Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label feminism. Show all posts

March 10, 2008

Cashing in on Title IX

The NYT article "Expectations Lose to Reality of Sports Scholarships" has a fascinating table reporting the value of Division I college athletic scholarships per sport and the number of students playing each sport in high school. Yet, whether due to innumeracy or political correctness, they fail to divide the scholarship dollars by the high school athletes, which would tell you the expected value of playing a high school sport.

For example, over a million boys each year play high school football, and $367 million in college football scholarships are consumed, so the "expected value" of being a high school football player is $358 in college athletic scholarships. In contrast, only $22 in women's golf scholarships are awarded each year, but only 54,000 girls play high school golf, so the expected value of being a girl golfer in high school is $413. So, being a girl golfer only pays a little better than being a boy football player, but, on the other hand, you compete by strolling around on manicured lawns and nobody slams you to the turf. And the football players more than earn their keep, competing in front of 80,000 people each weekend, while college women golfers might get 80 people to come watch a tournament. In contrast, the expected value of being on the boy's high school golf team is only $140.

Due to Title IX, which outlaws "discrimination" against females, especially in sports females don't like to play, colleges pay absurd amounts to bribe enough women to play certain sports.

I typed in the numbers for a few of the sports. Here they are, sorted by college scholarship dollars per female high school athlete, beginning with $9,453 of college scholarship money available for every girl who rows in high school!


HS Boys $/HS Boy HS Girls $/HS Girl Sex Ratio
Rowing 2,186 NA 2,359 $ 9,453 NA
Fencing 777 $ 1,802 641 $ 3,276 0.55
Ice Hockey 32,166 $ 926 4,245 $ 2,568 0.36
Riflery 2,274 $ 132 775 $ 1,419 0.09
Lacrosse 35,266 $ 423 26,677 $ 637 0.66
Golf 165,857 $ 140 54,720 $ 413 0.34
Field Hockey 213 NA 58,372 $ 302 NA
Water Polo 13,871 $ 159 11,856 $ 295 0.54
Basketball 541,130 $ 233 451,600 $ 272 0.85
Track/CC 713,305 $ 77 602,930 $ 133 0.58
Football 1,025,762 $ 358

NA

Even in sports that high school girls like, such as track and cross-country, which is great for staying slender, the bias is striking: the average high school girl runner can expect $133 in college scholarship money, versus only $77 for the average high school boy.

And, the "Sex Ratio" column understates the degree of anti-male bias because this table is based on high school team members, but there are a lot more boys than girls in high school who aren't good enough to make the school team.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

November 6, 2007

"The Difference Myth"

From the Boston Globe:

The difference myth

We shouldn't believe the increasingly popular claims that boys and girls think differently, learn differently, and need to be treated differently

Here's my favorite line in the article:

Scientists have turned up some intriguing findings of anatomical differences between the sexes.

Who would have imagined it? It's amazing what science can accomplish!

Here's my favorite comment from Boston Globe reader Aging Cynic:

Anyone who goes within a mile of this subject in Boston is toast. Ask Larry Summers. If the "progressive" echo chamber wants me to nod my head, they can make me do it. (They can't make me like it, however). This issue is so over. I understand when people won't take "no" for an answer. Why won't they now take "yes"? Do I need to be REEEALLY sincere?

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 31, 2007

A brilliant parody in Slate.com

For Halloween, Slate publishes the most hilarious parody of egomaniacal lesbian-feminist self-righteousness and general tiresomeness I've seen in awhile: "The Invisible Lesbian: Challenging the Myth of Merit-Based Publishing." It's attributed to "Sarah Schulman," who I assume is probably actually some guy who writes for The Simpsons or Letterman's Top Ten lists.

Update: Wow, this is a really elaborate hoax. There's a whole Wikipedia page (almost as funny) devoted to this obvious nom de plume.

Hats off to Slate for going to all this trouble to amuse us!

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 10, 2007

Damn white males keep benefiting humanity

The three hard science Nobel prizes (Physics, Chemistry, and Medicine/Physiology) have now been announced for 2007 and white males (six out of six in this case) continue to oppress the rest of humanity by discovering and inventing stuff.

The hard science Nobels are remarkably untainted by the Diversity Cringe. The judges just seem to feel, "Hey, we're the Nobel Prize guys. The N.o.b.e.l. Prize. We don't have to degrade ourselves for political reasons, so we won't." It's striking how few other prestigious institutions feel that way.

From 2000 through 2007, there have been 61 hard science Nobel Laureates, and one was a woman (Linda B. Buck in Medicine in 2004), or 1.64%. Since 1965, women have made up 2.13% of the hard science Laureates (6 out of 282), compared to 2.50% (6 out of 240) before then.

If this downward trend continues, I expect Larry Summers will have even more speaking engagements canceled.

They don't hate you for being wrong, just for being right.

Note, some of the recent winners have been pretty elderly, so somebody enterprising could go through the Nobel lists and make up a table of Laureates by decade of birth and see what the trend is when looked at that way. Of course, with just 6 out of the last 282 hard science Laureates being women, there's just not a lot there to work with.

From the Comments:

C. Van Carter said...

Speculations about women's cognitive abilities are obviously a greater impediment to scientific achievement than spending four years living on the streets as a child while your mother is in Dachau.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

October 2, 2007

Anita Hill all over again

Looking back, 1991-1995 seems like one of those eras (such as the late 1960s or 1917-1920) when America was undergoing a national nervous breakdown. Nothing symbolizes the free-floating hysteria of the era better than the vast brouhaha that erupted in October 1991 over Anita Hill's charges that Clarence Thomas ... uh ... well, it's hard to remember precisely what it was that so obsessed the nation at the time, but the essence of her complaint was that he had implied, in so many words, that he was a man and she was a woman.

This led to The Year of the Woman (as the media declared the 1992 election year to be) that Bill and Hillary Clinton surfed into the White House. Which was pretty funny, considering what ol' Bill had been up to down in Arkansas, but nobody got the joke at the time. (I must say, though, that I did write an article in December 1992, "A Specter Is Haunting the Clinton Presidency," forecasting that the incoming Clinton Administration would be put in mortal peril by a sexual harassment charge made by an Arkansas state employee. But nobody would publish it.)

If only Clarence had married Anita instead of that white woman, all this might have been avoided!

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.

At the time, I thought the craziness of the era was related to the recently completed war, just as WWI unleashed a lot of nuttiness. But, in retrospect, it seems more directly to be CNN's fault.

Before Desert Storm, so few people watched CNN that the Ricola cough drop company was able to use its tiny ad budget to buy a huge number of spots on CNN for its commercial of three Swissmen in lederhosen on top of an alp blowing giant Swiss horns. By the time the war was over, however, all of America not only had heard of Ricola cough drops but were heartily sick of the thought of them.

The war in Jan-Feb 1991 alerted people to the fact that there was this cable channel that broadcast news 24 hours per day. People started glancing at the TV news all day long. Of course, once the war was over, there really wasn't anything all that important to fill the vast 24 hour news hole, but they had to put something on, so why not testimony about various scandals? It was pretty close to free. And the public assumed that because it was on TV all the time, it had to be important.

The Golden Age of Cable News lasted from Anita Hill to the OJ Simpson trial in 1995, after which people started to realize that they were wasting their time.

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer

May 24, 2007

Finger length and SAT scores

Finger length and SAT scores: From LiveScience:

Finger Length Predicts SAT Performance

A quick look at the lengths of children's index and ring fingers can be used to predict how well students will perform on SATs, new research claims.

Kids with longer ring fingers compared to index fingers are likely to have higher math scores than literacy or verbal scores on the college entrance exam, while children with the reverse finger-length ratio are likely to have higher reading and writing, or verbal, scores versus math scores.

Not me. My ring fingers are longer, but my Verbal SAT score was higher than my Math score.

Scientists have known that different levels of the hormones testosterone and estrogen in the womb account for the different finger lengths, which are a reflection of areas of the brain that are more highly developed than others, said psychologist Mark Brosnan of the University of Bath, who led the study.

Exposure to testosterone in the womb is said to promote development of areas of the brain often associated with spatial and mathematical skills, he said. That hormone makes the ring finger longer. Estrogen exposure does the same for areas of the brain associated with verbal ability and tends to lengthen the index finger relative to the ring finger.

Unfortunately, the article doesn't provide any numbers on how big the effect is, which is what I'd like to see. (So, maybe, my finger lengths aren't totally anomalous -- I do like numbers, but I'm just not all that good with them!)

This provides an opportunity to recall this extraordinary 2000 essay in the UK Guardian by Becky Gardiner:

Slight of hand
New research links finger length to homosexuality. But Becky Gardiner has heard it all before
Friday March 31, 2000 The Guardian

When I was 19 I had the misfortune to be taught by Chris Brand, a psychologist with a belief in genetic determinism bordering on the evangelical. At that point - this was 1982 - his book, The g Factor, which claimed there was genetic proof that black people had lower IQs than white people, was no more than a twinkle in his eye, but his lectures made me so angry that usually I didn't go.

Article continues On this occasion I did. He was banging on about innate differences between black and white, male and female even then, saying that black people had smaller brains that whites, and women's were smaller than men's, and that this explained all manner of social ills (black criminality, female underachievement etc). Despite my fear of speaking in front of large groups, I found myself standing up in the crowded lecture hall and arguing with him.

I can't remember what I said, but I remember Brand's response. He smiled a small, smug smile. He let me talk and talk and talk. Then he interrupted me. "Could I ask you a favour? Could you hold up your hand for a moment?"

I held up my hand, a defendant in the dock. Brand nodded. "Thought so." He turned away for a moment then, theatrically, spun round to face the 300 students in the hall again.

"You will observe that this student," he said, "has an index finger which is considerably shorter than her fourth finger. That this is a male characteristic is well documented." That was it. He took up where he had left off, and it was as if I had never spoken.

Meanwhile, 300 teenagers looked anxiously at their fingers. Most were immediately reassured - the men by their short fingers, the women by their longer ones. But not me. There it was, lying in my lap, the shaming short finger. I was not brave after all, but foolish; by speaking out, I had simply drawn attention to my "maleness". I had inadvertently come out as a freak, a weird man/woman.

That was years ago, and the episode, so humiliating then, has long been little more than a party piece for me. On the many occasions I have told the story, I have only ever found one other woman who has The Finger, and she edits the women's page of this paper [the leftwing Guardian -- i.e., she's another feminist-Steve]; Chris Brand would be delighted.

But I have obviously been mixing in the wrong circles. New research has found that homosexuality is linked to the relative finger length. Professor Marc Breedlove, of the University of California, Berkeley, reports in the current issue of Nature that the ratio between the index and the so-called ring finger is a measure of how much male hormone a mother has exposed her unborn child to. The professor studied the finger lengths of 720 adults attending a street fair in San Francisco. And guess what? Lesbians tend to have short index fingers. Short index fingers equal exposure to male hormones equals masculinity equals lesbian. Simple as that.

But when the finger-staring has died down, what will we have learned? What can a correlation between a woman's unusually short finger and her lesbian sexuality (or any other "masculine" trait she might display - assertiveness, strength, a big salary) really tell us? That homosexuality is genetically determined, so we shouldn't persecute those so afflicted? Well, maybe, but surely it's more likely that homophobes will be delighted that there is now such an easy way to spot their next victim.

And in our personal lives, how can research like this help us? Since my experience in Chris Brand's lecture hall, my finger ratio has been one of the only things about me to remain constant. I have sometimes spoken up for what I believe in, and sometimes not. On occasion, I have tried to sit like a lady while giggling at some man's silly jokes, but more often than not I have been loud and bossy and sat about in bars. Over the years, I have had lesbian relationships [emphasis mine-Steve] and heterosexual ones. Today, I live with the father of my child, as I hope to do for many years to come. Have social pressures driven me to this denial of my "true" self? And what of my good friend Laura, a lesbian with a long index finger - should she ditch her girlfriend and find herself a nice man? In the face of findings such as this, our personalities dissolve. Our struggles against a socially constructed male/female divide, our changing choices, are reduced to more or less comical struggles against our very nature.

Common sense tells me that brain chemistry, hormones and chromosomes have some bearing on who we are and how we behave. And like most mothers, I have been amazed by how fully formed my tiny daughter sometimes seems. But as for the geneticists who weigh our brains and measure our fingers and say they know what we are, well, two fingers to the lot of them.

Two fingers is an obscene gesture in Britain.

This is a good reminder that what really makes people in the media mad about stereotypes is not when they are wrong, but when they are right. Essentially, feminism, multiculturalism, and PCism are wars against knowledge.

Here's Chris Brand's blog. Here's Chris's huge "Psychorealist" website from the 1990s with some extraordinary material. And you can download his suavely philosophical book on IQ, The g Factor, here. (This book is different from from Arthur Jensen's book of the same name and time).

My published articles are archived at iSteve.com -- Steve Sailer