Random Rumblings

Now that we are in the depths of fall, the days are short and the weather is getting colder. The winds seem to be stronger due to the missing leaves and crops that would provide some sort of shelter. The hardest part of every ride becomes finding the right clothes to wear. Riding in the fall can be some of the best riding if you can find a section of daylight and you dress for warmth (but not too warm because once you start to sweat, you are fighting an uphill battle). Since I opted to not race any cyclocross, my intensity and training is cut back as off season has started. I am doing a little more intensity though than I typically have done, which should hopefully help my early season racing. I am using the extra hours from not riding to get ahead with school work so I can justify the longer rides when I need them in the spring. I got all the work I did for my masters published so now I can take this work and really build on it for my PhD. If you want to see what it is about you can check it out here. It should be accessible to everyone as it is an open access journal, but I can't guarantee you will understand it all ;)

The rest of this post is just to remind you guys to always keep your minds open. With the recent election, most people were posting overly one-sided articles and not putting any actual thought into their posts. I won't tell someone who to pick, or which side of an argument to be on, but I like to know that people are informed on their decision. So here are two hot topics related to gender that will hopefully stimulate your thinking, and are not meant to push you to any side.

First: Why aren't their more female CEO's? So what I want to mention here is just something that a female friend shared with me that is doing pretty well in a biotech company. It was an interesting perspective that I have never heard before. People like to associate women's 'lack of progression' in the business world because of motherhood, such as taking a year off for maternity leave (which now men can do, so a business driven woman can continue to work if she pleases). So let us just leave men out of the equation completely here. What about a women-to-women comparison?
This is what she insisted that no one looks at. How is it fair to the woman that decides she would rather focus on business than have a family, if a woman could have a child and take a full year off of work and still receive all the same promotions and raises?

Number 2: This actually has ties into sports, so it is relevant to the blog. It has been posted all over Facebook so maybe you have seen it already, but it is essentially asking why women get asked different questions than men in sports. The video is here. My argument here is that the 'why' is easy. In the world of media and entertainment (which is exactly what pro sports is), money talks. So if you look at magazine sales or TV shows that excel with women, they are typically associated with beauty, fashion and/or gossip (like the bachelorette, or Kardashian's). So in order to get the female audience interested in sports, they bring in what they know sells into the interview questions. On top of this, how many women actually watch sports? It certainly isn't the majority, and from what I have seen, if they do a lot of times it is then because 'so and so is hot'. So then why is it so bad now for men to watch women's beach volleyball if women are watching men's sports for the same reason?

That was a bit of a rant, but the obvious thing that I see here is that women need to take more interest in the sport. As for the video, the why is easy, but the 'how can we fix this' is hard. Women don't care about men's sports, so by equality you can't expect men to care about women's. If you get women caring more about sports, the depth of the sport will increase and you will have something great to watch that will attract more viewers. So once 'Women's Health' starts outselling Cosmo, then we will know we are on the right track.