That’s interesting. My school didn’t have a math team, but (despite lacking math team training) i scored in the top 20 in my state in a random competitive math exam. I won a fancy dinner and a (then) expensive calculator, and a sales pitch about becoming an actuary.
I would have been very cranky to be pressured to join a girl’s-only league. I won the math prize in my highschool, and the prize was a book, selected by one of my (female) teachers, titled “women in mathematics”, which i didn’t read, because i didn’t want to be a woman in math, i wanted to be a person in math.
I don’t think there are very many sports where a typical female training with the men’s team would really gain that much. The STYLE of women’s basketball, e.g., is quite a bit different from that of the men’s team; as others have noted, this is a different sport with the same name and equipment.
People who have coached both men’s and women’s basketball (or soccer, etc.) usually say they have to employ different coaching strategies to get the best out of their players, from different motivational techniques to how they approach drills.
We did this with intramural ultimate frisbee when I was in college. Each team had to have a minimum number of women. The women were actually thrown the frisbee to fairly frequently, because a woman (on defense) guarding another woman (on offense) is just as likely to end up leaving her wide open or insufficiently-covered as a man defending against a man. But the problem came right after, when it was time for the women to throw the frisbee to a teammate. Their passes were very often incomplete; swatted down by an opponent or thrown poorly.
Let’s say that, at present, things are as you describe: that there’s already a boys’ varsity track team or cross-country team or whatever where each boy posts faster times than any girl in the school — and so there’s already a girls’ varsity team, where the fastest girl is slower than the slowest boy on the boys’ varsity team — and, oh, yeah, there’s already a junior varsity team, with (a) some boys who post better times than all of the varsity girls, and (b) some boys who don’t post better times than all of the varsity girls.
Don’t they, like, already know that?
Instead of keeping each runner’s time a secret, don’t they already make the numbers explicit? If you’re the second-fastest runner on the junior varsity team, don’t you already know how far you’re behind each of the varsity boys and how far you’re ahead of all of the varsity girls? And if you’re consistently the next-to-last finisher on the junior varsity team, don’t you already know which of the varsity girls are faster than you and which are slower?
That’s the nice thing about this world, actually – it’s sort of like the “let girls compete in boys’ sports, and also have the option to compete in women’s leagues” thing that a few people have been talking about in this thread. There’s no pressure to join a girl’s-only league or anything like that, it’s just that those competitions are there if you want to do them. (If any pressure exists it’s also the same as what people have been saying about sports – that it’s easier to excel in the girls competitions and so someone who wants to be recognized may well want to do them, while also being able to compete with everyone in the general competitions.)
Now, there are also some competitions where, because they want to have a larger percentage of girls eligible, they lower the threshold for the girls competing. That is wildly controversial, of course, but also a somewhat different topic.
I’m dubious. Maybe your daughter feels no pressure (and she enjoys the meets) but i bet there are girls who are pushed to go to girls’ meets. And if doing well in them was associated with winning scholarships (which is, indeed, a major problem with children’s sports in the US) there’d be a ton of pressure.
Eh, there is only one more-or-less prestigious girls’ math meet that I know of that isn’t tied to all-gender competitions. (By which I mean, for example, that the US team for the European Girls Mathematical Olympiad, which is the most prestigious all-girls math competition in the world, is picked from a set of girls who scored well on an all-gender competition.) There are other girls-competitions and girls-spaces, but I can’t imagine anyone being pushed to do them because they are not thought of as particularly important and don’t add anything to your resume, unless I guess you were an organizer or teacher in those spaces, but that’s a different kind of role.
Is there pressure to go to the one reasonably-prestigious one? It’s hard for me to tell. I mean, I imagine it’s likely some kids were pushed into it? But I think any pressure given by this girls’ math meet is completely dwarfed by the pressure felt in (some of) the all-gender competitions, which are considered as “more important.” And generally the girls who are winning the prizes in that girls-meet are the ones who are doing allllll the all-gender competitions as well.
Well, I’m happy your daughter is enjoying her math prowess. I suspect we’ve passed “peak actuary”, and it’s not as good a job as it was when i joined the field. But it’s a fun skill, and like being strong, it’s generally useful.
I’ll definitely talk to her about it as a possibility, thanks for suggesting it! A college friend of mine went in that direction and I think enjoyed it, though I haven’t talked to her in some time.
But yeah, our discussion makes me think that the underlying problem, even more than gender, is that maybe there’s no getting away from the pressure points of any kind of kid/high-school highly-competitive activity, they just manifest in slightly different ways, which is really too bad. Everything is a lot more competitive than when I was a kid, too.
Ok, if that’s the case, then we still don’t need segregated sports. Just let the girls onto the boys’ team, and let them warm the bench. Except that I don’t think that anyone would find that a particularly satisfactory solution.
As for the math competition thing, that’s a whole different discussion, and one for which I don’t think anyone really knows any good solution.
I enjoy physical activity, but not ‘sports’, mostly because of the competitive aspect.
Then again, I can think of ways in which competition can be devised to lead to win-win outcomes… with tongue only slightly in cheek, I offer this up annually during the run-up to the Superb Owl:
A modest proposal:
It has long been known that encouraging a widely shared activity with a bit of healthy competition is both an excellent way to build community, and to keep the citizenry distracted.
Ideally, one gets the children involved during their early education, then gradually ramps up their involvement through both participation and spectation, until as adults it becomes a major focus of their lives AND an excellent marketing opportunity.
Proposed: in grade school, the children be taught to build birdhouses and bat houses; in middle school they could advance to doghouses & cold-frames; high-schoolers could easily build yard sheds and bus shelters. Forming into work teams and advancing into college, barns and greenhouses would be great opportunities for practice. Upon graduation, those who had excelled would be recruited into regional teams, competing against each other to erect homeless shelters, community centers, food banks. Midwinter, the best and brightest of each region would compete on national TV to erect health clinics.
There could be roles for all manner of participants - one thrills to think of handsome young men in tight pants leading waves of cheers as nimble women race up ladders and relay shingles to their captain at the peak, waiting to drive the last nail with her golden hammer and win the trophy for that year.
Yeah. I recall reading about an example of that, of an exhibition match where an all-male professional baseball team played a softball match against a women’s softball team. The men did terribly. Their reflexes were simply all wrong for the game, despite the superficial similarities between baseball and softball.
I tend to agree. I don’t know the extent to which hurt male feelings have declined since Title IX was passed. I’ll add that when I ran high school cross country and track on a co-ed team that I perceived some throttling back of female effort so that they won’t crush the boys. I mean moving from 80% towards 100% effort is hard , so why not dial it back a bit to avoid playing with people’s heads?
A friend of mine also told me that boys on their HS tennis team used to look forward to challenge days, when you played to move up in the ranks. And that a lot of girls loathed that process.
So there are social benefits that people who happen to be male and people who happen to be female gain from the current framework.
Here’s my proposal. Try out new ideas with pilot programs. See how they work. Evaluate. Extend as appropriate. Bear in mind that lifelong fitness provides health benefits, even for the majority that is not especially competitive in athletics.
That’s more a historical accident than anything else. US college teams, at least for basketball and football, basically function as the developmental leagues for the NFL and NBA. It’s not like other countries don’t have competitions or don’t pay their athletes who are in their late teens. They just happen to be playing for a minor / youth / developmental league team rather than the State University. I don’t see how that matters. Either way, elite athletes from pretty much anywhere in the world almost certainly started playing in their elementary school years, most likely in competitive rather than recreational leagues. Competitive youth leagues are not a phenomenon unique to the US. If they were, that advantage (due to the extra years of practice) would be enough to make US athletes the most dominant in every sport played in the US.
I’m not sure what you say follows–I think there’s a big element of “youth sports as community spectacle” that is unusually emphasized in the US–but the thrust of my point isn’t about the uniqueness of US sports culture so much as about the harmfulness of high-stakes youth sport culture.
Got it. The point I was trying to make is that the high-stakes youth sport culture is how elite athletes are developed. As you say, there’s definitely some harmful aspects to that. But if we didn’t have that, and we waited until athletes were in their late teens before we allowed high stakes / competitive sports, that would lead to less talented athletes at the major league level. That’s also why I’m against the proposal in the OP. What would happen in that scenario is that girls would be locked out of the competitive youth leagues (whether that be a travel league or the varsity team at the local public school, the particulars of which are more about which sport is under consideration rather than how competitive the top level is). This would clearly be a detriment to those girls who do have the potential to play at a professional level.
If it creates more talented athletes at the pro level, at the cost of harming kids, forget having more talented athletes. We can get by just fine with less talented athletes in order to have less harm to kids.
“I, a person who doesn’t like sports and see no particular value in them, think we should radically change the way we do sports” is not a particularly winning argument. Your first step should be convincing all of the people who do care about sports not to (an impossible task, IMHO) or else your arguments won’t convince anyone who isn’t already not sold on the value of sports.