An Empirical Study of Gender Differences in Competitive High School Debate

Abstract

Gender differences in competitive environments have been studied extensively; however, the majority of literature concerns activities with an objective winner. In this paper, we examine gender differences in high school Public Forum debate, a two vs. two activity where judges subjectively decide the winner. We constructed a dataset with 44 variables and 125,087 unique debate rounds during the 2014-2015 to 2019-2020 school years. Using logistic modeling, we document a large difference in win rates between teams of different gender compositions, with female-female teams 17.1% less likely and male-female teams 10.0% less likely to win a debate round against male-male teams. However, there is no gender gap in win rates for novice debaters, suggesting that the disparity does not occur from innate entry ability differences but rather appears alongside experience in debate. We also find a large difference in participation rates between female and male students, which begins at the 9th grade level and is exacerbated over time due to female debaters being 30.34% more likely to quit than male debaters. Finally, we find that a higher ratio of female to male debaters from the same school reduces attrition rates of female debaters.