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Thursday, June 28, 2018
The Michigan Daily — michigandaily.com
OPINION

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I 

asked my big sister and 
former Division I collegiate 
soccer player if her school 
treated her the same as her male 
counterparts. 
Her 
response: 
“Students and fellow athletes 
do not treat me the same. They 
made comments about women’s 
sports being less important.” 
My sister is putting in the same 
amount 
of 
work, 
sacrificing 
the same amount of time and 
working through many of the 
same issues that all college 
athletes face and it seems like 
she gets no respect. This attitude 
toward women’s sports creates 
an almost hypocritical view of 
athleticism as “less-than” solely 
because the athlete is female. 
What qualifies men’s sports as 
holding any kind of importance? 
How can the same exact thing 
be any less significant simply 
because women are doing it?
Women’s sports are not less 
important. Women are not less 
important. Let’s remember that 
countless female athletes are 
putting in the same amount, 
if not more work as their male 
counterparts. Not to mention the 
fact that male athletes should 
be the first to support female 
athletes. They know just how 
much work has to be put in, 
just how much time has to be 
sacrificed and how grueling the 
life of a collegiate or professional 
athlete can be. Male athletes 
should not be the first to put 
their female counterparts down. 
Rather, they should be the first to 

be fighting for equality, fighting 
for justice.
I then asked one of my best 
friends, a Division I men’s college 
basketball player, if he ever feels 
like he’s given advantages over 
his female counterparts. “No,” 
he replied. “The only difference 
is the popularity of the sport. 
That’s not them getting treated 
differently, it’s just the way the 
world works.” Just the way the 
world works. Women just don’t get 
the respect they deserve. That’s 
just how it works. Female athletes 
are constantly given consolation 
prizes for competing in what’s 
seen as a men’s world. Just the 
way the world works. Now I know 
that my friend doesn’t really think 
female athletes deserve less than 
male athletes. I know because I 
spent four years of high school 
playing basketball alongside him 
and I know he respects me as an 
athlete. I also know he respects 
the women’s team at his college 
as well, but sometimes that can be 
harder to tell.
There have been countless 
times when I have been hanging 
out with my guy friends and 
we decide to play basketball. 
Without fail, I am picked last. 
I know it might sound petty – 
complaining about being picked 
last – but that’s not the point. The 
point is that of the group in which 
I end up playing these pick-up 
games, I am the only person 
who actually played basketball. 
I played for my entire life on 
competitive club teams and high 

school varsity. None of them 
played past fifth grade. But I am 
a girl, so I’m picked last – always. 
That’s the issue that is ignored. 
Because that’s just how the world 
works. My friends aren’t really 
sexist, they don’t truly believe that 
I am lesser than them. Simply, they 
have been conditioned to feel this 
is acceptable.
Young boys are raised in a world 
that believes men are stronger, 
faster and more athletic than 
women, and whether they mean 
to or not, they end up perpetuating 
these ideas through their own 
actions. We need to start to 
recognize the kind of embedded 
sexism that is constantly faced by 
female athletes. People need to see 
that saying “that’s just how it is” 
is not an answer and is a cop out 
for not addressing a real issue that 
needs to be fixed.
Passive 
acceptance 
of 
inequalities 
is 
no 
longer 
acceptable. 
It 
is 
time 
male 
athletes step up and speak up 
about the issues female athletes 
are facing. And just to leave you 
with a statistic that highlights 
this 
inequity, 
Forbes 
just 
released their list of the Top 100 
Highest Paid Athletes and not a 
single one was a woman. Not one. 
This can no longer be “just the 
way the world works.” We need 
change, we need progress and we 
need it now.

FARID ALSABEH | COLUMN

 EMMA CHANG
Editorial Page Editor
EMMA RICHTER
Managing Editor

Emma Chang
Joel Danilewitz
Samantha Goldstein
Elena Hubbell
Emily Huhman
Tara Jayaram

Jeremy Kaplan
Sarah Khan
Magdalena Mihaylova
Ellery Rosenzweig
Jason Rowland

Anu Roy-Chaudhury
Alex Satola
Ali Safawi
 Ashley Zhang
Sam Weinberger

Unsigned editorials reflect the official position of the Daily’s Editorial Board. 
All other signed articles and illustrations represent solely the views of their authors.

ASIF BECHER
Editor in Chief

EDITORIAL BOARD MEMBERS

MARLEE BURRIDGE| COLUMN

Speak up for female athletes

Marlee Burridge can be reached at 

marleebu@umich.edu.

The science behind implicit bias
T

he 
April 
arrest 
of 
two 
black 
men 
at 
a 
Philadelphia 
Starbucks 
has reignited public discourse on 
the topic of racial discrimination. 
Arguments proposed by the most 
vocal critics of the incident, who 
have charged the coffee chain 
with racism, portray it as the 
latest scene of a systemic white 
supremacy that has terrorized 
minorities for decades. In a post-
Jim Crow America, the question 
must be asked: How could such 
a widespread manifestation of 
racism persist in our society? 
The consensus has been, as 
far as Starbucks’ perception is 
concerned, 
that 
unconscious 
profiling is the culprit.
The idea that motivations 
can exist beneath the level of 
conscious knowledge is hardly 
a new idea; this was precisely 
the scandalous observation that 
set a prude Viennese aristocracy 
on fire in the days of Sigmund 
Freud. Marked as it is by racial 
tension, our current era takes 
as the object of scandal not 
implicit sexual attitudes but 
racial ones. As it applies to the 
Starbucks arrests, the argument 
states that even if the barista 
harbored no explicit prejudice 
against African-Americans, she 
was nonetheless motivated by 
an unconscious bias to call the 
police when the men declined to 
order anything. The assumption 
here is that race played a 
decisive role in the events that 
unfolded, that the arrest would 
not have been made if the men 
were white.
The 
Implicit 
Association 
Test has emerged as the most 
prominent assessment for the 
kind of implicit bias that has 
been implicated in the Starbucks 
incident. For those unfamiliar 
with the test, I encourage you to 
try it — it doesn’t take more than 
20 minutes, and the firsthand 
experience will be a far better 
explanation than what follows. 
In the relevant version of the 
test, there are two parts. one 
is when there are two buttons: 
“white and good adjectives” and 
“Black and bad adjectives,” and 
the other is when the two buttons 
are “Black and good adjectives” 
and “white and bad adjectives.”. 
The finding of this simple test is 
similar to others in psychometry 
— the practice of timing mental 
processes — in that the speed 
of our categorization changes 
significantly based on another 

parameter. In this case, that 
other parameter is the face 
we see prior to the word: It 
consistently takes people longer 
to identify positive words, and 
shorter 
to 
identify 
negative 
words, when Black and good 
are the same button, because of 
implicit bias.
Perusing other versions of the 
assessment, it was startling to 
consider just how many identity 
groups may be affected by the 
phenomenon 
of 
unconscious 
bias. Age, weight, and physical 
disability among athletes were 
some 
of 
the 
most 
striking 
examples outside the typical race 
or sex considerations, all three 
of which have been associated 
with the classic IAT finding 
of delayed response time. The 
diversity of subgroups present 
in the assessment is a testament 
not 
only 
to 
the 
potential 
ubiquity of implicit bias, but 
to 
the 
rising 
sociocultural 
movement 
that 
is 
bringing 
this issue to the forefront. 
The floodgates holding back 
the 
uncomfortable 
topic 
of 
unconscious 
marginalization 
have been opened.
As far as strictly scientific 
evidence is concerned, the IAT 
is still as close as we can get to 
quantifying the phenomenon of 
implicit bias. But even this has 
been scrutinized by scientists 
wary of the test, a skepticism 
that has slowly but surely been 
extending into the field of 
social psychology at large. Some 
psychologists 
maintain 
that 
the results of this assessment 
suffer from low replicability, 
and that the test itself fails 
to live up to quality-control 
standards. Moreover, the IAT 
seems completely inept at doing 
what it’s designed to do: actually 
predict potential acts of bias. 
Despite these criticisms — if 
only for the sake of argument — 
I’ll assume that these results are 
valid and consistent. Where do 
we go from there?
It’s 
my 
belief 
that 
the 
psychometric approach outlined 
by the IAT is not a rigorous 
method of demonstrating that 
unconscious racism exists per 
se. This position was largely 
influenced by my own experience 
taking the test. Within a few 

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