Category: Sex Discrimination

Is Positive Discrimination the Solution to Gender Imbalances in British Parliament?

After last summer’s elections in Great Britain, women made up only 118 of 659 politicians elected to the House of Commons. Great Britain is now considering requiring political parties to nominate women. Is this legal or even a good idea?

In the 1990s, Great Britain experimented with a system that forced parties to nominate more women for the British version of primary elections. That system was ruled illegal when it was challenged by law professor Peter Jepson.

On Jan. 28, Parliament approved a bill that would reinstate this system, essentially allowing political parties to engage in “positive discrimination” that would be illegal for private entities to do.

It is not clear that this is either legal or desirable.

Jepson told Women’s ENews that he would again challenge the practice, this time under European Union law. “I’m not at odds with the Labour Party over the inadequate representation of women in Parliament,” Jepson told Women’s ENews, “But there is nothing positive about discrimination.”

Current Member of Parliament Anne Widdecomb said she opposed the planned change not only because it would violate the human rights of men, but would also create a two-tiered group of female MPs. Widdecombe said,

It would create two groups of women MPs, one who could look everyone from the prime minister down in the eye, and the other that got there because of special favors. I wouldn’t find that helpful. I’d find it humiliating.

Widdecombe believes that the gender balance will shift when women who grew up in the 1980s when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister reach their 40s and 50s. Even then, though, it is questionable if women will ever achieve the exact 50/50 split that some feminists seem to desire.

By comparison, Women’s ENews notes that only 14 percent of U.S. House of Representative members are women. That percentage will almost certainly be higher 20 years from now, but I suspect the same sort of factors that result in a rather persistent wage gap will also result in large gender imbalances in democratically elected legislatures.

Source:
British Parliament passes bill to elect more women. Paul Rodgers, Women’s ENews, February 15, 2002.

North Carolina Boy Wants Tryout for Girls Softball Team

Josh Godbold is in an odd position — the 8th grader desperately wants to obtain some experience so that he can have a shot at trying out for a high school baseball team next year. There’s only one problem. The middle school Godbold attends has a girl’s softball team but no boy’s baseball team — and the school and state law forbid him from trying out for the team.

Although there are a few hundred female athletes playing on boys teams in North Carolina, where Godbold live, Title IX has never been interpreted by courts to allow boys to participate in girls sports, even in cases such as Godbold’s where the school does not offer an equivalent boys version of a girls sport.

NewsObserver.Com notes that North Carolina relies on a 1994 interpretation of Title IX written by the then-director of the Southeast regional director of the Office for Civil Rights for the U.S. Department of Education. In language that is purely Orwellian, that interpretation maintains that,

For example, a male may not argue that his opportunities to play on a female volleyball or softball team have previously been limited because his school has never offered these sports for males. … Overall athletic opportunities for males are not limited because, at a particular school, females may be permitted to try out for all teams while males may not try out for female teams.

Godbold’s father, Ricky, offered a much more common sense interpretation of fairness saying, “He’s being discriminated against playing a sport because he’s a boy. If a girl has a chance to try out for any sport at a school, he should, too.”

Laws to alleviate sexual discrimination should, at a minimum, be symmetrical when it comes to sex — if it is wrong to sexually discriminate against women in a given situation, it should also be wrong to sexually discriminate against men in a similar situation. Godbold should be allowed to try out for the softball team.

Source:

Girls’ team only option, boy says. T. Keung Hui, NewsObserver.Com, February 15, 2002.

Male Coach Wins $1.6 Million Lawsuit Against Smith College

In 1996, Smith College — an all women’s college that pioneered women’s sports, including holding the first women’s intercollegiate basketball game in 1893 — fired its basketball and soccer coach, Jim Babyak. In December, Babyak was awarded $1.6 million by a jury that agreed with his claims he had been fired because of his sex and age.

Babyak had received good performance evaluations through 1995 and helped build Smith College’s athletics into an extremely successful program. In 1996, when he was fired, the basketball team set a school record for victories and the soccer team won its sixth conference championship.

But Babyak was fired because, he claimed, official at the small college wanted a female coach. The college claimed that he tried to forced his student athletes to give him favorable reviews. He did so, according to the school, buy offering team captain positions to students in exchange for good reviews, and threatening to cancel a trip to San Antonio if his athletes did not give him good reviews.

The college’s case was undermined, however, by the facts. Babyak did not choose team captains, for example, but rather captains were chosen by a vote of the team members. Although the college maintained that Babyak had attempted to manipulate and bribe student athletes at a meeting, they admitted in court that they never even tried to interview an assistant coach and an athletic trainer who were at the meeting in which these untoward events allegedly took place.

Babyak insists that he does not want to become some sort of symbol, nor does he want his case to detract from any of the gains that female athletes have made, but he adds a commonsense bit of advice,

I’m trying to look at the positive side. Women have been struggling for equality for a long time. But once you reach equality, you have to treat people in kind. You can’t treat people as you have been treated in the past.

Source:

Smith bias case brought justice, ex-coach says. Ralph Ranalli, Boston Globe, December 20, 2001.

Women In Combat

It always amazes me that the issue of whether or not women should serve in combat positions is still an active debate. Women who are up to the challenge and can handle the physical tasks entailed by combat should certainly be allowed to become part of combat units. Instead the debate typically ends up with those opposed and those in favor both offering sexist excuses for their position.

Great Britain is currently studying whether women should be allowed to serve in frontline combat units and some are charging that the armed forces are engaging in one of the forms of sexism — downgrading the physical requirements so that more women can pass. The British Army recently conducted field trials that were supposed to be gender neutral — men and women were supposed to do the same tasks — but the UK Daily Telegraph reports that the field tests simply dropped tasks that some women would have found difficult.

The exercises, for example, didn’t include heavy weapons or tanks and apparently found many women were incapable of carrying out physically strenuous tasks such as digging themselves into hard ground. The Telegraph reports that one of the findings was that women’s bodies had to work about 25 percent harder to achieve the same level of physical exertion as men.

If this is true, this is a pointless exercise in sexism. The military should set objective standards for minimum physical capabilities of combat soldiers, and then enforce those standards regardless of sex. If a woman can meet those standards, then she should be allowed to serve in a combat unit. If not, then she shouldn’t. End of story.

On the other hand, Admiral Sir Michael Boyce displayed the sexism commonly found on the other side of this debate by wondering whether or not women would be aggressive enough in hand to hand combat, saying that aggression was not “a natural female trait.” Give me a break. I’ve known plenty of women who had no problem with being aggressive.

Even if we assume that, on average, women as a group tend to be less aggressive than men as a group, this tells us little about whether or not any given man or woman is aggressive enough to be a combat soldier (and, in fact, even supposedly “naturally aggressive” men have to be subjected to intense training to overcome their long-conditioned responses against killing people. Far from being part of a natural trait, many men who have killed others in combat have reported any number of psychological problems from the shock and guilt at taking a human life).

Put men and women on a balanced field with objective standards and allow the qualified soldiers into combat units regardless of sex.

Source:

Combat tests ‘watered down for women.’ Michael Smith, The Daily Telegraph, March 26, 2001.

Will the Heather Mercer Case Help or Harm Women?

When Heather Mercer won a $2 million judgment from Duke University, it was hailed as an important victory for women’s athletics. Instead it will likely shut the door for women who want to follow in Mercer’s footsteps.

Mercer wanted to be a kicker for Duke’s football team. She was given a tryout by the coach, but since her range was about 35-yards in practice, while a Division I school needs someone who can kick 45-yard field goals during a game, her coach cut her.

Mercer sued and a jury agreed that she had been discriminated against based on her sex. So why isn’t this a clear victory for women?

Because of the provisions of Title IX as they apply to sports. Under Title IX, if a school doesn’t have a women’s team in a given sport it must allow women to try out for the men’s team, with one important exception — contact sports are exempt from this rule.

That’s right, the current law is that if you allow a woman to try out to be a kicker on the football team and then cut her, she could potentially sue the university for sex discrimination as Mercer did. If you just tell the woman point blank, sorry football is a contact sport and the university doesn’t allow women to try out for such teams, the student has no recourse whatsoever.

The federal appeals court that allowed Mercer’s case to go to trial explicitly upheld the contact sports exemption writing, “we hold that where a university has allowed a member of the opposite sex to try out for a single-sex team in a contact sport, the university is, contrary to the holding of the district court, subject to Title IX and therefore prohibited from discriminating against that individual on the basis of his or her sex.”

The obvious reaction from universities seeing what happened in the Duke case will be to institute policies, either written or informal, to refuse try outs to women who want to participate on a men’s contact sport team.

In the end, Mercer’s legal victory will end up diminishing rather than enhancing women’s sports opportunities.

Source:

Sidelined! Kimberly Schuld, The Women’s Quraterly, Winter 2001.

Mercer v. Duke University. United States Court Of Appeals For The Fourth Circuit, No. 99-1014, Decided: July 12, 1999.

Judith Kleinfeld On the MIT Gender Discrimination Study

Judith Kleinfeld recently wrote a column for The Christian Science Monitor summarizing her views and the recent Independent Women’s Forum study of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s sexual discrimination study.

MIT’s study claimed that the university had discriminated against female scientists, but on closer analysis the study was a political document devoid of any statistics or solid facts that would allow anyone to examine whether or not there had indeed been sex discrimination at MIT. As Kleinfeld writes,

Did MIT actually discriminate against its female faculty? Check out the study yourself at MIT’s web site (http://web.mit.edu/). You will notice an astonishing fact: MIT’s study is innocent of evidence of gender discrimination. Not an iota of data is offered to show that MIT treated its female faculty any differently from its male faculty.

Irrational self-flagellation — it’s not just for medieval monks anymore.

Source:

False solution on gender. Judith Kleinfeld, The Christian Science Monitor, February 27, 2001.