Women: Sports, Science, Business, and Equality of Pay

I was talking to a friend of mine yesterday about why women are segregated in sports. For some sports it’s obvious; men are bigger, stronger, faster, taller. Women don’t play football with men because they would be destroyed. Women don’t run marathons with men because they simply can’t keep up. For lots of sports women cannot be competitive against men.

However, what about billiards, darts, poker, and any of the numerous other non-physical sports? First, I don’t think these things should be called “sports”, ha ha, but I digress. Why is there a Women’s World Championship 9-Ball Tournament alongside the regular World Championship 9-Ball Tournament that’s for men only? What could possibly justify splitting men and women in this case? It doesn’t matter how strong you are or anything like that.

The answer I usually hear is that, “Well, men are better at coordination.” An argument can be made for this; throughout the ages when men were out hunting the women were at home caring for the children. Because of this men have evolved to be more coordinated. I also have to admit that having watched both the women’s and men’s tournaments there is no question that men are better at billiards than women. Regardless of why it may be, it does appear that men are better at pretty much every sport than women.

My personal theory is simply that women like sports less than men because they are less competitive. If you have 1 million men playing billiards and only 100,000 women it’s perfectly reasonable to assume that the men will dominate. The best men will be better than the best women and there will be 10 times more of them purely by statistics.

There will always be flukes. I’m sure there are some women out there who are just gigantic and who could probably play in the NFL, but these flukes don’t change anything. However, I’m unclear as to why any of these flukes should be barred from playing with the men.

Let’s now get down to the tough question. If there is such an obvious physical difference between men and women, why is it so hard to accept that there might also be a mental difference? What I mean is, if I say, “Men are better at basketball,” it’s no big deal, but if I say, “Men are better at math,” suddenly it’s a hugely political issue and I’ve offended everybody (especially women). Why is it society screwing over women when you are talking about engineering, but just natural physical differences when you are talking about sports? How do you know that one is nature and the other is nurture?

Women’s rights activist groups always complain that there are fewer women CEOs, fewer women scientists, fewer women programmers, fewer women engineers, fewer women presidents, etc. They say that this is because of gender discrimination and that we as a culture are biased against women. Maybe so, or maybe men are simply better at these things.

I’m not saying “men are better,” I’m simply asking why the most obvious and simple explanation is the one explanation we aren’t allowed to talk about, or even consider. I hate these goddamn “taboo” issues that are simply above discussion. It reminds me of religion. We aren’t allowed to voice any contrary opinion.

I was a math major at MIT and of course almost everyone was male (almost everyone was also Asian; maybe MIT is discriminating against white people). However, I never once saw any evidence of discrimination, either against women or white people. It just seemed to be the way it was. Honestly, 99% of women I meet simply don’t LIKE math, and if they don’t like math what chance is there that they will go into a mathematical profession? I also taught middle school and high school in New York City and I didn’t see any evidence of discrimination there, either. If anything, women were more encouraged to go into mathematics precisely because of this perceived inequality. However, they just don’t.

Back in college I had many discussions that went something like this:

Girl: “We need more women in math!”
Me: “Okay, so why don’t you major in math?”
Girl: “No way! I hate math!”

I don’t think they saw the irony in what they were saying. You can’t just will things to happen. I would love it if there were more women mathematicians out there, but I can’t just conjure them out of thin air.

So, I’m going to come out and ask the question: Is it possible that there are more male CEOs simply because men are better leaders? Is it possible that there are more male programmers simply because men are better at programming? And so on. Conversely, is it possible that there are more female teachers simply because women make better teachers? To use a kind of odd example, when Windows crashes a lot more than Mac OS X you don’t think, “Windows is being discriminated against,” you instead think, “Windows sucks and Mac OS X is better.”

I already briefly addressed the question of “why” but I want to reiterate it again. I think the answer is very simple: each gender likes different things and, in turn, ends up being better at the things they like. It’s not discrimination, it’s just reality.

Let’s also not forget that there ARE female CEOs, and female basketball players, and female programmers. This in and of itself is evidence against discrimination: women who want to and work hard enough are clearly capable of all of these things. Nobody is standing in their way or stopping them from doing it.

At the risk of being offensive, I want to point out an observation of mine that may also help explain the lack of women in certain fields: many attractive women are not nearly as qualified as they think they are. A really attractive woman goes through life with everybody telling her that she’s smart, funny, talented, gifted, skilled, nice, kind, giving, loving, caring, wonderful, incredible, amazing, beautiful, perfect, ingenious, creative, insightful, and absolutely right about everything. Nobody actually believes this, of course, except the woman herself (because everybody tells her so). Because of this, I imagine many interviews go something along the lines of, “Well, dang, I wouldn’t hire her but I would totally do her.” Naturally, the woman doesn’t understand why she didn’t get the job because, after all, she’s perfect, and she ends up assuming it’s because of discrimination. I always find it amusing when someone corrects something a beautiful woman says because she invariably gets completely offended and upset.

Finally, I want to briefly expand this argument into other territories. Black people and white people have obvious physical differences, for example, so does it not also makes sense that they would have mental differences? What about Asians? Or Europeans? It seems incredibly unlikely to me that everybody in the world has an exactly equal brain. The observation that a certain group of people does better in a certain field than another group of people is not at all surprising. In fact, it would be far more surprising if everybody in the world was actually equal. Can you imagine if when you looked at the statistics exactly half of all basketball players were black, exactly half of all the CEOs were women, exactly half of all mathematicians were Asian, that every race of person made on average exactly the same amount of money? Now THAT would be amazing.

Before I go, I briefly want to mention that a certain Nobel Laureate (Dr. James Watson, the man who co-discovered DNA with Crick and Wilkins) got into huge trouble for suggesting that perhaps blacks weren’t as smart as whites.

All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours — whereas all the testing [IQ and Standardized testing] says not really…There is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so. — Dr. James Watson

He was simply expressing the opinion that the most obvious and simplest explanation was the correct one (Occam’s Razor). Again, I’m not saying it’s correct, I’m not saying that blacks aren’t as smart as whites, I’m just saying we shouldn’t ignore the evidence just because it’s politically incorrect or offensive. The problem is that once you decide to ignore a possible explanation, it doesn’t matter how many tests or studies you do, you will never find the truth. This is censorship by societal pressure and there is nothing more dangerous to science.

Tags: bias, billiards, discrimination, DNA, Dr. James Watson, equality, gender, genetics, pay, political correctness, racism, salary, Science, sports, women