From the New York Times news section:
Equity in Sports Has Focused on Gender, Not Race. So Gaps Persist.
Title IX, over 50 years, has heavily benefited white women over women of color. That’s partly because race has never been part of the law.
By Alanis Thames
June 30, 2022…While Black women are certainly beneficiaries of Title IX, which prohibited sex-based discrimination in educational settings, the door it opened for sports participation has disproportionately helped white women. Black female athletes remain generally underrepresented in most programs, particularly in sports like tennis, swimming and soccer.
My guess is that the real story is how underrepresented Hispanic (especially Mexican-American) women are in college sports and how overrepresented Asians girls are, especially in expensive sports like golf. But it’s 2022 so the NYT can only focus on black vs. white.
Excuse me, Black vs. white.
Another thing to keep in mind about female sports is how much of a test they are of Happy Families. Nabokov’s Ada begins, contra Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina:
“All happy families are more or less dissimilar, all unhappy ones are more or less alike.”
Happy families where dad is around tend to have niche interests that are helpful in getting them college athletic scholarships in less competitive sports, while unhappy families tend not to have dad around to keep the daughters off the pole by keeping them interested in sports.
In male sports, guys can claw their way to the top without a strong father figure around, although it definitely helps. E.g., LeBron James’s dad has been in jail most of the time since 8 months and 29 days after his conception. But most top women athletes not only had a father in their lives to pay for lessons and country club dues, they tended to have a very good relationship with their dads, which is why they want to play golf or softball or whatever boy-oriented sport it is their dads like. (I suspect the main exceptions to this rule are in sports that make sense to little girls without daddy’s guidance, like gymnastics and figure skating.)
The upscale Winter Olympics continue to attract good ratings among the heavily targeted maternal demographic who do a disproportionate amount of shopping because it’s a fortnight-long celebration of Happy Families.
