Junior examines boathouse dynamics

During their spring break trip to Tampa, Fla., members of the women's crew were lying on the beach working on their tan when they were approached by junior sociology major Jordan Bice, a member of the men's lightweight crew. He asked the them if they would mind being interviewed for his junior paper. Like all kind Princeton students, the girls agreed and gave Bice a wealth of information that eventually helped create his 60-page JP.

Bice's paper explored the social dynamics of the boathouse and how current media and social pressures affect those dynamics. He conducted interviews with 40 members of all four Tiger crews, including approximately half the lightweight and heavyweight men and about a third of the lightweight and open women.

"[The boathouse] seemed like a pretty unique place and crew in itself is sort of an isolated social environment. In that context, I could look at how the sport is treated and try to make generalizations for sports in general and sports at Princeton," Bice said.

Hailing from Berkley, Calif., Bice has always lived in a politically active community and has been interested in racial and other forms of institutionalized inequality from the time he was in high school.

"[Sociology] seemed to give background understanding on why people behaved a certain way, and ways that policy or action could be taken to improve the conditions people go through," Bice said. "Liberals and conservatives always use certain lines of argument, and I just wanted to sift through and see what was true and what was not."

The sociology of sport had always interested him, so he decided to write his JP on a sport he was familiar with and on which he could gather a lot of information.

Bice's study operated under the sociological assumption that athletic competition is a social sphere where certain societal ideas can be reinforced, such as the notion that men are physically — if not mentally — superior to women.

"I just wanted to see if at a place like Princeton, where maybe more so than in professional sports or other collegiate sports there might be a greater push to have women's equality, [the attitude was open to] really establish women's sports as a legitimate athletic enterprise," Bice said.

Currently, all four crews are highly ranked on a national level, so a comparison among them is not a flight of fancy. Both women's teams and the heavyweight men are ranked No.1, while the lightweight men are ranked fifth.

So, keeping in mind the relative equality of the crews compared to their peers and that the fundamentals of rowing do not change at all from a men's boat to a women's boat, the main thrust of the JP explored the issue of the legitimacy of women's athletics by examining the social hierarchy, or "meritocracy," of the boathouse. The boathouse hierarchy can be explained by who sits at the front of the "tanks" and is determined by an all-important pecking order that is rarely violated.

In the Princeton boathouse, it is as follows: heavyweight men first, lightweight men second, open women third and lightweight women fourth.

"When I asked why that was fair to the teams, they were like, 'It's just the way sports is, it's a meritocracy,'" Bice said.

Bice's study suggested that the heavyweight men and open women as teams seem to show more athleticism than the lightweight men, and if the boathouse really does operate under a meritocracy, the resources weren't divided solely on the basis of athletic merit.

"My own personal experience is that the best athletes are the openweight women, the heavyweight men, the lightweight men and the lightweight women in that order," Bice said.

When Bice noted this discrepancy between what the pecking order should be based on his study and what was actually seen in the boathouse, he decided to examine why the "meritocracy" theory wasn't quite correct.

"There was a distinction between a good athlete and a valuable athlete," Bice said. "Openweight women were considered by the heavyweight men [to work] harder than the lightweight guys and to be better athletes." There was a tendency, however, to give less value to women's crew than lightweight crew, to give them less access to the boathouse resources and to justify it based on differences in athletic value.

But this didn't explain why the open women were not considered to be a better crew than the lightweight or heavyweight men.

Bice argues that the heavyweight men believed the open women "achieved their maximum output to a greater degree than the lightweight men did" but that, because the lightweight men can move the boat faster, they have more value as athletes.

"The nature of rowing favors male bodies, and this aspect is often confused to suggest that men are better athletes," Bice said. "If it was a sport like long distance swimming, where, because of buoyancy, women have a physical advantage, I don't think it would be fair to say that male athletes are inferior and should be penalized for it. In this way, the context of the sport is important, and I argue that because most sports are built to test male bodies, it is unfair to directly compare men and women and have that justify unequal division of resources."

Though Bice's study suggests that there is a tendency for women's athletics to be unfairly marginalized compared to men's athletics, he also highlighted the positive character of women's participation in rowing, as it shows that female athletes can be strong, powerful and very fast.

In addition, Bice's study showed how women's athletics can be slightly more complicated than men's athletics as a result of the pressure to conform to popular beauty standards. His study also highlighted how women's athletic teams deal with these pressures differently from men's teams.

Bice's study, then, proves the inequality and what some might call the unfortunate illegitimacy of women's athletics. Crew may be the best possible scenario for women's and men's sports to have equal value, but even though female athletes in this context were considered better athletes, and their athleticism was recognized over men's , the heavyweight men still assumed they worked harder and had more natural ability by virtue of their being heavyweight men.

"Sport still reaffirmed the premise that men are fundamentally superior to women by comparing men and women directly," Bice said. "They are saying women have less athletic value because they can't move the boat as fast."

But even though women's sports may have been marginalized or looked over, Bice found that crew was having a positive effect on body image despite neatly fitting sociological stereotypes.

"Women's crews, as a result of intense media pressure or social pressure to conform to feminine standards of beauty, had really a very organized and strong stand against [being critical of each other's weight in a beauty context]," Bice said. "The women's teams as a group were interested in developing bodies conducive to being the fastest athletes, and in this way represented a 'rejection of traditional standards of beauty' as the primary context for feminine worth and instead adopted the identity of an athlete," Bice said.

Bice's analysis of women's athletics at Princeton suggests that while women's rowing is actively challenging notions of male supremacy in the sphere of athletics, even in a liberal-minded place like Princeton, athletes haven't reached a point where women's sports are valued to the same degree as men's sports.

The team just doesn't "go there" and "it would be totally inappropriate" to talk about weight or tell a girl she was too heavy. Bice also commented, however, on how the team members encourage each other to eat a lot, including carbohydrates.

"Part of their identity is they're girls who eat a lot, and they were sort of proud to take that on," Bice said.