Sunday, December 03, 2006

Court: Wisconsin boy can't join girls' gym team

Sexism! Illegal discrimination!

A boy who wanted to compete on his high school's girls' gymnastics team cannot sue for gender discrimination, a state appeals court ruled Thursday. The District 4 Court of Appeals upheld a judge's dismissal of Keith Michael Bukowski's lawsuit against the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association, which has a rule prohibiting boys from competing in girls' sports.

Bukowski filed the lawsuit as a junior at Stevens Point Area High School in 2004. He argued the WIAA rule preventing him from trying out for and competing on the girl's gymnastics team discriminated against him because his school did not have a boys' team. Bukowski argued that the rule violated the equal protection clause of the U.S. Constitution as well as a federal law known as Title IX, which prohibits sex discrimination in schools that receive federal funds. In a 3-0 ruling, the court said Bukowski failed to show that WIAA, a nonprofit organization of public and private high schools that sets rules for sports competition, could be sued under either argument.

Bukowski didn't prove WIAA was an arm of the state that could be sued for the constitutional violation or that it received federal funding as required in a Title IX claim, the court said. The ruling backed a Portage County judge who came to a similar conclusion. Courts have previously ruled that letting boys compete on girls' teams jeopardizes opportunities for girls.

Bukowski's attorney, Jared Redfield, said he would likely appeal to the state Supreme Court. He said the ruling means "the WIAA can discriminate at will, which doesn't make any sense at all." But Bukowski, who had competed in gymnastics at a local YMCA, argued the case was similar to recent examples of girls who were allowed to compete on boys' teams in football and wrestling.

Redfield said female sports no longer deserved what he called a privileged status because participation among women has increased sharply in recent decades. "Why not treat the genders equally?" he asked. "If women can go on our football team and they can wrestle in tournaments, why in the world if there's no access for a male to participate in gymnastics should they not be on the girls' team?"

But WIAA executive director Doug Chickering said females remain underrepresented in sports. He said allowing Bukowski to compete would have put pressure on WIAA to grant frequent requests from boys who want to play on girls' volleyball teams. "Our fundamental reason for denying participation was that we didn't want to see girls displaced from girls' teams by boys," he said.

Bukowski graduated earlier this year so the legal fight by him and his mother would affect only other students in the future. Hundreds of students at his school signed a petition backing his efforts to compete in 2004 but courts rejected his attempts for a faster ruling that would have allowed him to compete. Bukowski, a student at University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point, may have lost an opportunity for a college scholarship as a result, Redfield said.

Principal Mike Devine said the school does not have a boys' team because of lack of interest and he was following the WIAA rule in refusing to allow Bukowski on the girls' team. He said the school recently hired Bukowski as an assistant coach for the girls' gymnastics team. "We're glad to have Keith working with our kids right now. He does have some talent in gymnastics," he said. "Even though he couldn't compete with us, he's teaching our kids. That's a somewhat positive outcome for this."

Source



Dr Paul Irwing: 'There are twice as many men as women with an IQ of 120-plus'

Dr Paul Irwing is a senior lecturer in organisational psychology at Manchester University. He claims that men are more intelligent than women

All the research I've done points to a gender difference in general cognitive ability. There is a mean difference of about five IQ points. The further you go up the distribution the more and more skewed it becomes. There are twice as many men with an IQ of 120-plus as there are women, there are 30 times the number of men with an IQ of 170-plus as there are women.

I don't know why this is, all I can say is that we have a huge amount of data. In my 2005 paper in the British Journal of Psychology we looked at 22 surveys sampling 20,000 university students. In 21 out of the 22 studies males always had an advantage. That's a lot. We ignored the survey from Mexico because the results were consistent with a university that was extremely selective with respect to females [i.e. You have to be a very bright female to get into a Mexican university in the first place]. Why did Steve Blinkhorn call our research "flawed and suspect"?

The results of both studies were a shock to me. I find prejudice abhorrent. I've always taught sex differences from a left-wing point of view, that women are every bit as good as men. My findings don't fit my view of the world at all. Girls often do better than boys at school. There has to be some female compensating factor, most importantly the ability to process speech sounds, which means women read faster and more accurately and have an advantage in basic writing tasks. And women work harder than men and are more conscientious so they do things technic-ally correctly. Men are often quite original but deficient in what is technically demanded.

Historically women have been discriminated against. They've made tremendous progress and some people feel findings like this are a kick in the teeth. I have sympathy for that, but only people who know virtually nothing about IQ tests claim they have a cultural bias. All IQ tests are thoroughly tested and adjusted for bias, so if anything IQ tests are biased in favour of women not men.

People should have equal opportunities but if you want a society where everyone feels satisfied you're not going to find men and women doing the same things in the same proportions. It would help if we recognised that.

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