Archive for the ‘sport’ Category
a century’s creeping progress towards a bonobo humanity? – 1: this unsporting life
Having read, in Virginia Woolf’s A room of one’s own, about women and football, of all things, to the effect that women were no more allowed to play football (meaning soccer) than they were allowed to obtain a decent education, and given that Woolf’s lectures are almost a century old, it might be interesting to note the differences in women’s opportunities, and achievements, in sport but also in science, academia, business and politics, in the WEIRD world in particular (since that’s also my world), over the past 100 years or so.
Soccer first – my favourite sport. By the 1920s it was very much international (the first World Cup was in 1930, but soccer was an official Olympic sport from 1920), but of course the idea of women playing it at a serious level was barely conceivable. Fifty years on, in the 70s, it was a different story. At the beginning of that decade the first unofficial women’s world cup tournament was held in Italy, but it took another 25 years for FIFA to stage the first official tourney. The most recent one was held in 2023 here in Australia, and New Zealand, and was hailed as the biggest and best yet. Women’s soccer clearly has a bright future, though it’s very much worth noting that the total prize money pool for the 2018 FIFA World Cup was $400 million, compared to that for the women in 2019, a ‘mere’ $30 million. Of course these are eye-watering figures, but there’s obviously no excuse for awarding the men 13 times more than the women. I don’t have figures for the most recent tournaments (2022 and 2023), but I suspect the gap has narrowed a bit more, given how vocal a lot of female players and officials have been about the matter.
The one obvious sport, to me, in which women have had, historically, as much of a profile, or almost as much, as men, is tennis. Which raises a question which came to me even in my early youth – why are women’s professional tennis matches best of three sets when men’s are best of five? Does it have to do with women’s physical stamina being measurable at three compared to men’s five? Is the women’s marathon distance measured at three fifths that of men? Of course, the answer is the obvious one – women were traditionally considered to have less stamina, along with all their other limitations vis-à-vis men. But then there’s this:
From 1891 to 1901, women played best-of-five matches in the finals of the US National Championships, the predecessor for what is now known as the US Open. A lot of those finals went to five sets, but the United States National Lawn Tennis Association Council reduced the format to best-of-three sets, thinking five sets would be too strenuous a task for women.
The same site points out that this is a good excuse for awarding less prize money to women than to men, but currently the prize money for the Australian open is equal for men and women, as has been the case since 2001. Wimbledon and the French Open have had equal prize-money only since 2007, but the US Open was by a long way the first, in 1973.
So if equal pay is now the standard in elite tennis, what about equal work? It’s easy to see that in making big tournaments best of three for women, tournament organisers (and they’re apparently to blame for maintaining this format, not the players) have made a rod for women’s backs. Their excuse, apparently, is that having best of five matches for women too would be a scheduling nightmare. Just not enough hours in the day… So why not make the men’s matches best of three as well? Problem sorted? Ummm. Presumably they’ve found, or assumed, that the men’s games are a bigger drawcard, and better suited to longer, gladiatorial-style combat? It’s, mucho macho, a puzzlement.
Okay so what about golf, another internationally-watched sport with oodles of thrills and spills, and skills-per-gender equally celebrated. I won’t go into mixed play just as I haven’t mentioned mixed doubles in tennis, but of course it’s worth mentioning that in both sports the equipment used differs along gender lines, though there is individual variation too. Women in general have less upper-body strength and will tend to use lighter clubs (though with racquets there are likely complex aerodynamics involved which I won’t explore).
I’ve found a useful article, ‘How big is golf’s gender pay gap?’ on a golfing website (linked below) which unfortunately is undated (a constant source of irritation for me), but the mention of ‘the Rio Olympics this year’ dates it to 2020. Here’s a quote:
Golf has been a slow mover in the gender equality stakes, as only a year and a half ago, the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews issued their first women’s memberships. As the home of golf, St Andrews are to lead by example. But what example does it set for the next generation? And the vast gender pay gap is unavoidable, as our research shows professional male golfers can expect to earn 83% more in winnings this year than the next winner on the female tour. They play the same game, to the same level, the only difference is one chromosome, yet their trophies and achievements are worth less.
It’s a bit confusing – does it mean St Andrews should lead by example? It’s something of a personal issue for me as my mother’s family are from Fife and my brother was born in St Andrews, and I was born just across the Tay, in Dundee. Anyhoo, to claim that ‘the vast gender pay gap is unavoidable’ makes no sense. And the rest of this short article doesn’t provide any answers, or confidence in the future. It does point out that equal pay for women, in standard employment, has been achieved in many countries (though equal pay is only a part of the battle given that women alone are the child-bearers, and need to have employment scenarios that can accommodate this), so why such disparities in elite sport? The only answer I can think of is patriarchal tradition. As with may other ‘sports of kings’, golfing history is rooted in sexism (and racism). The US Masters is played every year at Augusta, Georgia, where women were first allowed to become members in 2012. The first section of a female tournament played on the Augusta course was in 2019! So much for the self-proclaimed land of freedom and opportunity. But then, Georgia is so far from New York that to call that country ‘the United States’ is a bit of a joke, at least to us outsiders.
So that’s enough of sport, or the ‘fun’ side of life, for now. I’ll look at other aspects of inequality – and matriarchal improvements – in future posts.
References
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/04/08/masters-tradition-is-rooted-racism-sexism/
A bonobo world, etc, 18: gender and aggression in life and sport
bonobos play-fighting
human apes play-fighting?
If anyone, like me, says or thinks that they’d like to be a bonobo, it’s to be presumed they don’t mean they’d like to live in trees, be covered in hair, have a shortened life-span, a brain reduced to a third of its current size, and to never concern themselves with why the sky is blue, how the Earth spins, and whether the universe is finite or infinite. What we’re really interested in is how they deal with particular matters that have bedevilled human societies in their infinite variety – namely sex, violence, effective community and the role of women, vis-a-vis these matters.
While making a broad generalisation about human society, in all its billions, might leave me open to ridicule, we seem to have followed the chimpanzee and gorilla path of male domination, infighting as regards pecking order, and group v group aggression, rising to warfare and nuclear carnage as human apes became more populous and technologically sophisticated. One interesting question is this: had we followed the bonobo path of female group bonding and controlling the larger males by means of those bonds, and of group raising of children causing reduced jealousies and infanticides, would we have reached the heights of civilisation, if that’s the word, and world domination that we have reached today?
I realise this is an impossible question to answer, and yet… Human apes, especially in post-religious societies, are recognising the power and abilities of their women more and more. Social evolution has speeded up this process, bringing about changes in single lifetimes. In 1793 Olympe de Gouges, playwright, abolitionist, political activist and author of the Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen, was guillotined by Robespierre’s disastrous Montagnard faction, as much for being a moderate as for being a woman. Clearly a progressivist, de Gouges opposed the execution of Louis XVI, and capital punishment generally, and favoured a constitutional monarchy, a system which still operates more or less effectively in a number of European nations (it seems better than the US system, though I’m no monarchist). Today, capital punishment generally thrives only in the most brutally governed nations, such as China, Iran and Saudi Arabia, though there are unfortunate outliers such as Japan, Singapore and arguably the USA (none of those last three countries have ever had female leaders – just saying). One hundred years after de Gouges died for promoting female equality and moderation, women were still being denied a university education in every country in the world. However in the last hundred years, and especially in the last fifty, we’ve seen dramatic changes, both in the educational and scientific fields, and in political leadership. The labours of to the Harvard computers, Williamina Fleming, Annie Jump Cannon, Antonia Maury and many others, working for a fraction of male pay, opened up the field of photometric astronomy and proved beyond doubt that women were a valuable and largely untapped intellectual resource. Marie Curie became the most famous female scientist of her day, and inspired women around the world to enter the scientific fray. Today, women such as Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, of CRISPR-Cas9 fame, and Michelle Simmons, Australia’s quantum computing wizard, are becoming more and more commonplace in their uncommon intellect and skills. And in the political arena, we’ve had female leaders in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, Norway, Finland, Iceland, Denmark, Belgium, France, Portugal, Austria, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Romania, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, Serbia, Croatia, Russia (okay, in the eighteenth century), China (nineteenth century), South Korea, Myanmar, Pakistan, India, Indonesia, the Phillippines, Sri Lanka (the world’s first female PM), Israel, Ethiopia and Liberia, and I may have missed some. This may seem an incredible transformation, but many of these women were brief or stop-gap leaders, and were all massively outnumbered by their male counterparts and generally had to deal with male advisers and business and military heavyweights.
So it’s a matter of rapid change but never rapid enough for our abysmally short life spans. But then, taking a leaf from the bonobo tree, we should look at the power of female co-operation, not just individual achievement. Think of the suffragist movement of the early 1900s (the term suffragette was coined by a Daily Mail male to belittle the movement’s filletes), which, like the Coalition of Women for Peace (in Israel/Palestine) a century later, was a grassroots movement. They couldn’t be otherwise, as women were then, and to a large extent still are, shut out of the political process. They’re forced into other channels to effect change, which helps explain why approximately 70% of NGO positions are held by women, though the top positions are still dominated by men.
When I think of teams, and women, and success, two more or less completely unrelated fields come to mind – science and sport. In both fields cooperation and collaboration are essential to success, and more or less friendly competition against others in the field is essential to improve quality. Womens’ team sport is as competitive as that of men but without quite the same bullish, or chimp, aggressiveness, it seems to me, and the research backs this up. Sport, clearly, is a constructed form of play, in which the stakes are sometimes very high in terms of trophies, reputations and bragging rights, but in which the aggression is generally brought to an end by the final whistle. However, those high stakes sometimes result in foul play and overly aggressive attempts to win at all costs – and the same thing can happen in science. Sporting aggression, though, is easier to assess because it’s more physical, and more publicly displayed (and more likely to be caught on camera). To take my favourite sport, soccer, the whole object for each team is to fight to get and maintain possession of the ball for the purpose of scoring goals. This battle mostly involves finesse and teamwork, but when the ball is in open play it often involves a lot of positional jostling and other forms of physicality. Personally, I’ve witnessed many an altercation in the male game, when one player gets pissed off with another’s shirt-tugging and bumping, and confronts him chest-to-chest, nature documentary-style. The female players, when faced with this and other foul play, invariably turn to the referee with a word or a gesture. Why might this be?
In 1914, the American psychologist E L Thorndike wrote:
The most striking differences in instinctive equipment consists in the strength of the fighting instinct in the male and of the nursing instinct in the female…. The out-and-out physical fighting for the sake of combat is pre-eminently a male instinct, and the resentment at mastery, the zeal to surpass, and the general joy at activity in mental as well as physical matters seem to be closely correlated with it.
three things: IQ and longevity, the Taliban and Americans, the real World Cup
Nerissa: …. superfluity comes sooner by white hairs, but competency lives longer
The Merchant of Venice, Act 1 , scene 2
Thing one
I don’t know what my IQ is, having never knowingly sat a test, but I assume it’s a number just short of infinity. So it was interesting to read, in Carl Zimmer’s book on genetics, She has her mother’s laugh, that IQ is highly correlated to longevity. Not that there’s a genetic link, at least not directly, but it stands to reason. The higher your IQ, the quicker it takes for you to ‘get’ things. This was more or less confirmed by a simple, ingenious brain processing test. Subjects were shown simple shapes flashing very briefly on a computer screen – two vertical lines spaced apart with a horizontal line sitting on top. The participants had to guess which of the two vertical lines was the longest each time. Researchers had worked out that if the images were flashed too briefly, the participants just resorted to guesswork. It required approximately 0.1 seconds for people, on average, to perceive the shape correctly. The key, though, lay in the variation of that perception. It ranged from 0.02 seconds to 0.136 seconds, and researchers found a pretty reliable correlation between accurate perception time and intelligence (presumably measured by IQ – Zimmer doesn’t say). Unfortunately it’s not quite reliable enough, apparently, for us to do away with those pesky, long-winded IQ tests and replace them snappy shape tests, but as mentioned, it does seem to confirm the intuition that intelligence has to do with sharpness and quick-wittedness. Which brings me back to longevity. Some work done in Scotland, which has turned out to be accidentally longitudinal, provides interesting evidence. In 1932 the Scottish government conducted a massive testing program of nearly 90,000 eleven-year-old students – just about the whole of the country’s kids of that age. They were all given a 71-question exam involving decoding, analogising and arithmetic among other things. Over time this ‘experiment’, or what you will, was forgotten, but the records were unearthed in 1997, and then researchers tried to get in touch, some 65 years later, with the ‘kids’ who’d been tested. They managed to gather together 101 elderly citizens in an Aberdeen hall to resit the gruelling test. They found that the score on the original test was a pretty good indicator – 73% – of the score second time around. But there was another interesting finding – the percentage of the test-takers who had scored well and were still alive in 1997 was considerably higher than those who’d scored poorly. Some 70% of the women in the top quarter of scores were still alive, compared to 45% in the bottom quarter:
Children who scored higher, in other words, tended to live longer. Each extra 15 IQ points, researchers have since found, translates into a 24% drop in the risk of death.
Carl Zimmer, She has her mother’s laugh, p296
Why is this so? Smarter people generally know what to do, and are quicker to learn what to do, to live longer, to make more, financially and otherwise, of the circumstances they find themselves in, to be safer, healthier and the like. Stands to reason.
Thing two
A huge fuss is being made of allegations, probably true, of Putin offering and paying bounties to the Taliban to kill American soldiers in Afghanistan. My first reaction to this news was – surely the fervently anti-American and anti-western Taliban were already hell-bent on killing infidel foreigners, and many of the purest ideologues among them would be insulted by the offer of bribes to do so? Then again, many of them would’ve been laughing up their ample sleeves at the thought of being paid by the Russkies, whom they likely consider only slightly less odious and infidelious than the Yanks, to do what they were already heaven-bent on doing. For this reason, it would surely be impossible to prove that any deaths of Americans, or their coalition partners – including Australians – at the hands of the Taliban, could be sheeted home to Putin and his fellow thugs. Even if money traced to Russia appeared in Taliban bank accounts after some atrocity or other, this doesn’t exclude the possibility that the atrocity would’ve occurred in any case. Win-win for the Taliban.
Thing 3
The announcement that the real World Cup will take place in Australia and New Zealand in 2023 makes life a little more bearable, though it’s three years away and I’m not getting any younger. This competition combines two of the most life-affirming enities in life, for me at least – women and soccer. Hopefully we’ll have learned many lessons from Covid-19 by then haha, and at least some of today’s thuggish political leaders will have been placed where they can do no more harm, and we can get on with the more exciting stuff of life, like having fun.