Commence Complaining

[Hooking]

I would wager those vaguely identified Ivy League sports championships are skewed more by gender than by sport. Equality is a good thing and so is excellence, in sports as well as academics.

[George64]

I would wager those vaguely identified Ivy League sports championships are skewed more by gender than by sport. Equality is a good thing and so is excellence, in sports as well as academics.

Earlier this month, I posted tables showing Cornell Ivy Championships by sport for men and women.

They show that from 2000-01, Cornell men won or shared 60 Ivy Championships, or 22 percent of the 272 available.  Five sports out of 17, wrestling (15), lax (12), outdoor (10) and indoor (7) track and field (who knew?), and hockey (6) accounted for 83 percent of these championships.

Over the same period, Cornell women won or shared 31 Ivy Championships of the 256 available (12 percent).  Three sports out of 16, outdoor (10) and indoor (7) track and field, and hockey (4) accounted for nearly 68 percent of these.

So, our men do better than our women, and, as we all know, our athletic strengths are concentrated in a few sports.

Today, as it's too cold to do anything more constructive, I calculated Gini coefficients for Cornell Ivy Championships by gender and sport.  The Gini coefficient is a measure of concentration with 0 indicating that income, or whatever, is equitably distributed across a population, and tends to 1 as the variable of interest becomes less equitably distributed.  The Gini coefficient for gender came out to .141.  By way of comparison, in the US in 2013, the top 1 percent earned 20.1 percent of all income, for a coefficient of .191.

Men's championships were much more concentrated (G = .669) than the women's (G = .238).  If our wrestling team had won 16 championships instead of just 15 and no other men's team won any, the coefficient would have been . 941.

There's probably a better way to do this kind of analysis, nonetheless, it suggests that  sport trumps beats out gender when it comes to the inequitable distribution of championships.