Saturday, March 31, 2007
"There's No Worse Crime in Baseball Than Being A Woman"?
So says a former female baseball umpire who sued Major League Baseball, the Triple-A Alliance, and the Baseball Umpire Development Program for sex discrimination a number of years ago.
And the Slate article in which this quote appears does ask a very good question: why doesn't baseball have more female umpires? There have only been six female minor league and no major league umpires in the history of the professional game.
The (partial) answer given by the article: "Little League baseball is still a boys' game. Young girls tend to play softball or another sport, so they rarely join baseball teams in high school or college. And since many prospective umpires are former baseball players, there's an especially small pool of women who have a passion for umpiring."
This explanation is just too easy. It does not appear, for instance, that this reasoning would explain why there also only two female NBA referees. Girls and boys both play basketball and a good number of women play professional basketball.
Seems to me that gender bias better explains the almost complete lack of female officials in male professional sports. How else to explain this "inexorable zero"?
And at least for basketball and baseball, being male should not be a bfoq for these positions.
PS
https://lawprofessors.typepad.com/laborprof_blog/2007/03/theres_no_worse.html
Comments
Achilles:
First, I wasn't giving a model exam answer on the topic in this post, just my quick take on what I see as a troubling story from the professional sports world.
Second, it appears that you are unfamiliar with the employment discrimination concept of the "inexorable zero" from the Supreme Court's Teamsters case. Basically, in pattern and practice group employment discrimination cases, courts rely on statistics to determine whether an employer has a standard operating procedure of discriminating against certain groups, like women. In such cases, when no women have been hired, as is the case with female major league umpires, "fine tuning of the statistics [do not] obscure[] the glaring absence of minority [employees].... [T]he company's inability to rebut the inference of discrimination came not from a misuse of statistics but from ‘the inexorable zero’"). See Teamsters, 431 U.S. 324, 342 n.23 (1977).
In other words, all of the questions you pose in your comment cannot hide the fact that the MLB has not hired ONE female major league baseball umpire in its entire existence. Also, if you read the Slate article in full, you will see there is evidence from a previous New York case that professional baseball has engaged in this type of gender discrimination in the past and a female umpire was successful in suing to be able to ump in Class A ball.
Because I believe the evidence suggests, based on this Slate article and other articles on this topic I have read in the press, that there are at least SOME qualified females who could be MLB umpires in the relevant labor pool, I think the inference of discrimination is appropriate here.
FWIW, I also believe gender discrimination is a serious allegation, but I believe the statistics here support my allegation.
Finally, in the future, if you want to have your comments published on this blog, I hope you will use a more civil tone and not resort to insults.
Posted by: Paul Secunda | Mar 31, 2007 9:23:19 PM
Another reason Paul's suspicion of gender discrimination seems valid is the blatant nature of baseball players' and officials' discrimination against the few women serving as sports reporters and baseball teams' front office officials. You hear comments like "women don't belong here" and harshly misorynistic attacks. So it's not a stretch to suspect that one reason there are so few female umpires is that same anti-women bias.
It's true that, as the commenter notes, probably few women apply or get the requisite training (e.g., a background in high school or college baseball). But "there aren't many women in this field at all" isn't just an alternative explanation to "they're keeping women out"; historically, fields with few women tend to feature more discrimination, precisely because women are seen as "outsiders" who "don't belong." A lot of the really bad cases of physical harassment, for example, tend to be about "the first women pipefitter at XYZ Corp." or "the first women firefighter in the City of XYZ," etc.
Maybe I can get a solid C- for this point, in contrast to Secunda's D-?
Posted by: Scott Moss | Apr 1, 2007 11:57:01 AM
I apologize for the harsh tone at the opening of my last comment, but I stand by my basic point. Prof. Secunda may not realize it, but he has a habit of articulating "suspicions" of unlawful discrimination that appear to be accusations. Accusations of unlawful discrimination have their place, but they should be based on more substantial evidence than media accounts of plaintiffs' untested complaints.
Yes, I have read _Teamsters_. The "inexorable zero" comment that is so beloved by many employment discrimination professors appeared in a footnote to the Supreme Court opinion. In the _text_ of that opinion, the Court referred to an substantial mass of statistical evidence, bolstered by testimony of over 40 specific instances of discrimination by the defendant union. _Teamsters_ does not stand for the proposition that uttering "inexorable zero" magically proves employment discrimination. Plaintiffs must produce other evidence, and in _Teamsters_ they produced it, in spades. As far as I know, no such evidence has ever been produced against MLB.
I did read the Slate article. I noticed that the two specific cases cited in the article occurred 35 years ago and 18 years ago, respectively. The latter case settled, and the article does not refer to any post-disco-era cases in which the plaintiff actually prevailed on the merits. The Slate author didn't bother to obtain any comments from the evil oppressors--I mean, MLB. This is the evidence on which Prof. Secunda bases an accusation? Oh, there were also the "other articles" he read in the press. I can't comment on those articles, but I doubt that they were any more authoritative.
I understand that blogs are not law journals, but whenever they write publicly, law professors have a responsibility to be ... well ... responsible, especially when they're commenting in their area of specialty. They shouldn't toss out accusations of discrimination every time they read a juicy web article.
It's entirely possible that unlawful discrimination does exist in the professional baseball umpiring business. It's also possible that it exists in a variety of other industries, but I'm not about to make public accusations without some substantial evidence. Perhaps we should find some evidence first?
Posted by: Achilles | Apr 2, 2007 8:23:50 PM
Something to cheer about: http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=1639#comments
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | Apr 4, 2007 4:43:51 PM
Are you really a law professor? This comment would barely rate a D- if it were an exam answer.
Before you glibly accuse the major sports leagues of unlawful discrimination, you need to do more than examine one Slate article, based on the self-serving statements of a former plaintiff who never proved her allegations. How many women have actually applied for umpire positions? What were their qualifications? What is the percentage who have been accepted into the program, compared to men? Have MLB or the NBA been discouraging women from applying?
I have no affiliation with MLB or the NBA. I just happen to believe that gender discrimination is a very serious accusation, and no one (least of all a law professor, supposedly an expert in the field) should casually toss around such an accusation without any evidence.
Posted by: Achilles | Mar 31, 2007 5:00:45 PM