Sasha Pachev
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« Reply #2 on: October 17, 2012, 12:24:43 pm » |
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Last time I checked Julie Thomas had 6 children. Amber has three (unless she secretly added one while I was not counting). Lindsey Dunkley has three. Over the years, and this year in particular, we have seen mothers dominate the podium in local marathons and half marathons. I find this quite significant. Pregnancy alone puts you at a competitive disadvantage. Having a baby to take care of only adds to that, and that baby takes some time to become somewhat self-sufficient. Then another one comes, and more.
How does this work? It is not like all women in Utah are mothers. From the demographic point of view if we look at the active LDS group where you would expect to find the highest concentration of mothers we would observe that even in that group we have a high number of women who do not have children. We have heavily populated singles wards in the Church, and in the family wards there are are plenty of single young women and couples that do not have children. Outside of the Church the percentage of women without children is even higher. You would expect that the distribution of talent is the same in all groups. Having a small but significant population with even a relatively small competitive advantage will result in domination - as an example consider how East Africa dominates the distance running in spite of the fact that the population of East Africa is much smaller than let's say China. So with that in mind you would expect a woman without children who on average is younger, does not yet have as many responsibilities, does not have to think how she is going to handle a crying baby in the middle of the night when she needs to recover after a grueling workout, and has not yet experienced the fallout of multiple pregnancies to be like an East African against Chinese even if we assumed that there are as many mothers for a woman without children in Utah as there are Chinese for an East African (Kenyan, Ethiopian, Eritrian, or Ugandan), which is by far not the case.
So given the above, how in the world do mothers manage to not only be somewhat competitive, but to dominate? I have some ideas, but I will let the mothers speak for themselves.
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