It was often argued that it is inherent to women in general to have a stronger will and desire than men to reach the goals they set for themselves. This might very well be, but that cannot explain the relative success of Dutch women over Dutch men, unless this stronger feminine willpower is a phenomenon exclusive to the Dutch. Otherwise, the strong will-powered Dutch women just compete against other strong will-powered women from other countries, and the weakly will-powered Dutch male athletes compete with other rather weak opponents. Clearly, this did not seem to be the case …

In general, the analysts shouldn’t have argued about differences between men and women in general, but about differences between the relative strength of Dutch women over other women, compared with the relative strength of Dutch men over other men.

Unequal women empowerment?

What might be an explanation then? We might find one by looking at the position that women have in their society. Traditionally, sports in the world have been dominated by men, but due to their increasingly equal opportunities in society, their participation in sports increased as well. If indeed a relationship exists between women empowerment and their results on the sports fields, we might not only expect better results over the years, but also smaller differences between the results of men and women.

To test this, I made some plots. Below, the results needed to win the Gold Medal on Javelin throwing on the Olympics, 100 meters running on the Olympics, and 500 meters speed skating on the World Championships, are shown. The red dots show the results of the men, the blue dots those of the women. The grey lines represent the general tendency of the lines, and in all three graphs, it is clear that the two lines tend to converge. Don’t be mislead by the small decrease of the differences between men and women: the initial differences were already very small, so a small absolute decrease is rather large on a relative scale.

Golden

Does this tell us anything about why Dutch women performed so much better than Dutch men did? No, of course not, for I did not take into account the Beijing Olympics, nor nationality. Nevertheless, if we accept that the increasingly strong position of women in society (in general) indeed leads to their achieving better sports results, we might also want to compare the position of Dutch women in Dutch society with that of women in many other countries. Compared to many other countries, Dutch women have a strong position in society. Perhaps, the Dutch think more seriously about women sports than is done in other countries.

If this is the case, the sport results of Dutch women is due to their empowerment in Dutch society. Perhaps women sports will increasingly receive more attention in other countries as well. Wouldn’t that be golden?

Friday, I watched “Katja en Sophie”, a Dutch talkshow hosted by Katja Schuurman and Sophie Hilbrand. The topic of the evening was the difficulties (Dutch) women have when combining a career with having children. Femke Halsema, political leader of Groenlinks, was one of the guests. She rightfully criticized an expert, but missed out on some of the more interesting arguments.

One of the elements of the talkshow was a video in which an ‘expert’ (Henk Noort) explained some scientific thoughts on why women still have lower career possibilities, compared with men. He mentioned two causes for the low labour market participation: women get physically ‘addicted’ to their children, thereby increasing the incentive for women to quit working after having had a child. The second reason was a comparison with the United States, where due to the shortage of men during the First World War men were forced to make way for working women.

Femke Halsema exploded when hearing these arguments. I think she was right to explode. Indeed, it remains just a little unclear how exactly a world war, 90 years ago, could bring differences between women labour participation about. I would say that that is not an explanation, but the labelling of an observed correlation. However right Halsema was to object to this ‘explanation’, she missed out on what I think is the more interesting statements made by Henk Noort: the argument that there is a biological basis for the low labour participation of women.

I think this argument fails on two accounts. Firstly, it is unclear why this biological explanation doesn’t apply in the United States (referring to the WWI argument), or at least how these two explanations relate to each other. But the more important criticism is that this explanation does not take into account the social structure, thereby failing to aggregate to the level of society. This is generally referred to as the micro-macro problem in social science.

What does that mean? Let’s suppose that indeed women after childbirth become physically ‘addicted’ to their baby and therefor have more difficulties than men to return to the labour market. We could interpret this as an individual level ‘preference’ of women. But behaviour is not formed by single preferences, but also by the beliefs (what is `good’ to do) and opportunities (what is ‘possible’ to do) of people. Beliefs in this case can be formed by social contacts (friend who work), opportunities to work is formed by propoer day-care. This alone can lead to the situation where the macro-level outcome of individual preferences seems counter-intuitive. In normal language, this means that despite the (supposed) biological preference of women not the re-enter the labour market is not a sufficient explanation for the low labour market participation of women.

It is nice when science is taken into account in a public debate, but it is almost never done properly. The few short minutes available to Henk Noort were not sufficient to give a detailed explanation of research findings. Additionally, science is characterized by debate, but in this broadcast no criticism was expressed. And criticism would have been justified, for when the social structure is not taken into account, a psychological mechanism is not enough to explain societal outcomes.