17 March 2022. Gender | Football
Why daughters tend to be to the left of their parents. Making the FA Cup a lot more equal.
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1: Why daughters tend to be to the left of their parents
There was a short and intriguing piece in The Guardian by Torsten Bell of the Resolution Foundation on some research on how transmission of political values within families was influenced by gender. The research looked at these patterns in Germany and Switzerland.
I realise that that sounds esoteric—but the findings are fascinating: on a left-right political scale, sons tend to replicate the parents’ political views, but daughters tend to end up to the left of their parents.
(Image via Gordon Dylan Johnson via Open Clipart, Public Domain.)
I went to look at the original research, by Mathilde van Ditmars in the European Journal of Political Research. Happily, it is outside of the Wiley academic publishing paywall.
One of the interesting elements about this shift in behaviour is that—in social science terms—it is relatively recent:
While women used to hold on average more conservative political views than men, gender realignment during the 1980s and 1990s has resulted in women moving to the left of men in Western post-industrial societies (Inglehart & Norris, 2000). The contemporary gender gap in political ideology implies women being more left-wing than men, which is explained by women's decreased religiosity and more egalitarian attitudes (Kittilson, 2016). In younger generations, women are increasingly more leftist than men, a phenomenon referred to as the gender-generation gap (Shorrocks, 2018).
Being a good researcher, she lays out their hypotheses before they start, but these are basically that right wing parents will have daughters who are to the left of their parents, while this will not be true of left wing parents, whereas sons of both right- and left-wing parents will reflect their parents views.
And that’s what the research says happens, accompanied by lots of statistical analysis. In short:
daughters are generally drifting further away from their parents’ political orientations when they are right-leaning, while this trend is not observed for sons.
The question is why: and the researchers conclude that young women’s political views are being more strongly shaped by influences outside of the home.
One underlying reason may be the increased societal attention in recent decades for gender equality, which is associated with left-wing positions.
It’s possible that the continued political fight for a whole range of demands connected to gender equality—whether #TimesUp, #MeToo, or for reproductive rights—all help to reinforce this (the article doesn’t speculate about this, but these clearly go beyond attention to action.
It also means that left of centre politics are easier to reproduce, because for daughters the influences of home and outside are reinforcing each other, whereas this is not true of right of centre politics. Interesting they also speculate that the gender attitudes of right of centre parents might create a greater gap between views in the home and those encountered outside.
Obviously, it would be interesting to see this research replicated for the UK, but both statistically and anecdotally it feels as if it would be similar. Statistically: in the UK women are generally to the left of men, although this used not to be true. Anecdotally: when people tell me that their managers’ views on climate change have been influenced for the better by their children, it is usually turns out to be daughters rather than sons who have done the influencing.
2: Making the FA Cup a lot more equal
One of the tests I apply to social innovation is whether it makes the present strange. And the proposal from Lewes FC for an ‘Equal FA Cup’—referring here to the FA Cup in England—definitely comes into that category, challenging a lot of the assumptions we make about how sporting rewards are structured. There’s something interesting going on here even if you’re not interested in sport.
(Source: Lewes FC)
I mentioned Lewes FC here a few weeks ago. It is a fan-owned club with a men’s team in the seventh tier and a women’s team in the second tier. The club has a strong values-led belief in equality and inclusion, and walks its talk. Uniquely in British football (I think) it pays its men and women players the same wages.
The gender part of the proposal is pretty uncontroversial. At the moment the disparity in prize money is shocking: something close to £16m a year for men’s teams, less than £430,000 a year for women’s teams. For women’s teams, participation ends up costing them money.
They have devised two approaches to create a fair allocation of reward.
In version 1, the men’s FA Cup and women’s FA Cup simply have the same amount of prize money. That’s the simplest way to do it, and benefits the women’s game enormously.
But in some ways version 2 is more interesting. This is ‘Equal Prize per fixture (PPF) in which teams in either Cup get the same amount of money for winning and losing in each round. There’s a slight weighting as teams progress through the competitions, but the effect of this version is to spread money right through the game, benefiting lower tier League teams and non-league teams, as well as women’s teams, disproportionately.
One of the things I like about this is that the FA Cup, in theory and practice, is open to every football club in England—as J L Carr celebrated in his short sporting novel about (the fictional) Steeple Sinderby Wanderers. It is the genuine expression of the ‘people’s game’.
The other thing I like is that the teams that lose out from this redistribution—typically, on the present system, those who get to the quarter finals and beyond—are already getting so much more money from the vast television-fuelled wealth of the Premiership that the modest winnings from the FA Cup (£360,000 for a winning quarter-finalist, and nothing for the loser) would probably get lost down the back of the Boardroom sofa.
As Rich Speight said at the Roker Report site,
The men’s FA Cup’s total prize pot is currently over £16 million, with over 45% of that reserved for the eight clubs that make it to quarter-finals and beyond, i.e. Premier League teams. These are teams that do not, by any stretch of the imagination, need the money. The winner takes home £1.8 million, or about four months’ salary for one of their average squad members. I doubt anyone at Chelsea even noticed (in last year’s Final) that Youri Tielemans’ goal for Leicester had cost them £900,000.
Whereas, at the other end of the football hierarchy, an extra £5,000 or £10,000 can go a long way. Lewes says that either of their two proposals will make 95% of the the teams who enter the Cups—men’s and women’s—better off. (They’ve published their proposals on their site—you can even download a spreadsheet and play with the numbers.)
They list the other benefits:
- Fairer distribution of prize money reflecting the FA’s ‘For All’ remit.
- Transformational sums of money going to women’s and non-league clubs, accelerating club & player development.
- Creating an FA Cup that will be a beacon for equity and fairness in sport worldwide.
- Signalling to fans and clubs that English football wants to be the leader when it comes to gender equality and not follow.
- Inspiration for thousands of female footballers that they matter and their future is taken seriously.
There’s clearly some campaigning talent at the club—the campaign looks good and encourages people to write to their MP or get involved in social media to discuss it. There’s a poll, currently split equally between the two proposals. The images here were also downloaded from the site.
It’s the sort of initiative that has a chance of success: the financial losers don’t lose very much, compared to the rest of their income from the game (and they still make good money from crowd receipts on Cup days). And right now they would benefit a lot, in terms of reputation, from making a gesture that helps the rest of the game.
Notes from readers:
J Walker Smith sent me a slightly sceptical note on the Edelman trust data, which I discussed yesterday. Walker’s an expert social researcher, and he has spent his life looking at these kinds of numbers. Here’s an extract from his email:
(W)hen you get a look at tracking (you have to dig), what you find over the long-haul is relative stability in these numbers... [Secondly]: What’s the baseline — what’s the right comparison point? Maybe in a vibrant democracy, skepticism and mistrust are good. Do we really want a society where people totally believe or blindly accept and trust everything the government says? I grew up in the late 60s and 70s, a period of time when mistrust of government was a rallying cry against war, environmental degradation and racism. Even in less tumultuous times, why is mistrust bad? And how do we know that these levels of trust are low? Maybe 61 [the business trust score] is way too high.
Ukraine notes:
At the Daily Maverick, Greg Rosenberg announced the “inaugural George Orwell Ukraine Study Tour”.
Given the current unpleasantness associated with the special military operation to defend the Donbass republics , the tour will circumvent Kyiv in favour of several other cities where participants can study the classics, along with an exciting new southern hemisphere destination: Pretoria!
j2t#281
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