Author(s) :

Rosemary Spindler.

Volume/Issue :

Abstract :

High school debate offers the opportunity for students to develop skills critical to leadership and civic participation, yet there remains a gender gap in both performance and participation. Several empirical papers have shown that attrition is a significant cause of the gap, but previous research has focused on national or collegiate vs. regional competition, and more technical events like Lincoln Douglas or Policy debate. Instead, this paper explores the gender gap in Public Forum high school debate at the regional level. Specifically, it determines what effect gender has on a team’s success at the Texas Forensic Association State tournaments over the last two years. This data set was chosen strategically to analyze judge bias as a possible explanation: Public Forum is often judged by nontechnical judges, leaving results more subject to personal bias; second, by the time competitors get to TFA, they have already shown persistence, minimizing the attrition explanation; and third, regional competitions are a more inclusive space. Publicly available data was collected from Tabroom, the system most commonly used to run tournaments. Using an Ordinary Least Squares regression with gender and prior experience as explanatory variables, it was found that an all female team was about 7 percent less likely to win a round than an all male team, given the same levels of experience. This result had high significance, although the relatively low R-squared value suggests there are variables other than prior experience and gender that are relevant to understanding success to be explored further.