COMMUNITY
COMPETING STANDARDS REVISITED Implicit Bias Awareness and its Impact on Gender-Based Success Disparity in Debate and Extemporaneous Speaking
J
ust over 10 years ago, the speech and debate community began noticing a problem. Tournament outcomes in debate and Extemporaneous Speaking— from the smallest local tournaments through NSDA Nationals—seemed increasingly to be dominated by male/masculine-presenting competitors. Success rates for female/feminine-presenting competitors, indicated by the number placing at small tournaments and the number advancing in elimination tournaments, were at uncomfortable lows. Many in the speech and debate community expressed concern that female students might begin opting out of these events, turning to other activities that allowed them greater opportunity to shine. For young women in speech and debate, and those who coached them, something needed to change.
The Backstory Concerns about gender disparity in speech and debate are nothing new, but neither are assumptions about the comparative abilities of masculine-presenting and feminine-presenting competitors, especially in the realm of debate and analytical speaking. For example, when Extemporaneous Speaking was added to the NSDA (then NFL) menu in the early 1930s, it was an event exclusively for male competitors. It took 20 years before a separate event for women was added, and another 30 before the
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gendered categories were finally unified into the current United States and International Extemporaneous Speaking events. For its part, the NSDA since the 1980s has worked to introduce new speech and debate opportunities for all students, irrespective of gender identity. A significant addition came in the 20022003 season with the creation of Public Forum Debate, then known as Controversy Debate. The new event proved to be immediately popular among female competitors, and for the first few years of the event, success rates for female
by Claire Witalec and Rich Kawolics
and male competitors at the NSDA National Tournament were on par. However, beginning in 2009, femininepresenting debaters were disproportionately eliminated in preliminary rounds, a trend that continued through the end of the next decade (Ronald and Kawolics, NSDA National Conference, 2019). The diminishing success rate for feminine-presenting debaters did not go unnoticed, and by the end of the 2010s, some attempts to quantify the problem were being made. One of the first attempts to do so came in 2017 when a group of high school debaters from Ohio published a qualitative analysis of ballots from a single tournament. Although their data were limited, they provided a strong indication that feminine-presenting debaters received more criticism while masculine-presenting debaters received more encouragement from judges (Reardon et al., 2017). A year later, a group of student researchers from Laurel School conducted extensive analysis of entries and success in Public Forum, Lincoln-Douglas, and Extemporaneous Speaking from 50 tournaments across the U.S. The results, published in Rostrum in April 2018,
showed a significant and persistent disadvantage for feminine-presenting competitors in all four events (Lynn et al., 2018). This disadvantage was troubling in light of prior academic research that had shown parity or advantage for feminine-presenting students in all factors believed to be useful in effective debate and analytical speaking. Subsequent scrutiny of debate ballots in a blind study conducted by the same researchers also confirmed the reality of more frequent criticism of feminine-presenting debaters for aggression, emotion, and tone, and that these criticisms were frequently linked to competitive outcomes (Ronald and Kawolics, NSDA National Conference, 2019). Although far from comprehensive, the data indicated that the success deficit for feminine-presenting debaters was likely the result of structure. This conclusion was justified in part by mounting evidence that feminine-presenting debaters were criticized for their debating “style” more often than masculinepresenting debaters, as well as a growing body of scholarly work showing the impact of implicit bias in employment, education, and politics.