Sydney Phillips, a 7th-grader at St. Theresa’s private Catholic school in New Jersey, wanted to play on the boys basketball team after the girls team was discontinued. After the school said no, Sydney’s dad sued. So the school just expelled Sydney, and her sister, too, via a snotty letter! Unfair! Am I the only one whose blood is boiling right now? Sydney, if you need a summer job in six years, look us up!
Why the school didn’t just let her play, or at least try out, is a mystery. If she fails the tryout, the school’s “problem” is solved. If she makes it, then the school’s team is better, and the school can use NJ interscholastic rules as its defense (“Our interpretation of state law is that Sydney is allowed to play on the boys team, because the school discontinued the girls team.” Done!)
There would be so much excitement and good will generated if Sydney were on that team. Is there a single American who wasn’t rooting for Mo’ne Davis to take the Taney Dragons all the way to a Little League World Championship? Her outing to pitch on August 20, 2014, brought a higher ESPN viewership than any Little League game ever. Everyone knows that at that age, there are many girls skilled enough to play with the boys, and even if they weren’t skilled enough, who cares? If St. Theresa’s had a national powerhouse basketball team for middle-schoolers, that’s news to me. Sports at that level is for fitness, pedagogical purposes, and fun. Let the kids play!
Women in sports is a hot-button topic for me. At the University of Chicago, we organized a co-ed recreational roller-hockey team that had several women on our roster, and our opponents were mostly all-male. We fielded an all-male lineup in an NHL-sponsored Summer Breakout tournament, and ended up competing against an all-female team called Chicks with Sticks, which was being heralded as the women’s national champions at that time. That game drew a huge crowd—all of them rooting against us! It wasn’t even discussed among our players—we were playing to win, period. We planned to play the Chicks like any other team between us and the trophy. (I’ll answer to comments if you want to know how that story ended.)
It’s a bit of a mystery to me why women are so under-represented in sports-like fields where the physical differences should not be determinative—poker/blackjack, chess, billiards, bowling. Garry Kasparov made waves at Harvard when he said that women did not have the temperament for chess, and predicted that a computer would become the world champion before a woman. While his prediction has basically been validated, the underlying reasons are still debated. I’ve always held the opinion that it’s just a numbers game. Societal norms discourage women from going into many of these fields (computer programming, too), so we don’t see many women among the top-ranked players.
There are not many women in blackjack. There are so few female APs that I used to consider it a major red-flag when any female tried to purchase my book, Exhibit CAA. It might be the case that every single female order was an attempt to mask the purchase for someone else. One order came in with “MGM Surveillance Department” at the bottom of the email, but what was really suspicious is that the email was from a female. She got so irritated about our unwillingness to fill her order that she started calling on the phone every day!
That said, one major appeal of the AP “job” is that it really is a meritocracy, and I’m sure that in terms of the technical aspects of beating the games, there would be no measurable difference based on gender, race, sexual orientation/identity, religion, age, or any other political or demographic factor. There are three sufficient (and probably necessary) traits to succeed: integrity, interest, work ethic. That’s it. And the last two are correlated. People tend to work hard when they have an interest. “If you like your job, you’ll never work a day in your life!”
An interesting theory is whether we can take the question (and perhaps the liberal agenda) a step further: is it actually an advantage to be female, or black? (Read the next post, please.)
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Chicks with Sticks almost sounds like it could be the name to a movie. If the all-male team was hell bent on winning no matter what did the chicks get roughed up or did the guys lose? Perhaps the crowd was cheering on the ladies because they perceived the fairer sex as the underdog, so the crowd cheered for the chicks.
Jeanette Lee and Allison Fisher are two chicks with sticks and I bet the two of them could destroy an Army of male billiards players.
In the case of Hillary Clinton, it is not an advantage to be female and run for el Presidente. Even if the major corporate media network spin doctors and their affiliates were with her and on her side. I like how Hillary failed by trying to co-opt support by grand standing with movie stars, singers, and sports stars as a force multiplier, only to come up short. 🙂
Well, did yous win?
How were the the scrums, or whatever you call a pile of players.
Thanks for sharing.
How did the Chicks story end?
Please tell us the result of the hockey tournament. I doubt I’ll find a hockey box score if I search the internet looking for “chicks with sticks!”
I’ve only ever come across one black female AP and I only saw her hustling VP machines.
JG wrote: There are three sufficient (and probably necessary) traits to succeed: integrity, interest, work ethic.
Arguing with possibly the best AP of all time on something within his wheelhouse is not an undertaking to be taken lightly. With that said, I respectively disagree.
Some level of intelligence is in the mix somewhere. Most players with an IQ of 80 will not succeed — no matter their level of integrity, interest, and work ethic. The task is simply too difficult no matter how hard they try.
You do hear of Rainman-type players — but they are very rare.
Bob Nersesian has said that professional gamblers are the smartest people he has ever met. He hasn’t met everybody, of course, but that’s an indicator that on average, APs tend to be bright.
Some money skills are necessary. We’ve all heard stories of gamblers who are frequently “between bankrolls,” but the most successful players seem to be able to manage this.
Having the personality to handle big losing streaks has nothing to do with integrity, interest, or work ethic.
Pattern-recognition skills vary among people. I know these skills are important in video poker and I suspect they are important in other gambling games as well.
Some level of people skills are important — although clearly APs vary widely in this. The best poker players are very observant of other people. If you don’t have those skills, you probably won’t ever get to the top level.
The points you mention just might be necessary. But they are hardly sufficient.
I would have to think that the all ladies team probably schooled and ran up the score on the all guys team. They gave the boys a run for their money.
I’ll add a fourth and probably the hardest to master…. Discipline.
I don’t have time to worry too much about the subject of female gamblers not getting enough respect; I am too busy laughing my way to the bank.
I don’t know if there are any online records of the tournament. It was in Chicago in the summer, but I don’t even know the year. Our team was called “The University of Chicago Phoenix” and “Chicks with Sticks” were being called the national champs, so it must have been after their 1994 national win (http://articles.chicagotribune.com/1995-07-07/sports/9507070311_1_roller-hockey-in-line-field-hockey). We felt confident going into the match; after all, we were a strong team, with a shot to win the whole thing. When we got to the court (basically a big parking lot outdoors), there was a pretty big crowd, rooting against us.
We beat the Chicks 8-0. The Chicks had some skilled stick-handlers and a decent goalie, but there was one huge difference–and it was not strength, as one article cited as the difference between the Chicks and their male opponents. The difference was speed. Our defenders (including me) could join the attack far forward, but then still catch the Chicks from behind if we turned the puck over and they tried to break out the other way. Public, recreational leagues were non-checking leagues, so we weren’t using size to bully and hit the Chicks. We were just skating around them, but we skated around a lot of male teams, too. We were fast. We ended up losing in the semifinals by one goal. The opposing forward scored the game-winner after skating right around me when I was the last defender back. Failures produce memorable moments.
Afterwards some of the spectators criticized the 8-0 victory, and asked why we weren’t chivalrous. We WERE chivalrous–that’s why we wiped them out.
Bob Dancer said: “We’ve all heard stories of gamblers who are frequently “between bankrolls,” but the most successful players seem to be able to manage this.”
I believe this is true much more of poker players than BJ/carny game APs. In my opinion, most good poker players are not APs. They are compulsive gamblers who happen to be good at poker. I forget where I read it (Munchkin’s book?) but poker players are making endless sidebets and throwing away money on craps, etc., between rounds. True APs don’t do that.
I can’t count the number of times I’ve seen poker “professionals” being staked or borrowing from other poker players. It’s just too numerous.
My biggest pet peeve of poker players is the misleading “career earnings” stat.
Speaking of hockey, are you going to the Frozen Four if the Crimson can overcome their Ivy-League deficiencies to make it? I probably have an extra ticket.
It’s not self evident that all people are created equal, at least not in any measurable way. Neither are all dogs created equal. Different breeds of dogs have different average strengths and weaknesses, and different innate affinities for different kinds of activities, on average. Likewise in humans.
There’s actually a lot of legitimate empirical research on human biodiversity, but the public remains unaware of it because it contradicts some of the most sacred quasi-religious dogmas of our society.
For a fun, brief introduction to this sort of politically incorrect research I’d recommend Hjernevask, the Norweigan documentary miniseries: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E577jhf25t4&list=PLd9_g7lAICxtlGbxh4_z8ik178o8CDPnv
Steven pinker provides a good summary of some of the evidence for sex differences here: https://youtu.be/n691pLhQBkw
Off the top of my head here are some good reasons why women are underrepresented at the top of nearly every field:
1. Many empirical studies have shown that the standard deviation of intelligence is higher in men, because a lot of intelligence genes are X-linked, and if you get two different X chromosomes you’re blending their effects, making extreme outliers less likely. So men are overrepresented both as CEOs and as garbage collectors.
2. The adult means are unequal too. On nonverbal tests like raven’s progressive matrices, men outperform by half a standard deviation. You only see gender equality in intelligence when the tests are pre-puberty, or mostly verbal. Due to the combination of #1 and #2, the IQ 130+ group is more than two thirds male.
3. On average, men are less risk-averse. This particularly helps explain why there are more male APs.
4. On average, men and women prefer different occupations and make different work-life balance tradeoffs. The magnitude of this difference in choices is even larger in very gender-egalitarian countries like scandinavia, which belies the assumption that cultural programming is behind the difference. (See: Why Men Earn More by Warren Farrell)
I agree that the PC movement won’t even entertain a discussion of biological inequalities by race or gender, but there’s no way any gender differences in intelligence would lead to any inequalities in gender participation in the AP world, because being an AP requires mainly work ethic and interest, not special intelligence. (We’ll debate that in a future post.) But I think your #4 is the main thing. For various reasons (wisdom? travel vs. children?), women don’t choose to become APs. I include that personal choice as part of “cultural programming.” My point is that these choices, which are influenced by culture, are the main factor, not skill differences. Any normal woman can count cards, and no old-boy network could stop her from then making money with that skill. Thank you for a comment with content!
If you have an extra ticket, and you’re going, I’m in, even if the Crimson are not in!
I bet $500 that was somewhere in Missouri
You’d lose that bet. It was east of the Mississippi.
Why is pattern recognition important in VP? Does this refer to memorizing strategy and speed of play? Or is there something about patterns of spin results that could be important?
Societal norms is a weak argument, but OK, let’s go with it. In Russia, a nation that has been at the very top of chess or dominant, has a culture that is deeply in love with chess. So, yes, culture matters. On the other hand, the truly bright stars from around the world are competitive, and in today’s chess world, are just as good as the Soviets even though chess remains far more important to the Russian people.
More importantly, Russian women have always been encouraged to play chess because chess is such a part of the entire culture Yet both within Russia and outside of Russia, women are not just somewhat behind the men, they are completely outclassed. So while it is PC to claim cultural differences, that conclusion does not stand up to scrutiny. This notion of absolute equalness is simply wrong. Men and women think differently and have different strengths and weaknesses, though some crossover surely exists. Other posters have already given some links about that.
“More importantly, Russian women have always been encouraged to play chess because chess is such a part of the entire culture” So you’re telling me that women in Russia play chess in equal numbers as men? You’re using Russia as a paradigm for gender equality in terms of participation?