Before I begin, I would like to emphasize the hard work of those who formulated this system and the hard work of the student parliament who spent countless nights putting together the Olympics. Overall I know many people who enjoyed the event and this article in no way says that any of members of the parliament did a bad job nor do I mean that they do not care about the student body. This article is simply my opinion and my opinion alone on a point system used everywhere. This is a not critique but an article stating my experiences and how I think they can be used to better the system, that has actually itself created tremendous improvement in the inclusivity of the Olympics. I invite all readers to write a comment with your own thoughts and alternatives to the system in a respectful the manner that keeps in mind the hard work of these who brought it to life. One more thing to note there is a clear difference between gender and sex. This article always refer to female as in the sex and not the gender. I will explain that in a different article.
As I sat down beside my friend, I asked how her game in the Olympics went. She laments to me that everyone ignored her; none of her teammates passed her the ball and she simply stood there for the whole time. I sighed and comforted her, but I was not surprised. This is what happens when we focus too much on ideals and not on real incentives.
As a parliament member myself, I know that the motive of this system was noble. Let us give the teams two points for having female members to encourage them to be more inclusive. This incentive, of course, worked but not in the right way.
To be clear, as an idea, I agree that girls deserve more points for being on these teams. First of all, most of the players on each team are male and so there is an obvious physical advantage that these boys have. Therefore, if a girl wins one point against one of these boys, controlling for skill, then her win should be worth more points. This also means that in theory, even if they are at the same skill level, getting there took her much more arduous effort. Moreover, being in a male-dominated space as a woman is not always nice… Often women are under greater pressure to prove their competence. Their mistakes are amplified and so many highly adept women lose all confidence in their abilities. Other than that, men can socially exclude you as “the only one”. Knowing this, many women decide to just not enter these places. Hence parliament introduced the incentive to make the teams more inclusive.
But the issue here is not the motive, it is that the incentive specifically affects demand. Particularly, it does not affect how much the girls themselves want to join, but how much the houses want them to join. Let me explain.
At my past school in Jamaica, we also had an Olympics. Instead of one team though we had a girls’ and boys’ section. Therefore, the number of boys could not make up for the lack of girls. But the issue was that barely any girls wanted to do it. So, guess what they did? They badgered us until we entered the races. Dozens of us were forced to play. Being unfit, unskilled and uninterested in that hot sun, made those games torture. Not only that, but after the games we would be barraged with complaints about our poor performance.
Now, the houses were not awarded twice the points for enrolling girls but the more players you had for each section, the more points you could win. Unlike us, these house leaders wanted badly to win the Olympics and so they were incentivized to forget our actual desires and force us to participate.
To be fair, my friend at Bodwell wanted to play but the incentive is all the same. Because girls are worth more points, the house members who badly desire the team to win, are incentivized to gather as many girls as possible, whether those girls want to join, and whether or not they actually want to play with them.
Hence, they recruited my friend (and all the other girls in the match by the way) for extra points, but they never played with her because they never planned to in the first place.
So, while I understand the motive, maybe we should simply let girls join if they want. That way we could avoid the Legacy vs. Spirit controversy and at the same time, allow girls like me to live off the sports field.