Girls Wrestling and the Toyota Way Save America

Girls just want to wrestle and, according to an article by Tamar Lewin in the New York Times, some people think that is a problem. Even though only about 5,000 girls are currently wrestling on high school teams, the number is rapidly growing. Because there are still too few girls to regularly form their own teams, most of them join boy’s teams and compete against boys. The coach at Francis Lewis High School in Queens, New York Josue Herrera, expresses the general discomfort with this, “‘I think it’s better if it’s girl and girl…. If boys and girls wrestle together, it’s physically harder for the girl, but mentally harder for the boy.’”

While this dilemma probably does not rise to the level of historic significance, it does underscore some of the essential flaws in the way Americans often think and behave. The distress generated by coed wrestling emerges from a convergence of four of the most critical weaknesses in contemporary American society.

We give more importance to whether or not things are easy than we do to whether or not they are wise. We blur or, even, dismiss valuable distinctions through mystification rather than pay attention to what is really going on around us. We validate and reinforce victimization rather than promoting self-determination. We slavishly bow to authority rather than doing the hard work necessary to either understand or influence the decisions made in our name.

Coed wrestling genuinely does provoke uncomfortable feelings for a lot of people. It raises questions that need compelling answers before most folks will embrace it. Some of those questions are very difficult to formulate much less settle. When coach Herrera voices the idea that maybe we just shouldn’t go there at all, he is speaking for a lot of Americans, maybe even most Americans. It seems easier to disregard the Olympic medal aspirations of a few thousands of children, than engage in the exploration, self-examination and dialogue necessary to evolve a wise response to the issues raised by those aspirations.

This is a common reaction to discomfort in our country. In venue after venue, political, social, scientific and economic, we see Americans and their leaders dodging problems rather than solving them. The typical strategy for avoiding the hard work of engagement and resolution is to reduce complex issues to simple-minded debating points and then focus on building cadres of true-believers dedicated to driving their passionately held position down the throats of all dissenters. We see ourselves habitually going to war against anything unfamiliar.

Given this pattern of response, it comes as no surprise that girls’ wrestling is being politicized. In Minnesota, lawmakers are on the verge of repealing that part of state law which allows girls to participate with boys in public-school-sponsored sports when no girls’ teams are available. If this happens, coed wrestling will no longer be allowed in Minnesota's public high schools. How can we tolerate such non-solutions?

Yes, pound for pound, boys tend to be stronger than girls. Nevertheless, some girls consistently beat their male opponents. Moreover, this type of problem was solved in sports like boxing and, yes, even wrestling before the dawn of history. Bantam-weights do not box heavy-weights for obvious reasons. The familiar approach of applying a refined understanding of performance characteristics to creating competitive classifications solves the problem. If a familiar solution to the differences in capability between girls and boys is so obvious, what, really, is the problem with girls and boys wrestling each other? If it is not a problem of fairly weighting physical differences, what kind of problem is it?

In Lewin’s article, Jamie Block, who coaches wrestling at Dobbs Ferry High School, notes that “‘It’s always a little intimidating for the boys at first. They’re raised not to do this to a girl.’” He adds that the girls who come out for wrestling are serious and often have more training than some of the boys. The father of a girl with Olympic potential points out that for boys, coed wrestling opens a can of worms. In his experience, “‘A boy who goes out on the mat against a girl doesn’t win. If he beats her, he was supposed to, and if he doesn’t, he’s dead meat.’”

How do boys get the idea that girls are necessarily pushovers, unwilling or unable to take care of themselves? And who gave boys the idea that losing to a girl is different from losing to anyone else? A great deal of effort over the last century has gone into de-mystifying and empowering women. Had multiple generations of Americans not struggled with the issues of feminism and equal rights, our country would be significantly poorer and far less interesting today.

It’s Culture Darling

Obviously women are different from men. Many of the differences are unquestionably biological, but some are clearly the result of cultural conditioning. Cultural conditioning can be a good thing. It is one of the ways we pass on lessons learned from generation to generation. A great deal of what we believe about men and women derives from our cultural heritage.

Culture definitely matters. Beliefs have consequences, sometimes un-intended consequences. One of the greatest strengths of Western culture has been its slowly evolving ability to objectify reality and itself. We have a methodology, called science, which we use to test what works and what does not work in the real world.

When we apply that methodology to our cultural beliefs, we are sometimes forced to confront that some of the things we have been taught to believe aren’t good for us. Up through the nineteenth century, Americans believed that portliness in men was a sign of good health. Science has subsequently taught us that it is instead an invitation to heart disease, diabetes and a variety of other life shortening ailments.

The consequences of some of our beliefs about women and men are not entirely clear. Perhaps there is good reason for barring women in the military from combat, for reinforcing the idea that women should be the gentler sex, and for discouraging competition between the sexes. The point is that we don’t fully understand all of the consequences of the many things we are taught to believe, because much of what we believe is yet to be meaningfully tested.

It is very common for Americans to avoid dealing with reality by ignoring distinctions and promoting mystification rather than paying attention to what is really going on around us. For instance, the widespread failure to clearly distinguish between the roles of science and religion in society has generated a huge amount of pointless strife.

The controversy about intelligent design is a classic example. Because religion is rooted in faith and science is rooted in test, the concept of intelligent design is irrelevant. It is unnecessary to faith and easily discreditable by science. It could only become controversial through the blurring of distinctions and mystification. While those who engineered the controversy may have used it to successfully pursue personal or political agendas, it is otherwise a pointless and ultimately embarrassing confabulation.

Likewise, the idea that it is bad for girls to be strongly challenged physically or for boys to be strongly challenged mentally, reflects widely held cultural prejudices that seem questionable. If wrong, they certainly are not good for American society. Frankly, it is a little hard to believe that a nation can have too many physically strong, mentally agile citizens.

It is as though strongly challenging young women and men to fully achieve their potential were a form of victimization. But that implies that achieving goals should be easy. We reinforce the idea that struggle is avoidable. But struggle is only avoidable if you never attempt anything that is demanding or out of the ordinary.

Focused aspiration and sustained effort are essential to achieving maturity. In some sense, each of us constructs a self just as an artist creates a work of art. When people are denied skills and experiences with which to build justified confidence in themselves, their capacity for solving problems and making wise decisions is undermined. Their ability to take care of themselves is compromised.

When people lack the skills or inclination to dissect problems and create solutions, they naturally look outside themselves when faced with challenging situations. They look for comfort from leaders who express self-confidence and optimism, whether or not justified. Insecure people are prone to authoritarian tendencies and are more likely to slavishly follow rather than do the hard work of finding answers.

In the New York Times article, Tamar illustrated how strongly the idea of coed wrestling affects some school administrators. She described one athletic director who blocked a girl from joining a boy’s team by using rules intended for protecting younger athletes who want to compete alongside older ones. The director insisted that he was just following state guidelines, “‘It’s not up to me.’” Other officials countered that he clearly exceeded state requirements in his determination to shut the girl out. Would he have behaved so callously had he talked to coaches at other schools where girls have been successfully integrated into boy’s teams?

Authoritarians usually do not bother asking questions since they believe they already know the answers. They are themselves obedient to authority and they expect obedience in response to authority. For them, reference to a higher power trumps all other consideration.

People who have adopted authoritarian personalities are not inclined to evaluate what their leaders tell them. They defer to authority and characterize their sheepishness as a requisite expression of trust. Had they been challenged in early life and helped to master the challenges, one wonders if they might hold themselves and others to a higher level of transparency and accountability.

Cut to the Bottom-Line

This has ramifications for America that reach far beyond coed wrestling. Toyota is set to become the largest automobile manufacturer in the world, displacing General Motors. It has already been the most profitable for quite some time. One of the primary reasons for its success is that it has transcended the culture in which it originated. Toyota is far less Japanese than GM is American. From the beginning, Toyota’s leaders recognized that culture is critical to success. Success at anything depends on what people believe about themselves and what they expect from themselves. Recognizing this, Toyota has self-consciously evolved a culture, the Toyota Way, rooted in visionary pragmatism, commitment to social responsibility, and determination never to be satisfied.

Over the course of the last two generations, the United States, like GM, settled for good enough. Rather than embrace challenges that would have made us stronger. We pulled the covers over our head. The most obvious example is our failure to follow-up on the first tentative steps taken in the early seventies toward a post-petroleum future. More recently, we elected one of the worst Presidents in American history to a second term.

Instead of aggressively pursuing ways to create new wealth, the center of gravity of our economic system has shifted toward consolidation of existing wealth. Instead of creating greater transparency and participation, our political system has progressively disenfranchised anyone who does not embrace one of the two dominant, big-money parties.

This hasn’t all been bad. These have been wonderful times for an elite class of Americans who comprise roughly a tenth of a percent of the population. They sponsor and benefit from a culture of greed—greed for material possessions, greed for control and greed for self-aggrandizement. Their legacy is a country in decline by almost any measure of social and economic well-being. The lessons they took from reading Animal Farm, 1984, Brave New World and The Prince were not cautionary—quite the opposite. They were inspired to own and eat the whole egg, shell and all.

Can a culture in decline save itself. While history does not encourage optimism, there is at least a past from which we can learn. There are several potential avenues for re-invigorating American culture. The place to start is with a ferocious dedication throughout society to transparency and full participation.

In a rational community, this would be easy since substantial research indicates that transparency and democracy increase productivity. In case this is news to you, consider one of the studies published in 2003 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics. It compared the performance of corporate “dictatorships” to that of corporate “democracies.” According to its authors, Paul Gompers, Joy Ishii and Andrew Metrick,

Corporations are republics. The ultimate authority rests with the voters (shareholders). These voters elect representatives (directors) who delegate most decisions to bureaucrats (managers)… One extreme tilts toward democracy, reserves little power for management, and allows shareholders to quickly and easily replace directors. The other extreme tilts toward dictatorship, reserves extensive power for management, and places strong restrictions on shareholders’ ability to replace directors.

This very sophisticated study, which ranked 1,500 companies across 28 governance provisions, compared the performance of the 10% of firms with the most dictatorial governance against the performance of the 10% of firms with the most democratic governance. Through the 1990s, the returns from the stocks of the Democracy Portfolio outperformed the Dictatorship Portfolio by 8.5 percentage points per year. Certainly, if GM’s annual return on investment had been 8% higher over the last 15 years, Toyota would not be overtaking it, at least not anytime in the near future.

Another study compared the performance of companies that opened their accounting books and taught their employees how to understand them against companies that didn’t. Again, the more transparent companies outperformed those that reserved their accounting information to senior management.

Decades of research tells us that inclusiveness translates into superior performance. This doesn’t mean that elitists can’t be successful. Political history and the whole structure of managerial capitalism deny such a Pollyanna conclusion. The average pay of corporate CEOs didn’t jump from 30 to 200 times that of their lowest paid employees in the last twenty years because modern society is increasingly inclusive. What is important to understand it that the dramatic and accelerating consolidation of the U.S. economy into the hands of a class of politically enfranchised elitists has been accomplished at the cost of that greater fortune which would have been available to be shared by all had transparency and inclusiveness been promoted.

America can re-learn a great deal from Toyota’s successful culture. Visionary pragmatism and commitment to social responsibility are not new in America, just eclipsed by an atavistic re-interpretation of the social contract between labor, capital and management. Somehow American culture has become enthralled with the illusion that a sustainable society can be based on the pursuit of pure self-interest and immediate gratification. How many times throughout history have we seen elites promote this social equivalent of perpetual motion only to reduce their societies to dust and ashes?

The most difficult and possibly essential lesson from Toyota is that the job is never done—a determination never to be satisfied. Continuous improvement is a relatively new idea in human history. Broadening its application from manufacturing to culture building and politics would be especially powerful for Americans because it transmutes authoritarian defensiveness into a much healthier drive to make things better. Making things better requires that you understand what is going on in the first place, always a good thing.

Elitists strive to secure their prerogatives by exclusions of one sort or another. Energy that might have gone into making the world a better place for everyone, instead goes into creating social and economic barriers to entry. Inevitably those barriers become literal walls with the modern equivalent of broken glass embedded in their tops.

The elitist habit of mind looks for ways to keep girls from wrestling. It promotes socially stultifying authoritarianism. It makes America non-competitive which in turn provokes fear. Fear is readily manipulated into a defensive imperialism. So begins the journey down the rat-hole of history.

America is well on the way to becoming a GM among nations. We have fallen to 16^th place out of the 28 developed countries, our healthcare system’s performance ranks 37^th in the world, and we are the world’s largest debtor. We can start turning this around by helping girls who just want to wrestle.