Sorry, feminists, men are better at scrabble, by Heather MacDonald.
The 2018 World Scrabble Championship was held last month in London. The champion, 51-year old Nigel Richards, played “groutier” (meaning sulky) for the winning 68 points. This was Richards’s fourth world title in English Scrabble; he also took the French Scrabble title this year for the second time, even though he doesn’t speak French.
If Richards’s dominance of competitive Scrabble is clear, there is a less noticed but more significant pattern in the game: since the World Scrabble Championship began in 1991, all winners have been male. The North American Scrabble Championship has had one female winner (in 1987) since its founding in 1978. All eight finalists in this year’s French World Scrabble Championships were men.
Competitive Scrabble constitutes a natural experiment for testing the feminist world view. According to feminist dogma, males and females are identical in their aptitudes and interests.
If men dominate certain data-based, abstract fields such as engineering, physics and math, that imbalance must, by definition, be the result of sexism — whether a patriarchal culture that discourages girls from math or implicit bias in the hiring process.
But the hypothesis that all large groups are statistically equal, so beloved of the political left, is wrong:
But there are no cultural expectations that discourage females from memorising dictionaries — a typical strategy of competitive Scrabble players, often in a language the player doesn’t speak. Girls are as free as boys to lap up vocabulary. Nor are there misogynist gatekeepers to keep females out of Scrabble play; the game, usually first learned at home, is open to all. According to board game maker Hasbro, 83 per cent of recreational Scrabble players 25 to 54 are female.
Championship Scrabble, however, rewards typically male obsessions: strategy, maths, a passion for competition, and a drive to memorise facts. Richards’s mother told The Guardian in 2015 that he “related everything to numbers” when he was growing up. …
Male obsession is what drives technological progress. It is the force of nature that has lifted mankind out of poverty over the last three centuries.
Feminists have persuaded policymakers that only patriarchal inequity can explain the male dominance of Silicon Valley and of pure research. The archetypal male science geek, ignoring the demands of ordinary life so he can solve a physics problem or write code, is out of sight, out of mind.
The same maniacal pursuit of mastery that leads someone to spend every waking moment poring over a dictionary to prepare for a Scrabble tournament has also led to the computer revolution and to the West’s conquest of disease and natural disaster.
The left, with their dopey ideas that just happen to benefit them in their economic depredations, is trying to suppress male obsession. If they succeed, a stagnant future awaits mankind — which will be rendered less able to compete in the universe.
hat-tip Barry Corke
