Steve Sailer crunches some numbers.
I found this fascinating, but then again I’m a math nerd:
Over a million boys each year play high school football, and $367 million in college football scholarships are consumed, so the “expected value” of being a high school football player is $358 in college athletic scholarships. In contrast, only $22 [million] in women’s golf scholarships are awarded each year, but only 54,000 girls play high school golf, so the expected value of being a girl golfer in high school is $413. . . . In contrast, the expected value of being on the boy’s high school golf team is only $140.
He provides a whole chart of different sports, showing overwhelmingly that women get more scholarship money than men do. Quite logically, he suggests this is due to Title IX: When men and women don’t play sports at exactly the same rate, it’s presumed to be the fault of “discrimination,” so schools have to bribe female athletes to keep their ratios PC.
However, there are some factors that could complicate this. For example, if a higher proportion of men in a given sport don’t go to college, they can’t get athletic scholarships, so this will drive down the “expected value” even though it’s not due to Title IX bribery. It’s still striking, though, that men’s football – the stereotypical who-cares-if-they’re-good-students-let’s-get-them-to-our-school sport – ranks so poorly, though, behind ice hockey and fencing even for males.