ted their brothers or fathers for fostering an interest in football; rarely did they seem embarrassed. Perhaps this showed that male spheres of knowledge were more valued, or maybe it showed that girls' "tomboy" interests are not stigmatized while boys' "sissy" interests are.
My colleague and I used the exercise as a jumping-off point for discussing gender in society. We pointed out, for example, that in some executive lunchrooms, professional sports are a much more common topic of conversation than interior decorating. (That's certainly the case here in Washington, D.C., especially on Monday mornings during the National Football League season.) Indeed, the woman executive with nothing to contribute about sports can feel alienated or be viewed as aloof. Some years ago, The Learning Annex put out a self-help book to remedy this problem, How to Talk Sports to Men. "Does ERA mean only the Equal Rights Amendment to you?" it asked. Women who expressed their ideas in sports imagery, it suggested, became "easier for [men] to understand, even if the ideas ... remain the same."
Of course, some women didn't care. During the spring semester in 1993, coincidentally after I had used the exercise successfully in class, I watched the Super Bowl on television with three other people. An interesting play had just taken place on the field, and the other male and I were discussing it, when I noticed that the two women were conversing intensely about the name for the color of the sport coat worn by Dallas coach Jimmy Johnson, striding up and down on the sidelines. "Life imitates sociology class," I concluded.
The matter is not really trivial, however. Seemingly inconsequential differences in knowledge can lead to significant stratification by gender. Years ago, for example, working with Phyllis Rosser and John Katzman, I examined the serious gap in female performance on the math part of the SAT. We looked at performance by gender on old SAT items. Simply siting one item at a girls camp instead of a boys camp prompted girls to do better, boys worse. The item with the largest male/female gap of all involved sports statistics. Even my son -- no math whiz in high school and now an English teacher -- mastered sports statistics. They were important to him. By deleting that item and altering others, we were able to come up with a math test on which girls performed as well as boys.
Incidentally, "SAT" is not an abbreviation for "Scholastic Aptitude Test," even though most Americans think it is. Partly as a result of arguments I made to Nancy Cole, then Vice-President of Educational Testing Services, purveyor of the SAT, after Cole became president of ETS, the company removed "aptitude" from the title of the SAT (See The Validity of Testing in Education and Employment), renaming it the "Scholastic Assessment Test." A few years later, painfully aware that "Assessment Test" was redundant, ETS renamed the SAT once more. Now it merely stands for "S.A.T." -- the initials mean nothing at all!
Of course, our little teaching exercise was hardly the last word about gender and color. Indeed, a recent article in Smithsonian magazine (March, 2013) "50 Shades of Gray Matter," claims that women may have a genetic ability to distinguish colors better than men. The author, Libby Copeland, knows that "women possess a larger vocabulary than men for describing colors." This, she believes, already provides indirect evidence that it's genetic. (I would have thought exactly the opposite: the larger vocabulary suggests that girls have spent more time learning about colors and thinking about colors.)
As well, she cites research by Israel Abramov, "a psychologist and behavioral neuroscientist" at Brooklyn College. He found that "an object that women experience as orange will look slightly more yellowish to men." He deduces tentatively that Darwinian evolution is responsible: "males needed to see distant, moving objects, like bison, while females had to be better judges of color when scouring for edible plants." Copeland concludes, "Someday, further studies could reveal whet