice Kennedy that's making the difference.  Perhaps he has been taken over by the aliens.

What I Did Over The Weekend

Got my passport renewed, and came across that dratted old problem that I don't really have fingerprints.  Whenever I have to get them taken the print-taker agonizes and agonizes and finally accepts some smudge or other.

How about that?  You could argue that snakes don't have fingers, naturally.  But I have fingers, not just fingerprints.  It's unlikely that I have adermatoglyphia (though my mom has no fingerprints at all) , because it looks like something called "damaged fingerprints."  They try to be real fingerprint whorls but fail miserably.  Sigh.  That's the story of my life.

I was once told that my prints are worn down from all that housework!  People are so funny.