Post: #1

Yes
That is a strong WTF.


Came across this study.
Wait for it:

Quote:The present study provides the first evidence that increased gender equality in a society releases the human potential not only of women, but also of men

Ok, I'm game. Let's check it out.

Quote:Numeric counts of medals won by male and female athletes for each country in the Summer 2012 and Winter 2014 Olympics were gathered from The Official Website of the Olympic Movement (2014). Each country’s gender gap score, a composite measure of economic, political, health, and educational equality between the sexes, was obtained from the most recent World Economic Forum’s Global Gender Gap Report (2013)...
Further assessed were control variables including gross domestic product (GDP), population size, and income inequality (GINI index), obtained from the most recent statistics produced by The World Bank (2012).

Ahhhh!
So you only looked at 2 Olympic games. Mental note #1: Size of sample is not large enough.

Quote: There were a total of 121 countries for which data on all variables could be obtained. We initially gathered data on medals won only for the Winter 2014 Olympics but decided to also include the Summer 2012 Olympics since northern countries dominate winter sports, introducing a potential confound.

Wait!
You did not stop to think that the winter Olympics are also biasing your sample, even if you actually incorporate the "regular" Olympic games?
Mental note #2: Clearly biased sample

Quote: separate regressions showed that a country's gender gap score significantly predicted Olympic medals won by women (b = 0.44, p = .003) and men (b = 0.31, p = .019), even controlling for latitude, population, GDP, and income inequality

That is funny!
The more you get "Gender Equality" the more Women will win medals. Wait, If your "Gender Equality" goes up 100%, you females will have 44% more medals, and the Males 31% more. Wow, we should totaly have more "Gender Equality" because then we will be better at sports, Right?

Quote:Gross domestic product and population size also predicted medals won, such that wealthier countries and larger countries won more medals. Latitude was not a significant predictor

Oh, the richer the country, more medals? Why not have more children - Then it will win more medals.
Thank god that latitude, a human concept, has no correlation. I would not know how to explain it.

Here is something interesting:

Quote:Interestingly, general income inequality in a country likewise predicted medals. The greater a country's economic equality, the more Olympic medals it won. However, a country’s income inequality and gender equality were not significantly correlated

More Gender equality does not equal Income equality.

Let's have a closer look at that "Gender Equality" thing:

Quote: Splitting each country’s gender gap score by each of the four components (economic, political, health, and educational equality between the sexes) revealed that it was educational equality that best predicted Olympic medals

So - It is not that you have economic equality of genders, or political or even health (because women live longer and have more research of their related illnesses) but it is access to education.
So if you have more females in higher education, you win more medals.

Quote: Rather, gender inequality is likely to hurt both women and men by encouraging stereotypes that limit their ability to reach their full potential as individuals

Let's recap:
1. Size of sample is not large enough - You want to show it? Go for 40 years of Olympic games. You know what? Go for all of them.
That may show us something.

2. Clearly biased sample - Drop the winter Olympics. Yes, the Jamaica team may win at bobsledding , but it still a biased sample.

3. Here is something very important:

Quote:Overall, medal counts were highly skewed towards zero with a variance (SD = 18.79) greater than the mean (M = 9.25)

For those who are less math-heads, it means that there were a lot of countries with no medals, and I mean a lot. This skews results, and even when you use the right regressions - you have a problem.

4. Olympic games is a professional business. It is not about a median society index, but about the 1% of athletes in that society. You want to draw conclusions? You are looking at the wrong correlations!
Correlation does not imply causation.
I would suggest correlation with national sport budget as % of GDP, Gender gap in sports (example allocation of budgets per gender) and importance of sports in that nation (let's say based on % out of overall internet traffic in that nation).

5. They did not take data per specific years (2012, 2014) but what was available. So there is an underlying assumptions that controlled variables did not change in those years.
Wow - that is bad methodology!

My take:
Flawed methodology, biased sample.
BAD RESEARCH.

Post: #2

How much brain-sweat went into compiling these statistics? What a waste of human potential. I'm willing to put down Vegas money that "Gender Equality" (whatever the hell it is they're measuring) and "Olympic performance" (itself, a dubious measure as you noted) are both correlated to a single factor:

Wealth.

Poor farmers in the third world don't have time for gender equality, nor the extra cash for creatine.

This study pisses me off because I'm pretty sure that, somehow, I'm paying for these jackasses to sit around making it.

Post: #3

BREAKING NEWS: increased ice cream consumption PROVEN to cause more shark attacks.

Data sheet maps

Post: #4

This "study" looks like homework from a teenager.

Post: #5

Hold on a sec. You're going to site P scores without giving us the ones that tell us if this observed correlation actually means anything?

STUPID move. You're not going to impress anyone who doesn't know what those numbers mean, and everyone who does is going to be asking what your r^2 is.

For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, read this link. It's going to equip you to destroy a vast majority of bullshit "statistics" that people quote:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_interval

Post: #6

Conservatives are anti-science! You guys just blindly dismiss all research that you don't like the outcome of, with your fancy nonsense terms like "publication bias" and "spurious correlation"!

On another note, those studies claiming to find innate differences in the male and female brain are clearly pseudoscientific bullshit. I mean come on, they're obviously just a lame excuse for sexist bigots to remain sexist bigots.

Post: #7

delete, accidental duplicate

Post: #8

Wait, are they saying that wealthy societies with gender equality win more gold medals than societies more concerned with fighting the plague and killing women who fornicate?

I'm sure feminism is why the US and Australia are more successful than Burundi and Yemen.