Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Anti-francophone discrimination?
With the number of hockey stars that Quebec has produced, from Maurice Richard and Guy Lafleur to Mario Lemieux and Vincent Lecavalier, one wouldn't think racism was holding back players from the province.Those discrepancies indeed suggest that the francophone players face a higher hurdle in the NHL draft. Sirois' book would make for interesting reading, assuming you can read French. Here is a somewhat skeptical review of the book from Hockey Book Reviews.com.
But a book published Monday by former National Hockey League player Bob Sirois, examining four decades of professional drafts, comes to the explosive conclusion that francophone Quebecers are systematically thwarted by an "anti-francophone virus" plaguing the NHL.
Francophone Quebecers are wrongly disparaged as too small, too lax on defence and not suited to the robust "Canadian" style of play, Mr. Sirois writes in the book, published in French and titled Le Québec mis en échec (Quebec Bodychecked). "Myths, prejudices, stereotypes and favoritism make up an integral part of every draft session in the National Hockey League."
...Mr. Sirois found that, proportionate to their share of the population, francophone Quebecers were less likely to get drafted than anglophone Quebecers and francophones were generally selected lower in the draft. He notes that about 10% of all NHL players were completely passed over in the draft but managed to break into the league; the rate among players from Quebec, 19%, is almost twice as high. "In light of these figures, don't even ask whether it's true that Quebecers are under-estimated by NHL scouts," he writes.
Hat tip to Wil!
Labels: discrimination
Report: Lower Ticket Prices for Women's Basketball is Due to Institutional Sexism
From the Chronicle of Higher Ed.:
"Colleges charge a premium for admission to see males play, even when women's basketball teams are ranked as among the very best performers in the nation," write the authors, Laura Pappano and Allison J. Tracy, both of the Wellesley Centers for Women. By charging less for admission to highly ranked women's games, the authors say, athletics departments engage in "institutional discrimination that is camouflaged as sensible economic practice."
The report analyzed ticket prices at every level, from single-game to season tickets, at 292 Division I colleges. The results showed that ticket prices for women's games lagged far behind those for men's games at the same institution at all of the top 25 women's basketball programs in the country—even at colleges where the men's team ranked lower than the women's team.
Here is the abstract to the report.
Tickets to college sports—and men’s and women’s Division I college basketball in particular—may appear on the surface no different than tickets members of the public may buy to attend professional sporting events. But unlike professional franchises, colleges are non-profit organizations and, in many cases, public institutions. Decisions around ticket prices do not reflect an actual marketplace, but internal calculations and decisions that necessarily reflect a value placed on the event by the institution. This distinction is critical because previous research shows that lower-priced events are perceived as lower quality and less worth watching or attending. Our review of ticket prices for men’s and women’s Division I college basketball for the 2008-2009 season considered entry fees charged by 292 institutions at various seating levels, including season ticket packages and single game tickets. Our results showed significant gender gaps at every pricing and seating level with colleges charging a premium for male play. This gap persisted even among teams identified by the NCAA as top-ranked women’s teams with large fan followings. Analysis of attendance figures further showed that the gender differential in price across schools is not accounted for by differences in attendance. Because athletics, and particularly college basketball, have an increasingly prominent cultural profile, the practice of effectively de-valuing women on the court has implications off the court as well. The results support the broader contention that women athletes—as women in traditionally male arenas—continue to face institutional discrimination that is camouflaged as sensible economic practice.
I do not doubt their findings, but I wonder if they took into consideration something: that basketball fans are more willing to buy men's tickets than women's tickets, and not because of sexist attitudes. Perhaps, just perhaps, sports fans find men's games, on average, more exciting to watch than women's games.
I wonder if the authors asked themselves this question: why would those in athletic departments be willing to "leave money on the table" to feed their sexist attitudes? They note themselves that top-ranked programs tend to charge less for women's games than men's games. If fans are willing and able to pay the premium, why aren't they charged the premium?
One "solution", if you want to call it that, would be to force all colleges to charge exactly the same price for men's and women's ball (and to not set lower prices for men's games). Then let's see what happens to attendance at women's games.
Here's Stacey Brook with a similar take that it is the demand side of the market that the authors of the paper are ignoring.
Cross-posted at Market Power
Labels: college basketball, discrimination, NCAA; college sports, ticket demand, ticket pricing
Wednesday, March 11, 2009
Two pieces worth noting
First, in recent years, English teams have been getting the upper hand over their Italian counterparts, a reversal from prior decades. Why is this? My own answer is that "catenaccio," the Italian style of playing, is a form of implicit collusion. The pace is slow and defensive-minded. It is failing in an era in which skill and pace are increasingly prevalent on the pitch. Beckham is at AC Milan now because that is where he has a comparative advantage in the twilight of his career, as he has lost a step or two in the past decade. This WSJ story, "Why Can't Italy Beat England in Soccer?" touches on this briefly, and covers other interesting angles on the issue.
Second, here's a paper "Interracial Workplace Cooperation: Evidence from the NBA," discussed in the WSJ's Real Time Economics Blog. The claim: assists in the NBA are race-neutral. Surely work a look for some of our readers.
Labels: discrimination, NBA, soccer
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Race and coaching
Even if it's not proof of racial discrimination, the disparity between the percentage of black athletes and of black coaches is relevant, at least symbolically. A sport that's dominated by white coaches and black athletes—white overseers giving orders to young black bucks who do the physical work—can bear an uncomfortable resemblance to a plantation. (And, fair or not, this resemblance is just a tiny bit greater when the overseers give their orders with Southern accents and the school is located in the former Confederacy—sorry, Auburn.) Add to that what many consider to be the exploitation of so-called "student athletes," most of whom won't make the pros and don't receive a decent education because they need to spend most of their time practicing or playing ball. To the critics, we have an overwhelmingly white university administration and booster base that are happy to benefit from these black kids' efforts in their athletic primes but won't support even the best of them as coaches later in their careers. To be sure, none of this proves that Turner Gill was turned down by Auburn because of his race. But it does suggest that college football is in need of reform that goes much deeper than getting rid of the Bowl Championship Series.I have a couple of quick observations to make. First, the proportions are way out of whack here. Given the disparity -- 5% black coaches, predominantly black players -- something important is going on, and it is worth making an attempt to understand it.
The basic claim of Ford and others is that "soft discrimination," stemming from the onerous task of pumping rich white boosters for money, is unique to college football, and that black coaches have the wrong skin color to do this effectively. That is, boosters are bigoted. The proportions of black coaches in major college basketball (28.5%) and in the NFL (pushing 25%), where fund-raising is not in the job description, are viewed as evidence in favor of this claim. But if boosters are the problem, and boosters are unique to major college football, then the proportion of black coaches should be significantly higher in sports such as track and field and in Division II and III football. If the proportion of black coaches in these sports were on the order of 25%, that would be strong evidence in favor of the booster bigotry hypothesis.
I also have some contrarian points to make. First, Auburn's hiring of Chizik might be stupid, but in hiring a white guy they didn't do anything different than Clemson, Syracuse, and Tennessee in not hiring Turner Gill. Auburn is getting a bit of a bum rap on the race issue (Brian has already chimed in on the stupid angle). Second, Gill's record at Buffalo can be compared with Brady Hoke's (a white guy) at Ball State. Both coaches turned around losing programs. Gill's 8-5 Buffalo team upset Hoke's 12-1 Ball State squad in the MAC Championship game, but the better year overall clearly belonged to Ball State. So one might ask, for what jobs was Brady Hoke considered? I don't know the list, but in the end he took the job at San Diego State, which is not remotely close to the stature of the Auburn job. Turner Gill may indeed be destined to be a big time major college football coach. But it will help his cause to have more than one winning season on his record when he takes the next step.
Finally, consider the failure rate among black coaches in college. With a head coach count on the order of 5 or 6, the passing of Croom at Mississippi State, Prince at Kansas State, and Willingham at Washington has to give an AD pause. If Gill wins the MAC next year and ends up at a Big Ten school, Auburn will take another round of whipping in the media. But it just makes sense to me that Gill, or any other coach, put more on his resume before stepping into the recruiting and on-the-field wars of major college football. The process of integration in college football coaches has begun, but it will take a good while longer to play out.
Labels: college football, discrimination
Friday, November 21, 2008
Practice practice practice
, at ESPN The Magazine. The context of the interview, of course, is sports. Here are some interesting pieces of it:THE MAG: Based on this book, if I'm an owner, I should be the most patient one in sports, right? After all, the Beatles, as you write, played a ridiculous 1,200 gigs—a lifetime—before they became any good.Most people think genetic variation across countries accounts for disproportionate success rates in different sports. I've had a hard time convincing students, for example, that if Canadians quit playing hockey we'd see a bunch more players like Steve Nash in the NBA. Pistol Pete
GLADWELL: It's interesting. Andy Reid has said that with the offense he runs in Philadelphia, it takes a receiver three years to be comfortable in it. A receiver! I don't think we take this into account. We create offenses of such stunning complexity in the NFL, that it's impossible to truly judge anyone in their rookie season. It's ludicrous. How can you, if you're Detroit, draft all these wide receivers and then give up on anything after a couple years, or call 'em busts, when it's far more about executing a system that takes years to master? You have to give them their work.
Or if the Lions offensive players were calc majors…
Yeah, you can't go into a math class and pronounce who the great students are after two weeks. No one can master calculus in two weeks. So we need to be consistent. If you hire a coach that has offensive schemes as complicated as calculus, then you better have the patience you'd have with those students. Let's stop and acknowledge that football is not a sport for dumb jocks. It's a highly complex cognitive activity.
...That said, you were a distance runner. That's about pure endurance. Your book says success is often about circumstances. Do these ideas fly in the face of one another?
I was a middle and long-distance runner, and Alberto Salazar said something to me recently—he said, "Why is it that the Kenyans dominate long-distance running the way they do?" There's all kinds of theories on genetics, and endurance, and he says, "Look, they have a million teenage boys running 10-12 miles a day. How many boys here run 12 miles a day?" Maybe 5,000, if that. They have a million, and if you have all those kids doing that kind of mileage, you're not only going to develop all the talent that's there, you're not gonna' miss any great runners. You're exploiting 100% of the running potential.And we see that elsewhere, like Canadian hockey players…
And you can say the same thing for Dominican infielders. There are certain cultures where we like to think they have some innate advantage, but growing up there, baseball is a really, really big deal, and everyone puts an enormous amount of effort into it, and as a result, they produce a hugely disproportionate number of athletes in that model. There's no mystery here: it's about numbers and it's about work.
- an outlier to be sure - fits Gladwell's story in a number of dimensions. The sense in which Pete Maravich was an outlier had little to do with his physical makeup and loads to do with incessant practicing, combined with the favorable circumstances of his youth. Thinking along Gladwell's lines might be useful in addressing positional discrimination both within and across sports.Labels: discrimination, training
Friday, September 05, 2008
Golf, the International Language? (update)
One comment to the previous post by frequent reader Bartman suggests that while "the NBA might love Yao Ming, but they'd hate having 3 Chinese starters on every team."
That's a thought-provoking statement with which I think I ultimately disagree, and I believe the data back me up. While the economics literature is full of papers that show that consumer discrimination exists in sports, most of these papers adjust for player quality. Therefore, while a white fan may prefer Larry Bird or Mickey Mantle to roughly equally talented black players such as Magic Johnson or Hank Aaron, the same data also show that white fans nearly always prefer a black star to a white scrub. While Mantle's baseball cards sell for more than Aaron's, Aaron's still sell for more than Joe Shlabotnik's.
Remember, the NBA's fan base is largely white despite an overwhelming percentage of African American players, and Arsenal remains one of the mosts popular sides in the EPL despite fielding almost no English players. If China brings 3 starters to every team each with the skills of LeBron, Kobe, or KG, the NBA will quickly learn to love these players.
Labels: discrimination, golf
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
Golf, the International Language?
This decision bring up several interesting issues. First of all, the sports economics literature is full of papers testing for discrimination on the part of consumers. A classic 2001 paper by Kanazawa and Funk about the NBA found that black players were paid less than comparable white players but that teams with white players, even bench warmers, drew better Neilsen Ratings. As a back of the envelope calculation, the higher ratings could explain the higher salaries for white players. So, can one ethically justify employer discrimination that is done to accomodate customer discrimination? The U.S. Supreme Court generally says no, but what about this case? Obviously, the main difference is that English can be learned while skin color cannot, and the LPGA has stated that it intends to help those needing special tutoring to attain English proficiency.
Second, it is interesting that this is in issue in the LPGA but not other major sports leagues. Can you imagine the NBA banning Yao Ming until he passes an English proficiency test or Man. U. benching Cristiano Ronaldo until his fluency increased? (Of course, most Brits speak barely understandable English, but that's another story.) Apparently the NBA thinks its fans rather like Yao Ming's 22.0 points per game despite his somewhat limited English language abilities. Are LPGA fans less interested in watching the world's best female golfers (16 out of the top 20 of whom are non-native English speakers), and more interested in hearing their post-round press conferences?
Labels: discrimination, golf
Wednesday, May 14, 2008
Sport as a window on society
.I will root for Rangers, who could complete a remarkable season by winning three trophies in the next eleven days, with this year's CIS Cup already in the bag. But Rangers are emblematic of sectarian violence, as discussed by Foer, and I won't be singing along with chants against the pope tonight.
Zenit are favorites to win their first European trophy. A Zenit victory would symbolize the rise of the Russian economy, and the rise of Russian football as well. Zenit, as well as Russian football, are emerging from relative obscurity. How far can they - and the economy itself - go? There are some eye-opening facts about Zenit in this story from the BBC, including the fact that Zenit are owned by Gazprom, now the fourth largest company in the world. Gazprom has been pouring money into Zenit - making Zenit the Russian version of Chelsea, who are also lavishly funded by Russian oil wealth.
But the most amazing, and disturbing thing in the article is the following discussion about race. Zenit is an all-white team, by design according to their coach Dick Advocaat:
Unfortunately the club also have a hard core of racists among their supporters. Zenit are the only club in Russia never to have signed a black player, and their fans were accused of racist taunts during the Uefa Cup win over Marseille earlier this season.Customer discrimination is a concept that dates back to Gary Becker. The fans' behavior in this case is awful, but not without precedent in Europe (hence the kick racism out of football campaign). What is quite remarkable though, is the explicit policy statement of customer discrimination by Zenit's manager. I've not come across anything quite like it.
Marseille defender Ronald Zubar said: "They threw a banana at us and made monkey sounds."
Manager Dick Advocaat has even admitted that the fans' attitude has affected his transfer policy.
"The problem is our fans," he says. "I would be happy to sign anyone but the fans don't like black players.
"I don't understand how they could pay so much attention to skin colour. For me, there's no difference between white, black or red.
"But the fans are the most important thing Zenit have. That's why, in future, I have to ask them outright how they'll react if we sign a dark-skinned player.
"If the fans don't agree with me, I won't do it. I won't buy a player who won't be accepted by the fans."
Ultimately, virulent discrimination is a limiting factor for any football club, indeed any economy. Perhaps Dick Advocaat should be channeling Bear Bryant, who learned that lesson long ago. Bryant integrated the Alabama football team after getting whipped on the field by black players from Southern Cal. Although some argue that he was late to the party, better late than never.
Labels: discrimination, sports economics
Thursday, March 01, 2007
Black coaches
Of the 119 Division I-A schools, only six have black head football coaches. There are even fewer in the lower divisions: five in Division I-AA, two in Division II and one in Division III. The figures exclude historically black colleges.Of the six D1A schools, there are black coaches at Buffalo (Gill), Kansas State (Prince), Miami (Shannon), Mississippi State (Croom), UCLA (Dorrell), and at my alma mater, Washington (Willingham). UCLA has a history of incorporating black talent in a discriminating market that goes back to Jackie Robinson, who played football there before breaking the color barrier in major league baseball. Buffalo is a new program at which the allegedly discriminatory network of boosters is largely absent. This might contribute to their having a black athletic director as well. The economic theory of discrimination implies that non-discriminators will profit by employing talented people who the discriminators ignore. Buffalo and UCLA being members of this small club of six falls in line with the theory. But where are the other non-discriminators, and what is Mississippi State doing on the list? There may be a bit more to the story than what's being reported.In addition, there are only 12 black athletic directors in Division I-A, and not a single major conference commissioner is black.
While the report suggests that the mood at the hearing was quite negative on this issue, I see things differently. Here just south of tobacco road, the roster of basketball coaches in the basketball-mad ACC was once all-white. Today, Clemson, FSU, Georgia Tech, Miami, NC State & UVa, along with northern outpost Boston College all have black head coaches. That's a majority of minorities, folks. Even the disaster at Maryland after the Bob Wade saga could not hold back the tide in this booster-heavy, but more importantly, highly competitive league.
A statistic I'd like to see is the number of black assistant head coaches and coordinators at D1A schools, relative to a decade ago. This is the wellspring of future coaching talent. If it is much better stocked with black talent than ten years ago, and I believe it is, the six current coaches are just the tip of the iceberg. If it can happen in tobacco road hooops, it can happen anywhere.
Labels: coaches, college football, discrimination
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Wimbledon Eschews the Labour Theory of Value
The All England Club has gradually reduced the pay gap over the years, but held out against equal prizes as a matter of principle.The important question is not who works harder or who has what opportunities to earn extra income from other matches. Instead, the important question is who is expected to generate how much revenue. And judging from the ratings and attendance, it appears that a three-game women's tournament generates at least as much revenue as a five-game men's tournament. If so, it makes sense that the women's prize money would be at least as large as the men's prize money.
[Club Chairman (sic), Tom] Phillips had cited surveys showing that men give better value than the women. The men play best-of-five set matches, while the women play best of three. Also, the women make more money overall because they also play in doubles, while the top men usually play only singles.
"It just doesn't seem right to us that the lady players could play in three events and could take away significantly more than the men's champion who battles away through these best-of-five matches," Phillips said last year. "We don't see it as an equal rights issue."
What puzzles me, though, is why these grand slams do not extract more rent from the contenders.
Last year, men's champion Roger Federer received $1.170 million and women's winner Amelie Mauresmo got $1.117 million.Would the top talent really give Wimbledon a miss if the prize money were "only" $1 million?
The answer, presumably, has to do with entry conditions. If Wimbledon offered only $500,000 as the top prize, how long would it take for some other tournament to emerge, claiming a position as one of the top four grand slam tournaments? Possibly Dubai?
Labels: discrimination, sex, tennis, Wimbledon
