Girls' Sports Build More Than Strong Bodies

Girls' Sports Build More Than Strong Bodies: "

Since I'm a skier, I love watching the Winter Olympics. All those amazing athletes performing amazing feats, on snow and ice no less! This year my 11-year-old daughter is just as engaged, in part because she has so many exceptional women to root for. Downhill racer Lindsey Vonn and the other women starring in Vancouver (how about that Jenny Potter and her three goals against Russia in women's ice hockey!) are surely an inspiration to girls everywhere.

Let's hope so anyway, because a new study from the Wharton School of Business finds that girls' participation in sports makes them more successful in all kinds of endeavors. The author discovered that Title IX, the 1972 law ending gender discrimination in funding of high school and college sports, opened a lot more doors for women than the gates to arenas.

Thanks to Title IX, girls' participation in school sports shot up from one in 27 in 1972 to one in four in 1978. It is now one in three. But their rate of sports participation is not uniform in every state, for a variety of reasons. Wharton professor Betsey Stevenson studied the variations in girls' sports participation state-by-state, and after controlling for a number of other variables was able to correlate those results with their success later in life.

Stevenson found that a 10-point rise in the percentage of girls that participate in high school sports leads to a one percentage point rise in female college attendance and a one to two point rise in labor-force participation. She also found that the advent of Title IX is connected to 20% of the increase in female attainments in higher education in the years since, and 40% of the rise in employment.

“It’s not just that the people who are going to do well in life play sports, but that sports help people do better in life,” Stevenson told the New York Times. “While I only show this for girls, it’s reasonable to believe it’s true for boys as well.”

Stevenson doesn't explain why sports participation confers such benefits, but I have a feeling the lessons learned from sports -- a competitive spirit, the value of team work, the self-confidence conferred by physical abilities -- are critical to success in most fields of endeavor later in life. Anyone have any other theories?

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