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Books update + gender parity [books]
Mar. 4th, 2024 08:30 pmIt felt like it took a while, but eventually I finished reading Make the Bread, Buy the Butter. This book was brought to my attention by my sister-in-law. I very much appreciated the author's willingness to roll up her sleeves and attempt to prepare all kinds of things from scratch, including the escapades where she obtained some goats and some turkeys. This book is partially a cookbook, but also very entertaining and enlightening reading.
I'm not sure my "hassle factor" calculates out in quite the same way as the author's, but there's significant overlap. I'm still probably not going to go back to baking my own bread or making my own yogurt in the near future, just because my lifestyle here means that I just don't have THAT much time at home for cooking projects. But I was pleased to learn that Craime Fraiche is so simple to make.
After finishing that, I started back in on a book that I picked up in Vermont last summer, Women's Voices in Rowing, written by a Czech rower who interviewed 14 influential women in the sport.
I will say that the writing quality in this book is a bit all over the place, but it is worth tolerating that just for the sake of the many things the interviewed women have to say about their involvement in the sport of rowing over the years.
I was struck, for example, by commentary across multiple interviews about coaches in rowing who take contrasting views of either, "If you aren't here training with our team, you aren't really training at all," as compared to coaches who take the view of, "If you need to take an extra week here or there to be in your home country to train with your home country's high-performance crew, that's fine because I know you're getting high-quality training and you'll bring that back with you when you return to our program."
When I started rowing, it was with coaches who had a philosophy more aligned with the latter view, where they saw benefits to having multiple coaches work with subgroups of rowers, figuring that the diverse ways in which different coaches would coach would click with different rowers and ultimately lead to faster/better learning and mastery.
On the other hand, a couple years ago I listened to an interview with a national team rower, who responded to a question about how she came to trust her teammates by pointing out that the trust was developed through working hard alongside those teammates. It's harder to make that happen if teammates only come together occasionally or inconsistently.
Altogether, there's probably a good point of compromise between complete insularity and shuffling/variety. It was just interesting to read about different perspectives on the topic.
The other subject in the book that is getting me thinking dealt with efforts to establish/attain gender parity at the Olympics. The book was published shortly after the start of the pandemic, so most of the discussion focused on the 2020/2021 Olympics. It sounds like things were getting pretty close that year, but a quick internet search just now indicates that 2024 will be the first Olympics to actually have equal numbers of men and women participating.
This is a really big deal for the sake of global access to sport. This is the sort of thing that creates impetus for different countries to start new sports leagues for women.
Several of the women interviewed for the book have been involved in different aspects of the Olympic movement, so they shared some of their perspectives as insiders as to what has been involved in the deliberate, long-term effort to reach gender parity at the Olympics. There are still substantial gender gaps with regards to women in sports leadership positions, but overall the effort has involved key individuals putting their feet down and saying, "No, women need to be at the decision-making table, in leadership positions. Figure it out."
At the same time, the women interviewed in the book noted that they're observing a drop in the number of women in coaching or other high-level positions in rowing, as compared to the past. Most likely the accumulation of hundreds of individual decisions.
I just keep circling back to how different the gender representation is within some sports as compared to others. With under 10% women participating, the Paris-Brest-Paris is so abysmally far behind other sport events. If the Olympics can do it, why not in these other arenas, too?
And that, really, is a big part of why a lot of people have been working so hard to make this happen at the Olympics. To get more people to stand up and say, "If this can happen at the Olympics, it should happen here at home, too."
I'm not sure my "hassle factor" calculates out in quite the same way as the author's, but there's significant overlap. I'm still probably not going to go back to baking my own bread or making my own yogurt in the near future, just because my lifestyle here means that I just don't have THAT much time at home for cooking projects. But I was pleased to learn that Craime Fraiche is so simple to make.
After finishing that, I started back in on a book that I picked up in Vermont last summer, Women's Voices in Rowing, written by a Czech rower who interviewed 14 influential women in the sport.
I will say that the writing quality in this book is a bit all over the place, but it is worth tolerating that just for the sake of the many things the interviewed women have to say about their involvement in the sport of rowing over the years.
I was struck, for example, by commentary across multiple interviews about coaches in rowing who take contrasting views of either, "If you aren't here training with our team, you aren't really training at all," as compared to coaches who take the view of, "If you need to take an extra week here or there to be in your home country to train with your home country's high-performance crew, that's fine because I know you're getting high-quality training and you'll bring that back with you when you return to our program."
When I started rowing, it was with coaches who had a philosophy more aligned with the latter view, where they saw benefits to having multiple coaches work with subgroups of rowers, figuring that the diverse ways in which different coaches would coach would click with different rowers and ultimately lead to faster/better learning and mastery.
On the other hand, a couple years ago I listened to an interview with a national team rower, who responded to a question about how she came to trust her teammates by pointing out that the trust was developed through working hard alongside those teammates. It's harder to make that happen if teammates only come together occasionally or inconsistently.
Altogether, there's probably a good point of compromise between complete insularity and shuffling/variety. It was just interesting to read about different perspectives on the topic.
The other subject in the book that is getting me thinking dealt with efforts to establish/attain gender parity at the Olympics. The book was published shortly after the start of the pandemic, so most of the discussion focused on the 2020/2021 Olympics. It sounds like things were getting pretty close that year, but a quick internet search just now indicates that 2024 will be the first Olympics to actually have equal numbers of men and women participating.
This is a really big deal for the sake of global access to sport. This is the sort of thing that creates impetus for different countries to start new sports leagues for women.
Several of the women interviewed for the book have been involved in different aspects of the Olympic movement, so they shared some of their perspectives as insiders as to what has been involved in the deliberate, long-term effort to reach gender parity at the Olympics. There are still substantial gender gaps with regards to women in sports leadership positions, but overall the effort has involved key individuals putting their feet down and saying, "No, women need to be at the decision-making table, in leadership positions. Figure it out."
At the same time, the women interviewed in the book noted that they're observing a drop in the number of women in coaching or other high-level positions in rowing, as compared to the past. Most likely the accumulation of hundreds of individual decisions.
I just keep circling back to how different the gender representation is within some sports as compared to others. With under 10% women participating, the Paris-Brest-Paris is so abysmally far behind other sport events. If the Olympics can do it, why not in these other arenas, too?
And that, really, is a big part of why a lot of people have been working so hard to make this happen at the Olympics. To get more people to stand up and say, "If this can happen at the Olympics, it should happen here at home, too."
