Feminism Versus Scrabble
Heather Mac Donald on the obvious-but-seemingly-unthinkable:
Since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men. Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist worldview. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests. If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields like engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism—whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit bias in the hiring process.
But there are no cultural expectations that discourage females from memorising dictionaries—a typical strategy of competitive Scrabble players, often in a foreign language that the player doesn’t speak. Girls are as free as boys to lap up vocabulary. Nor are there misogynist gatekeepers to keep females out of Scrabble play; the game, usually first learned at home, is open to all. According to Hasbro, 83% of recreational Scrabble players 25 to 54 are female.
Championship Scrabble, however, rewards typically male obsessions: strategy, math, a passion for competition, and a drive to memorise facts. [World Scrabble Champion, Nigel] Richards’s mother told the Guardian in 2015 that he “related everything to numbers” when he was growing up. Feminists will need to employ circular logic to conjure forth a discriminatory barrier in Scrabble: Males’ excellence at a certain activity itself keeps females out. But that leaves unanswered the question of how males came to excel at Scrabble—or any other abstract, competitive activity—in the first place.
Also this:
Like competitive Scrabble, Wikipedia has no gatekeepers. Anyone can compose or edit an entry; participation is largely anonymous. There are no centuries-old Wiki traditions shoring up male Wiki dominance. Yet only 13% of Wikipedia editors are female, according to the Wikimedia Foundation, even though no one would know the sex of a female editor to be able to discriminate against her. Entries for typically “female” subjects are skimpy compared with typically “male” ones. The implication is unavoidable: Females aren’t as obsessively driven as males to nail down facts, correct errors, and dominate a field.
We’ve been here before, of course. And doubtless we’ll be here again, due to Yale sociology professors and New York Times columnists being ideologically confounded by the fact that men and women tend to differ in their levels of enthusiasm for pop-cultural trivia.
And the World Barbie Championship would be decided by whoever makes Barbie into the best French spy for GIJoe’s attack squad against the Nazis, as tradition has always dictated.
like “championship Scrabble,” are all about memorizing wordlists?
That’s only half of Scrabble. The other half is being able to look at the whole board and rapidly solve a fairly thorny C&O problem – out of these seven letters, which subset of them intersected with the current played tiles will give me the highest score?
That kind of intuitive number juggling is where the ladies don’t even show up to compete.
I play Scrabble with the software developers here at work.
I have my degrees in the humanities and I can spell better than they; I also know more fancy words.
And they totally cream me. They’re hella good at figuring how to maximize the score for what they have, while I sit there trying to figure out what the coolest word is.
Actually, I usually come in third of four, because there’s always that one guy who draws lousy tiles nearly every turn.
while I sit there trying to figure out what the coolest word is.
You want to be playing Balderdash.
The inevitable chess one has surfaced.
oh yeah, link: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/nov/20/world-chess-championship-women-magnus-carlsen#comment-122783670
I’m breaking a five-year lurk (following David’s blog with huge delight) to respond to this, as for once I have something relevant to contribute.
My husband and I run a UK-wide general knowledge quiz for schools called, with huge originality, ‘Schools Challenge’ (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schools%27_Challenge, though whoever set up the page – not us – put an inauthentic apostrophe in the title). We’ve been organising it for 33 years now, and I’ve seen countless teams play, both at regional and national level. The game was modelled on University Challenge: a round of questions begins with a starter, where individuals press a buzzer to answer, and is followed by three bonus questions, where the team confer before giving the answer. This means that speed and aggression on the buzzer is vital, as is the willingness to take risks: there are no negative scores (unlike University Challenge), so it’s frequently worth interrupting a question and guessing.
Without exception, we’ve found that, although at the regional level, there are plenty of girls playing on the teams (the schools themselves can be single-sex or mixed), by the time the National Finals are held, the eight teams that make it through are overwhelmingly male.
In the Senior competition, where most team members are between 14 and 18, there are many years when we see no girls at all among the 32 participants; and where there are girls on the team, those teams almost never win. In those 33 years, there have only been a couple of exceptions to that trend, both teams from mixed schools with one exceptionally good girl on the team. In the Junior competition, where the upper age limit is 13, girls do better: a girls’ team won the National Finals back in 1987, and roughly a quarter of the competitors at the Finals are female, sometimes considerably more.
I’m no scientist, but my hypothesis is that older boys will generally have the advantage in this sort of game because of all that testosterone sloshing around. It’s also because boys on the whole don’t appear to care if they’re wrong. I’ve taught for over 40 years, and it’s noticeable that when one asks a question in class, a boy will characteristically answer with a statement and a girl with a question (‘Is it…?’).
It’s true, then, in my experience, that boys are on average more competitive than girls, and I don’t think this is simply cultural, though obviously culture may play a part. As for the people wittering on about sexism and prejudice, they’re generally immune to any actual research.
five-year lurk
[ Slides fancy cocktail over to Sue. ]
It’s best not to ask what’s in them.
Girls & boys do about equally well in spelling bees because boys take longer to develop those verbal skills required for spelling bees than girls do – girls actually have a advantage due to puberty. However, if the bees required participants to be older than 14-15 boys would probably dominate since boys verbal skills finally stop developing at around 16-17 or even later.
Also, scrabble is just different structurally to a spelling bee of course…
RE Baceseras:
Girls & boys do about equally well in spelling bees because boys take longer to develop the verbal skills required for spelling bees than girls do – girls actually have a advantage due to puberty. However, if the bees required participants to be older than 14-15 boys would probably dominate since boys verbal skills finally stop developing at around 16-17 or even later.
Also, scrabble is just different structurally to a spelling bee of course…
“…though whoever set up the page – not us – put an inauthentic apostrophe in the title).
Inauthentic? Hmm – it depends on whether you are using ‘challenge’ as a noun or a verb. If a noun, then schools takes a possessive apostrophe (the challenge of/for schools). If a verb, schools doesn’t take an apostrophe, but challenge needs an object, as ‘to challenge’ is transitive – you are left pondering ‘Schools challenge whom/what?”
Interestingly, guys may do better at Competitive Scrabble, but when it comes to nitpicking subediting pedancy like this comment, the sexes are pretty equal, in my longish experience.
Interesting comment above by Sue Sims.
Behavioral differences between males and females exist across the mammal world and certainly in primates, This is not cultural (rather, cultures mirrors biology), it reflects the differences in effective evolutionary (including reproductive) strategies.
Male ‘aggression’ has a bad rap, but really it’s based on the need to top the other guys (sometimes fighting, but more often resource accrual) because these are the ones that get to contribute to the next generation. The one with the most often has the most offspring. Female reproduction is limited by lifespan and health, excessive confrontation and combat is counter productive. Cooperation is far more useful for females. (Males cooperate too, but generally male cooperation is to dominate another group of males, think combat, think business. Throughout history most exploration was done by males.. Same drive at work). The difference between stating an answer even if wrong VS, posing a question fits right into this model.
Why are there no World Barbie Championships?
If there were, they would be dominated by gay men.
You see the same thing with Esports as well (competitive video gaming, if you don’t know the term). This is an arena where physical ability is almost totally irrelevant, the only relevant thing being twitch reflexes in some games. In many games like Hearthstone, physical ability is TOTALLY irrelevant because reflexes don’t help. A quadriplegic could be competitive. And this is an environment where it is generally NOT POSSIBLE to know the gender of a player unless they explicitly tell you.
Yet every single professional video gaming scene is utterly DOMINATED by men. 99%+, and most of the ‘women’ are transgenders (i.e still men).
Funny how that works.
Look, it doesn’t matter how plainly obvious, how logically sane, how biologically grounded, etc. etc. etc. the differences twixt men and women are. The only thing that matters, the only thing that ultimately carries the day, is that those who insist that there is absolutely no difference will scream, holler, demand, march, and generally make nusainces of themselves until they get their way. That is until the Gods of the Copybook Headings wake up.
Jay is obviously right, this is not just a human thing. Males in social species compete for dominance across the animal kingdom, to win reproductive access for their sperm to the scarcer resource – eggs. Humans are a little weird because of the extraordinary range of fields they have invented to compete in.
But it’s not like human females don’t get to play in this game. They get to play “Judge.” Not so much judge of who has won, but judge of whether the particular game is a worthwhile indication of mate-worthiness.
One of my favorite statistics from a Jordan Peterson lecture is this one. In studies where they show women pictures of men, and men pictures of women, and ask them to rate whether the person is “above average” or “below average” in sexual attractiveness, men rate 50% of women as “below average.” Good math, guys.
And women rate 85% of men as “below average.” The reason for men to compete is left naked to view. Six out of seven are you are going to be rated “NOT GOOD ENOUGH !”
It’s amazing we men can concentrate so hard on strategy, math, memorization, etc, since we spend most of our time thinking about boobs.
I will press a buzzer before I know the answer, based on whether I think I will be able to answer it by the time I have to. I get lots wrong, of course, but I get more right so I tend to accumulate points. I actually won a decent amount of money on a TV program with this strategy back in my late twenties. Yet in a paper test on the same material, I’m not particularly good.
When I try to explain to women that my strategy is the best one for winning, based on the knowledge I have, they simply cannot get their heads around pressing the buzzer with a realistic likelihood that you will get it hopelessly wrong.
Being good at something is a survival strategy as well as a sexual strategy for men. Appealing for sympathy, a survival and sexual strategy that works for women does not work for men. Hence, men succeed or fail, and women complain that it’s not fair that they don’t get the same benefits and status as the men who succeed.
It’s why men’s rights activism will never the traction feminism has. People just don’t feel sorry for men, even if they’re dying in their millions in the trenches. Meanwhile, the likes of Anita Sarkeesian get showered with pity money because people say mean things to them on the internet, and get to address the UN about the “cyber-violence” of being told they suck.
“Six out of seven are you are going to be rated “NOT GOOD ENOUGH !””
They showed pictures. If you want to make it more accurate, show women a list of professions. Then you’ll get 9 out of 10 not being good enough.
We don’t care about looks as much as you blokes do. We want STATUS.
@Lee Moore, @dicentra
“And women rate 85% of men as “below average.”
There’s a study to be done here (if not already done). There’s an Onion article, something like ‘Woman removes yet another line from her list of must-haves in men’, where the lady in question started out with a long list of things a partner must have, only to whittle it down year by year, gradually moving towards the more reasonable. Someone else – Nora Ephron maybe? – said that in the end you pretty much settle for sanity and a job. (Or ‘Attractive, Solvent, Single: pick any two’).
Anyway, I would like to see the breakdown of that 85% figure by age. If the above is true I would expect that figure to drop slowly over time as the reality cluebat keeps hitting. I don’t think it would get to 50% (just look at all the 40something cat lady articles pretending they don’t care about being single or blaming ‘intimidated’ men etc).
dicentra : They showed pictures. If you want to make it more accurate, show women a list of professions. Then you’ll get 9 out of 10 not being good enough.We don’t care about looks as much as you blokes do. We want STATUS.
I don’t think JP gave effusive details of how they did this particular trial. But you can do status with pics. (Or profession descriptions as you say.)
They do the same bunch of guys, dressed differently as markers of status. eg you have guys A to Z, and take 5 pictures of each – wearing suit to wearing hobo. Then create sample packs of say 10 pics (with no guy appearing twice in any sample, obviously.)
Then they give a sample to a gal to rate. Repeat lotsa times with different samples and different gals. Then do the math. And, unsurprisingly, you’re right. Status wins hands down.
Though gals may not yet have evolved the skills to distinguish, on sight, between a hobo and a tech billionaire. You may need to show the cardboard shelter or private island in the background 🙂
prm : in the end you pretty much settle for sanity and a job
There’s a nice exchange in an episode of Two and a Half Men, in which Alan (the pathetic, desperate, brother) tries online dating and gets a date with a woman about six inches taller than him. Along the way he admits that all the stuff he put in his profile was a lie, and he was just projecting himself as his more successful brother, Charlie. So he is surprised when the woman suggets another date – he thinks his uselessness and lying would have turned her off. She reassures him that she’s serious about a second date (roughly) as follows :
“Have you done much online dating ? You’ve got a job and a penis. You’re a winner.”
Being a psychologist, I have been testing kids for more than 10 years now (https://www.testkidsiq.com). Generally speaking, girls have higher verbal intelligence than boys. So I really don’t know why girls don’t be at the top of scrabble tournaments… Probably, they don’t consider competition to be important. Relation is more important to them.