The article that I am going to use was found off of math feed. The article is titled “Did Sexism Play a Role in Serena Williams’ Loss?” and was published on October 11, 2018 by Allison Goldstein. The article was focused on Serena Williams and her recent match at the US open this September.
Serena was losing in the match, and what further contributed to her loss was a point penalty, and a game penalty. She was given a warning for coaching, got a point taken away for racket abuse, and then a game taken away for verbal abuse with the umpire. There is a lot of controversy surrounding this recent issue. Serena pulled many cards whilst arguing with the umpire, and one of them was that she was penalised because she was a woman. Although a fan of Serena Williams, I felt that her argument was flawed and that she really did deserve to get penalised those points because she genuinely did violate rules of the game. Goldstein does a good job of anaylisting Serena’s case, and incorporates valid points which clears things up.
Prior to reading this article, I had already read a couple articles regarding this topic in class. One of them was written by the New York Times and the other was an article refuting the NYtimes through a compilation of tweets from Serena’s husband. What was interesting was that a couple of the points mentioned in the refuting article was mentioned in this one, only this time, formally written.
The article with Serena’s husband had many valid points, but lacked a genuine tone because it was in the form of tweets, and even included “memes” or jokes. This article did a much better job of establishing a serious tone, and had fair analysis throughout it.
Goldstein explained that although statistics show that men get fined more often, this does not mean that women get fined less as the total number of times that men act out is not known. Goldberg then goes into other factors of the issue, such as the impacts of emotions in women and men, and supports her theories with her own research.
The way that Goldstein concludes her article is also quite admirable. After laying out all of her evidence and providing a really strong argument, she still goes back to a neutral stance on the situation and only says that the situation “deserves a second look”.
I really enjoyed this article because unlike some other texts we have read in the past like “The Mathematician Reads the Newspaper”, the math concept is more simple and can be applied more easily than other concepts. Now when I see a statistics in the news that involves a rate, I will know that it is important to also know the full number that the rate is being compared to so that I can understand the statistic more accurately rather than blindly taking in information that may be framed intentionally to make people misinterpret a situation.
