Gender dynamics in high school policy debate: propagating gender hierarchies in advocating ‘better’ futures

ABSTRACT

High school policy debate is an academically rigourous and highly competitive US activity—elite debaters often go on to top universities and pursue successful careers. Access to the skills that debate teaches is invaluable for high schoolers, but these benefits are not equally accessible to all. As a historically male-dominated activity, the number of male debaters remains disproportionately high and the activity continues to be highly influenced by gender hierarchies. Through semi-structured interviews, this paper addresses the question: what makes high school policy debate a unique educational space for producing gender dynamics, and what are the impacts of those dynamics on debaters that identify as women? Our findings show that debate is a complex and contradictory space. While women in debate are disadvantaged by gender imbalance, implicit activity norms, and instances of objectification and sexual violence, the activity also arms students with tools to disrupt these gender hierarchies.

KEYWORDS:

• Secondary education < EDUCATION SECTORS
• gender-based violence < SUBSTANTIVE TOPICS
• sexual harassment < SUBSTANTIVE TOPICS
• critical pedagogies < SOCIAL / CULTURAL CLASSIFICATIONS

Introduction

The current moment in the United States invites deep reflection on how our institutions, including those for secondary education, can be made more inclusive and equitable. School closures in response to the COVID-19 pandemic require us to think deeply about digital equity, even as protests for racial equity highlight the entrenched nature of structural racism across society. We need educational spaces in which students of all backgrounds and identities can engage these issues and enact more equitable futures. We argue that competitive debate is one such educational space. It teaches young people enormously valuable skills such as argumentation, problem solving, and public speaking, and also gives students a platform to express their ideas about how global and domestic issues should be solved (Peters 2009; Antilla 2013; Stanbrough 2016; Anderson and Mezuk 2012). However, the radical openness of the activity, in terms of its lack of both many formal rules for engagement and structured systems of discipline, also leaves it vulnerable to more problematic social norms. In this paper we focus explicitly on gender dynamics within the activity. Past studies have found that women debaters are less competitively successful, more likely to quit, and routinely experience gender discrimination and sexual harassment (Hyde and Kay 2015; Tartakovsky 2016; Fiebrantz 2013), and more recently debaters have pushed for the activity to engage in its own #MeToo movement in response to gender-based violence (Gray 2020). There is a great need to understand the dynamics that prevent the activity from advancing inclusivity, so that debate can live up to its true potential for empowerment. In this paper we examine gender dynamics within high school policy debate, with a focus on how the activity both reproduces unequal gender hierarchies and creates spaces to contest those hierarchies.

Gender and high school debate

Policy debate is one of several styles of competitive high school debate taught in the US, and distinguishable by its rules and norms surrounding affirmative case creation (an affirmative case is a proposed, debatable plan that is introduced in the first speech and anchors the debate round), communication style, and speaker points. Each year, the activity focuses on one topic related to US policy and crafts a resolution. Although debaters have creative control over their own affirmative cases, they are expected to stay within the bounds of the resolution and to center their case around US government action. The affirmative case, and the following speeches, are delivered at lightning speed (often upwards of 350 words per minute). This is a practice known as ‘spreading’ and it causes policy debate to sound intimidating – even incomprehensible – to many. In each round the judge evaluates the debaters by choosing a winning team (policy debaters compete in teams of two) and assigning speaker points to each debater, which are totaled to determine tournament speaker awards.

Scholars have studied the relationship between debate and gender, but gaps remain. Most research focuses on quantitative studies about the effect of gender on success in intercollegiate policy debate. Women debaters win less frequently and receive lower speaker points than male debaters (Hyde and Kay 2015; Matz and Bruschke 2006; Bruschke and Johnson 1994; Dhillon and Larson 2011), partially because the low retention of women debaters causes men to be disproportionately experienced within the activity (Hyde and Kay 2015; Poapst and Harper 2017; Mabrey and Richards 2017). Even though these studies are not specific to high school, they nevertheless show a strong historical trend of gender inequity in policy debate generally. This trend is echoed in studies of gender in other forms of debate, such as Parliamentary, Public Forum, and Lincoln Douglas (Skarb 2003; Manchester and Friedley 2003; Mazur 2001; Tartakovsky 2016, 2017; Pierson 2013).

Fewer studies consider the specifics of how implicit gender bias informs the competitive and social experience of women in debate. Poapst and Harper (2017) connected the experience of women and racial/ethnic minorities in debate to muted group theory, which argues that individuals who belong to muted groups must conform to the dominant script if they want to succeed (Kramarae 2005; Dillard-Knox 2014). In discussing the birth of radical black argumentation styles, Reid-Brinkley (2019) argued that ‘if the image of the nationally successful debater is a white, male, and economically privileged body then […] their practices, behaviors, and their identities become the models or thrones upon which others must sacrifice their identities in the pursuit of “the ballot,” or “the win”’ (127). Scholars have explored, for example, how norms of competitiveness and aggressive communication styles put women – who are also normatively expected to cooperative and docile – into an inescapable double bind with social and competitive consequences. These studies speak to how femininity (or lack thereof) is leveraged to discredit women, impacting their treatment, win rates, and speaker points (Matthews 2016; Spera, Mhaoileoin, and O’Dwyer 2013; Fiebrantz 2013; Meredith 2013; Warner 2003).

In addition to exclusion via community norms, many women in policy debate also face issues of sexual harassment (Stepp et al. 1994; Bjork and Trapp 1994; Greenstreet 1996). Stepp et al. (1994), for example, found that 64% of female debaters and coaches responded affirmatively when asked if they had ever experienced sexual harassment. Greenstreet (1996) argues that the high occurrence of sexual harassment in policy debate causes women debaters to quit the activity more frequently than men. These studies, although outdated and restricted to intercollegiate debate, evidence policy debate’s long history of rampant sexual harassment and gender discrimination.

While this literature raises many important issues, it remains limited in quantity and scope. Of the literature that does exist, most is narrowly focused on one aspect of discrimination, centers on college debate, is quantitative, and is over fifteen years old. Lacking is a comprehensive and theoretically grounded analysis of high school policy debate as an institution that produces its own gendered norms and relationships. By focusing on gender discrimination and empowerment in all aspects of the activity, this paper helps to build a more systematic framework for understanding discrimination, and for coming up with possible solutions.

Gendered institutions in education

Joan Acker (1992) offers a foundational framework for understanding the gendered nature of institutions. Acker argues that gender inequity within organizations is difficult to solve, because it is implicitly built into organizational structures and norms – even when the organization itself explicitly advocates for gender neutrality. Even in institutions where success is assumed to be based on merit – such as debate – ‘gender is present in the processes, practices, images and ideologies, and distributions of power’ (Acker 1992, 567) that constitute the institution. Acker (1992) defines four embedded processes involved in the ‘creation and recreation of the gender understructure’ (Acker 1992, 567): 1) overt decisions and procedures that exclude and create hierarchies based on gender, 2) images, symbols, and ideologies that legitimise the pervasiveness of hegemonic masculinity (Connell 1987), 3) interactions between individuals that are directed by performances of gender, what West and Zimmerman (1987) refer to as ‘doing gender,’ and 4) internally constructing gendered personas to fit institutional and broader societal expectations.

In education literature, Acker’s theory of gendered institutions is employed in a number of recently published studies relating to women’s participation in STEM and entrepreneurship programs, as well as their careers in academia. Most often, Acker is used to establish an understanding of the gendered context in which women work or learn (Britton 2017; Van den Brink and Benschop 2012; Pokorska 2020; Pawley 2019; Mueller-Fichepain, McConnell, and Gartland 2020). Acker’s theory is particularly useful in interpreting how the experiences of women are reflective of subtle and implicit gender biases, since it focuses largely on understanding covert gendered processes (Britton 2017; Jones, Warnick, and Taylor 2015; Pham 2018; Pawley 2019; Cochran 2017). Acker’s work, for example, has been used to assess the efficacy of various gender equality initiatives implemented in universities by serving as a theoretical framing tool to measure institutional shifts through a feminist lens (O’Mullane 2021; Clavero and Galligan 2020). In the context of our project, Acker’s (1992) theory raises the question of how gender is implicated in the organization and maintenance of debate as an institution. To what extent does the debate community encourage overt procedures, symbols, interactions, and internal processes that reproduce gender hierarchies? Alternatively, in what ways might community norms and practices escape Acker’s (1992) theorization, to offer novel opportunities for the empowerment of women? Such an analysis would offer a more comprehensive theorization of how debate shapes gendered relations amongst students and educators.

Methodology

This project asks the question: what attributes make high school policy debate a unique educational space for producing gender dynamics, and what are the impacts of those dynamics on debaters that identify as women? Our approach to answering this question was semi-autoethnographic, since three of the four researchers were women debaters that recently graduated from high school. Autoethnography is a methodological approach that has only recently emerged within education research, but has rapidly grown across the social sciences as a method for critically analyzing personal experience to better understand wider cultural phenomena (Kumar 2020; Marx, Pennington, and Chang 2017; Noorwood 2017). Autoethnography is a powerful method for highlighting historically marginalized perspectives within research. In this project, three of us were able to collectively reflect on our experiences as women debaters to frame overall research goals and questions. We found it to be a highly paradoxical space. As women, we felt our voices (and selves) were often unfairly controlled, criticized, and dismissed by judges and other debaters. At the same time, we recognized that debate gave us a unique platform to speak and be listened to. We shaped the project’s interview approach to open space for others to speak to this paradoxical nature of debate. Our position as women and former debaters further enabled us to recruit other women debaters for participation in the project, and to ensure that they felt comfortable sharing their candid experiences. Finally, our autoethnographic reflections provided us with key insights into the subtle manner in which power circulates within the debate community during project analysis, and it also ensured that this analysis was performed reflexively to ensure rigor (Koopman, Watling, and LaDonna 2020). This work was also supported by a fourth researcher, a male who is our former debate coach and a social science researcher at the University of Washington. His positionality as an academic researcher and male helped to ensure greater objectivity and rigor throughout the process. We feel that this approach produced rigourous research that nevertheless highlights subaltern stories that constitute an important critique of high school debate. Our hope is that this paper can be used to support applied efforts to disrupts gender hierarchies within the activity.

While we drew on autoethnographic values, the primary data for this paper came from semi-structured interviews with former high school debaters, who are now adults and mostly pursuing their undergraduate degrees. We used a purposive sampling technique, identifying individuals that we believed would have an insightful perspective on gender within the activity and that represented diverse gender identities. We contacted potential participants by email, beginning with personal contacts from summer debate camps and tournaments. We then expanded our participant pool via snowball sampling, by asking participants to recommend additional individuals. Through this process we interviewed a total of sixteen participants. Most participants had engaged in a full four years of high school policy debate. They came from high school teams that ranged from very small (2-4 policy debate students per year) to large (20 + students) and from young to well-established, and that focused their participation on both local and national competition circuits.

Recognizing that gender identity is socially constructed and given meaning through its performance (West and Zimmerman 1987), we began each interview by asking participants to describe their own identity in relation to gender. Eleven of our participants identified as CIS-gendered women, two identified as men, and three had fluid gender identities or were exploring their identities. Many participants described their race and/or sexuality as important components of their gender identity. Although race was not a primary focus of this study, participants did include several women of color, who offered an intersectional lens to their interview responses. This diverse pool of participants allows us to capture a broad range of the perspectives within debate, although we also recognize that more work is needed to reach larger samples of debaters.

The study was reviewed by the Human Subjects Division of the University of Washington, which determined that the project qualified as IRB exempt. Interviews were conducted, both remotely and in person, after receiving informed consent from the participants, and all were recorded for transcription. We asked questions about all aspects of debate, including tournaments, coaching, debate camps, and argumentation. However, discussions were always anchored by the question of how the participant’s personal identity impacted (if at all) their experience in debate. Transcripts were anonymised to ensure the confidentiality of participants, and quotes within this paper are attributed to pseudonyms which were constructed using the first letter of the interviewer’s first name and the number of the interview. The researchers performed an inductive analysis of the transcripts using a grounded theory approach (Glaser 1978; Kitchin and Tate 2013). In contrast to deductive analysis approaches that use data to test pre-existing theories or hypotheses, grounded theory offers a systematic approach for identifying emergent themes within data to build broader theories that are ‘grounded’ in data. Grounded theory is an iterative approach to analysis, in which researchers go through multiple rounds of data collection and analysis. We proceeded in three stages. The three former debaters performed a first stage of analysis, called ‘open coding’, during which they looked for common trends that shed light on aspects of debate that marginalize or empower women. They analyzed transcripts concurrently, with check-ins to triangulate the coding schema (Baxter and Eyles 1997). Their prior experience as debaters bolstered the theoretical sensitivity of this process, since it provides them context and understanding of debate norms and practices. However, to ensure rigor and consistency, the coach also reviewed codes across all transcripts. This process was iterative and required the team to constantly re-code transcripts as the coding schema evolved. At this stage two of the ex-debaters ended their participation in the project, due to the demands of their second year in college. The remaining ex-debater and coach continued the collaboration. In the second stage of analysis, the coach performed axial coding to relate codes into a reduced set of themes (Strauss and Corbin 1990). Axial coding occurs when researchers identify relationships across existing codes, to build broader themes to describe the data. Results of this process were discussed by the ex-debater and coach. Finally, the ex-debater took the lead in building these reduced sets of themes into a theory for explaining the relationship between debate norms and gender hierarchies – a process referred to as selective coding. In this instance, we found that the main themes emerging from the data were highly consistent with Acker’s theory of gendered institutions, and therefore were able to use that theory as an organizing framework for describing the results of the study.

Analysis and discussion

Our grounded theory approach identified a range of attributes within the activity – including lack of many formal rules; pervasiveness of implicit competitive and professional norms; common interactions between students, judges, and coaches; gender imbalances in terms of the number of women debaters and coaches; and more – that have subtle but important impacts on gendered relations within the activity. In this section we place our analysis into conversation with Acker’s (1992) theory of gendered institutions, to develop a more rigourous theorization of how these attributes work together to shape the experiences of women debaters. We find that many of these attributes work together to produce gender inequities within the activity, but that certain practices also produce opportunities to contest these same inequities.

Overt decisions and procedures

The first type of gendered process that Acker (1992) identifies is overt decisions and procedures that ‘control, segregate, exclude, and construct hierarchies based on gender’ (567-68). These processes can be key levers not only in producing gendered hierarchies, but also in adjusting how institutions shape gendered relationships to increase equity. Given their overt nature, these processes tend to be both visible and formally codified within institutions. As described above, though, a key aspect of policy debate is its overall lack of many overt rules. The community tends to be open to argumentative experimentation and to generally lack many explicit rules of engagement or structured systems of discipline. This is particularly the case with regard to rules related to the control of gendered relations. For example, the National Speech & Debate Association’s (NSDA) High School Unified Manual, which shapes many of the rules adopted across the nation, only mentions gender a single time, in a generic statement affirming the importance of equity (NSDA 2022). Similarly, our participants rarely identified formal debate rules that contribute to gendered inequity. They tended to describe debate as a unique educational space in which ‘the students have more control of the dynamic of what’s being discussed than the coaches or judges.’ (S3)

The most overt decision-making mechanism that participants identified as relevant to gender was the ability of debate judges to determine the outcome of rounds. Participants broadly agree that a judge’s ability to decide the winners of rounds and ability to assign speaker points both had the potential to impact gender dynamics. Participants further argued that these decisions are inevitably impacted, to varying degrees, by personal bias. In some instances, this is subtle. Participant P5 argued that when ‘you have a very competitive round and it’s really close and you’re … you’re getting it down to these minute details that, you know, are frankly really hard for anybody to do, it’s like near impossible for like subtextual factors to not come into play.’ Given the subtly of this bias, it is difficult to tease out the degree to which it produces gendered imbalances in the win/loss records of teams. Participants did widely feel, though, that these subtle biases have resulted in speaker point spreads that are ‘awfully skewed male in terms of who receives higher [points]’ (S4). In other instances, participants argued that judges were far more heavy-handed in allowing their personal biases to shape their decision-making processes. They argued that this happens most often in the context of debates about affirmatives that draw on critical theories, including feminist theories. As Participant S2 describes, ‘I remember we had one judge […] and as soon as he walked in we … we like did our aff and he just signed the ballot for the negative. And he was just like, I don’t think this is stuff that should be in debate.’ Participant P4 similarly argued that judges regularly used the ballot to vote against debaters making critical, identity-based arguments, which then deters debaters from running those arguments. Given that these decision-making abilities were one of the only overt mechanisms identified by participants, they could provide a key site for improving gender dynamics within the activity. Unfortunately, though, this will likely require a broad shift in the thinking and behavior of judges. Performing that widespread shift in mindsets requires not just a change to official rules, but a more extensive engagement with the implicit norms and informal interactions that shape the debate community. It is to these dimensions of the activity that we now turn.

Construction of images

Acker (1992) identifies images, symbols, and ideologies as a second set of processes that gender institutions. These processes work to characterize organizations as masculine in nature, for example by portraying them as ‘aggressive, goal-oriented, competitive, efficient, but rarely as supportive, kind, and caring.’ (Acker 1992, 568) In the case of debate, this relates to activity norms that shape how students understand what it means to be a ‘good’ debater. As evidence throughout this section demonstrates, common norms identified amongst participants included competitiveness, aggressiveness, rationality, and professional appearance. Our participants argued that many of these norms reproduce micro-inequities (Aiston and Fo 2020) that accumulate to produce an educational environment that celebrates symbols of masculinity. These findings are perhaps not surprising – women have historically been excluded from the policy and public spaces that debate is meant to emulate (Fraser 1990), many public speaking curricula continue to implicitly normalize masculine traits (Carli 2015), and studies have found that women disproportionately feel aversion to or anxiety about public speaking (e.g. De Paola et al. 2021). Nevertheless, they highlight deeply ingrained norms that reproduce broader gender inequities within the debate community.

Policy debate’s competitive nature and emphasis on powerful speaking skills often encourages performances of aggression amongst competitors. However, these norms intersect with performances of gender to produce a harmful double standard for women – a dynamic explored in a previous study by Jarzabek (1996) and confirmed by our participants. When asked to describe the ethos of successful debaters, participants used adjectives like ‘controlling and dominating,’ ‘hyper-masculine,’ ‘assertive,’ ‘cocky,’ and ‘hostile.’ At the same time, they pointed out that women debaters who display these qualities are punished because ‘arguing [is] not ladylike.’ (S3) In this way women debaters are forced to choose between ‘femininity or […] argumentativeness,’ (S3) with negative consequences resulting from either choice. If a woman does not act aggressively, then they are ‘given a little bit less credibility than male debaters […] and, I think that since ethos plays such a big part in who wins debates, that initial inclination towards male debaters that a lot of judges have kind of impacts the competitive success of women negatively.’ (S6) Nevertheless, many women participants noted that they felt pressure to act in an unaggressive, feminine manner within rounds because they were ‘distinctly afraid of being called, like, bitchy,’ (H3) a reputation that would stick with them beyond the activity. In contrast, if a man acted aggressively, ‘they just seem really smart and, like, powerful because they control the round.’ (P3) These findings are consistent with studies of competitiveness in sports (e.g. Coulomb-Cabagno and Rascle 2006) and video games (e.g. Bertozzi 2008), which similarly find that men are more likely to engage in – and be rewarded for – more aggressive play.

Participants also argued that there is a pervasive belief within debate culture that ‘argument is so rational and logos-driven that men are better at it’ (S3) than women, who are instead driven more by (irrational) emotion. The perceived irrationality of women debaters often manifests itself within criticism of their voices. Good debaters are expected to speak loudly, quickly, and assertively. However, many of our participants noted that when women emulate this standard, they are penalized for sounding ‘like chihuahuas,’ (S4) ‘too hysterical,’ (H3) or ‘overly emotional.’ (H3) Women constantly receive the message that femininity is a ‘weakness’ and that feminine expression does not ‘belong in the debate space.’ (H3) Several participants recalled responding to this messaging by lowering the pitch of their voices during speeches. Participants believed that these biases were also evident within the disparity between speaker points for men and women. As Participant S5 noted, ‘look at the speaker awards, right? Like, I don’t think that like dudes are just better speakers than women, like, they’re not, you know?’

Finally, expectations around dress and professionalism are also grounded in implicit norms that have gendered components. Many participants noted that women in debate are expected to adhere to a higher standard of professionalism than men. In elimination rounds at national tournaments, it was commonplace to see ‘two guys in, like, sweatpants and a tee shirt versus, like, girls who, like, still are expected to dress up even though it was, like, a 7AM round.’ (S8) Participants also said that they faced criticism related to the perceived degree of femininity of their clothing. According to Participant S8, ‘at, like, those like super traditional local tournaments it was, like, if you wore pants like as a girl then some of the judges would feel the need to, like, make remarks about it.’ And yet, since ‘feminine performances are devalued in the debate community,’ (S3) some participants also felt devalued if they dressed too femininely. Participant S6 said, ‘I remember a judge telling me that, you know, the way I was presenting myself wasn’t appropriate. Like, I needed to wear a cardigan on top of a, like, sleeveless black dress in order to be presentable.’ This participant felt that they were being told to cover up their gender identity. Another participant reported, ‘I definitely heard comments that, like, they only voted for you because they’re attracted to you.’ (P4) Taken together these images of women as variously emotional and bitchy, too docile, or only valued for their physical appearance all distance women from the rational thinking that is valued within the activity. This can bias judges to vote against women debaters as described in the last section, which further feeds into stereotypes of women as bad debaters.

Interactions

The final examples of the preceding section highlight how norms are transformed into material practices through interactions between different members of the debate community. This section goes into more detail on how common types of interactions within the activity produce subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle forms of gender discrimination.

From the outset, it is important to note that these interactions almost inevitably include a disproportionate number of individuals that identify as men. Participants widely described gender imbalances on their teams and within the community more broadly, and women participants often indicated that these imbalances made them feel uncomfortable during tournaments, debate rounds, and summer debate camps. For debaters who were the only woman on their team, living accommodations at travel tournaments were often awkward, lonely, and disproportionately expensive. The issue extends to debate rounds. Participant S1 described this discomfort: ‘I definitely feel very intimidated … like, when you’re just surrounded by them [men], like even the layout of the room, right? Like you’re just literally surrounded.’ Similarly, when asked whether she felt comfortable at debate camp, Participant P3 said, ‘I honestly did not. Like, in all my labs, there would be like five girls,’ and I ‘didn’t really feel ever that comfortable. Like, it was always men that were the best debaters.’ Participants widely felt that this unequal gender representation made many women debaters feel excluded from the activity.

These feelings were exacerbated by even more stark gender imbalances within the teams that are most successful at debate. This imbalance not only highlights the greater participation of men in debate, but also strengthens representations that men are more aligned with the qualities (e.g. rationality, competitiveness) that naturally describe better debaters. Participant H3, for example, described their experiences at competitive national tournaments as ‘jarring for me, because I honestly didn’t see very many people who looked like me, both in terms of race and in terms of gender.’ Another participant explained that ‘there’ve been historically very few female/female teams that went to the TOC [the Tournament of Champions – the most prestigious high school tournament]. I don’t know if there’ve been any to be honest. Um, so I think nationally there’s kind of this standard that male debaters are more successful, they’re better at debate.’ Further, this gender imbalance means that there is a lack of role models for younger women in debate. Participant P3 lamented this, saying that they ‘never really had anyone who was older than me and that could tell me things were going to be okay.’ Participants also confirmed that this gender imbalance filters up to judging and coaching. Since debate is such a technically difficult activity, judges and coaches tend to be former debaters – and, therefore, disproportionately male.

These imbalances, in combination with the behaviors and norms that exclude women from the activity discussed in previous sections, produce highly gendered interactions across the activity. Our participants argued that many debaters actively cultivate an overt form of masculine culture that dismisses women as legitimate competitors, leading to a feeling that debate acts like a large ‘boy’s club.’ (S1) Here, our participants are invoking the concept of an ‘old boys’ club,’ which refers to informal, male-only social spaces that are used to control norms and opportunities within organizations (Stapleton and Michelson 2021). These clubs produce masculine cultures within organizations. One aspect of this masculine culture within debate is the hypersexualization of women. Many of our participants recalled that their sexual or relationship history was sometimes emphasized more than their competitive success. Even when she became a successful debater herself, one participant recalled still being referred to as ‘this dude's partner or like this person's girlfriend.’ (P4) Other participants received comments from their peers that their competitive success in debate was purely a result of their sexual appeal. For example, one participant recounted a time when rumors spread that she was awarded the role of team President ‘because [she] was sleeping with all of the predominantly male leadership.’ (S1) This masculine culture’s active devaluation of women also manifests itself in the tendency for the community to actively ignore complaints of sexism. One participant noted that she felt ‘like a lot of times guys see [sexism in debate] as like a woman’s problem.’ (S3) That sexism is so prevalent in debate and that it can be difficult to address due to cultural apathy makes debate a difficult space for women to exist in.

Many coaches and judges also participate in this discrimination, tending to ignore and undervalue their debaters who are women. For example, participants told us their coaches would consistently invite only the male members of their team to ‘side’ practices. Another interviewee, who was the president of her team, said that her coach and some male members on her team would eat lunch together every day at school, during which they would make important team-related decisions without her. This pattern continues at debate tournaments, where, in the experience of another participant, judges would often look only at him and neglect to acknowledge his partner who was a woman.

Women in debate also experience instances of sexual violence and objectification. Multiple participants noted that men are more likely to cross boundaries in debate than they are in other educational spaces, as there is a tendency for male debaters to believe that if they can out argue an opponent in a round then they can also debate a woman into consenting. As Participant S3 put it, ‘no means no doesn’t apply to debate because [debaters] can turn a no into a yes.’ Aside from more serious allegations of sexual violence, many participants recalled highly prevalent issues of sexual misconduct that do not reach the level of being prosecutable. For example, Participant S3 said that her male debate team members made her feel like a ‘piece of meat’ and another noticed that every time a new woman debater came on the team, she would be ‘claimed’ in a romantic sense by one of the older male debaters. There also seems to be a lack of interest in proactively addressing instances of sexual misconduct as ‘usually a lot of times coaches, their default strategy is like, I’ll just deal with a problem when it arises.’ (S3) Even worse, one participant told us that her coach was complicit in her male team member’s sexually aggressive ‘locker room talk’ during a car ride home from a tournament (S8).

Exacerbating these dynamics is a lack of a formal response to either microaggressions and sexual misconduct. There are so many different independent actors within the debate community – schools, tournaments, camps, the teams themselves, etc. – that debate organizations, including school teams, often do not have the capacity to carry out oversight of all debate activities and one disciplinary decision does not necessarily impact the actions of a debater more broadly. The lack of both a cultural commitment to addressing sexism and a formal disciplinary structure means that debaters who commit sexual misconduct may, for example, ‘get kicked out of camp [but still] compete for the rest of the year.’ (H2) These dynamics create unsafe feelings that, among other things, drive down the number of women participating in the activity.

Internal processes

Acker’s final argument points out that gendered hierarchies are reinforced through internal processes ‘in which individuals engage as they construct personas that are appropriately gendered for the institutional setting’ (568). For women debaters, this process is informed by the range of different reactions they may face to the way they choose to ‘do gender’ (West and Zimmerman 1987). For example, as described in above the ‘Construction of Images’ section, if women choose to ‘check their femininity at the door’ (S3) in order to better fit the image of a ‘successful debater,’ perhaps they will be (sub)consciously rewarded in higher speaker points or in more respect from their peers. However, in shirking their ‘essential nature,’ (West and Zimmerman 1987) women may face other competitive and social consequences, including losing speaker points for sounding ‘hysterical’ or being deemed ‘bitchy’ by fellow debaters (H3). In this way, femininity is both degraded and valued in debate; it is simultaneously an ‘accomplishment’ (West and Zimmerman 1987, 126) for women and antithetical to the image of a successful debater. For many women debaters, this dynamic creates a cognitive dissonance that makes engaging in Acker’s fourth pillar, the internal construction of a gendered persona, extremely difficult. In fact, some debaters ‘feel so uncomfortable from, like, a position of sexuality that you feel there’s no one for you to talk to, so the best option is for you to quit.’ (S3) This results in a frustrating and vicious cycle in which gender discrimination leads to decreased representation and visibility of women within the activity.

Disrupting debate as a gendered institution

Despite these dynamics, the openness of debate as an activity also provides space for students to question and transform gender hierarchies. Put another way, the activity’s lack of overt procedures or rules for controlling gender make it possible for students to experiment with producing more empowering and equitable gendered norms and interactions. Already, many participants described how they have drawn on the openness of the activity to improve their internal capacity to produce positive change. The opportunity for exposure to a very wide breadth of authors and scholarship is unique to debate and it makes the activity a great training ground for young activists. For example, through writing a file on the model minority myth for debate, one participant was able to understand her own identity better. Another participant echoed this, saying that the feminist literature they read for debate helped them discover their own gender identity. Many interviewees also noted the value of being exposed to critical literature about micro-politics and microaggressions, and then having the freedom to use that literature to change in-round norms and interactions. In policy debate currently, it is commonplace for debaters to ask each other for their pronouns before rounds and to generally avoid using gendered language. This development is a result of debaters responding to the use of gendered language by arguing (in round) that gendered language makes women rhetorically invisible, thereby reinforcing harmful patriarchal cultural norms. By making sexism an issue that mattered within a debate round – in a way that a judge could vote on – debaters directly incentivised others in the community to change their behavior.

Participation in policy debate also transfers portable skills for women. The activity’s unique combination of oppressive gender dynamics and openness to experimentation and advocacy make it an activity that fosters passion for social justice issues and gives debaters the tools to address these issues. Since the core of policy debate is interrogating the status quo by suggesting change in policy, it trains students ‘to think really critically about the world around [them]’ (P4) and be practical oriented and solution seeking. The simple fact that debate rewards students when they successfully argue an issue fosters a sense of empowerment. Many of our participants said that debate gave them passion, taught them the value of being heard, and led them to finding their voice. After all, ‘when you can stand up and despite people despite biases still pull out the win, it is empowering,’ (S3) like ‘I played the game exactly how you wanted it to be played and I still beat you.’ (S3) Perhaps most practically, debate also taught us how to handle sexism that we encounter day to day in the real world. As one participant said, ‘now when things bother me, it’s really easy to handle it, um, or it’s really easy to like articulate why I feel a certain way and then figure out what the next best course of action is.’ (P4) However, whether students are ultimately able to leave debate feeling empowered relies a lot on their interactions with supportive coaches, judges, and role models. Transforming these interactions, so that they are more supportive, may therefore be a key site for intervention within the activity.

Conclusion

In this study we interviewed sixteen former high school debaters about their experiences in debate and perceptions of the role gender plays in the activity. We then connected our findings to Acker’s four processes of gendered institutions in an attempt to understand the extent to which gender impacts that experiences of women in debate. We found that debate has a relative dearth of overt rules and procedures that enforce gendered norms, leaving the gendered nature of the activity largely open to being shaped by more implicit norms and interactions. Norms surrounding what it means to be a ‘good’ debater, including an aggressive speaking style and expectations surrounding professional dress, often put women into a double bind that results in penalties both in round (in terms of speaker points) and socially. The pervasiveness of these norms combined with the stark gender imbalance in the activity creates a tendency to hypersexualise and undervalue women debaters, and also leads to instances of sexual violence. These dynamics often make debate an uncomfortable, unfair, and even dangerous space for women. However, because these dynamics are largely grounded in activity norms instead of overt rules, debaters themselves are often presented with a unique opportunity to transform existing norms and practices to make the activity more equitable. Participants argue that this makes the activity an excellent training ground for young activists. Women learn how to change the debate space through research and argumentation, and this better equips us to later change society. This analysis offers a model for how Acker’s framework might be extended to identify opportunities for change within existing gendered institutions.

This research remains limited in that it only engaged a limited number of participants, and it also did not analyze how other elements of identity such as race and sexuality impact the experiences of debaters. This presents an opportunity for future studies that, for example, expand interviews to a large sample, combine qualitative methods with quantitative assessments of gendered inequality in debate success, or expand their scope to questions of how intersectional identities shape the experiences of debaters. Despite these limitations, we believe this study offers important initial insights into the gendered dimensions of debate, with important applied implications for educators. We hope that this paper galvanizes coaches, judges, and other authority figures in high school debate to reflect on their behavior and to push for structural change in the activity. Many of our participants recommended that coaches be more mindful when allocating time, resources, and opportunities to their debaters. Participants also encouraged efforts to reverse the normative and textual exclusion of critical and identity-based argumentation, which many described as critical to their self-empowerment. One possibility for structurally supporting these arguments would be for the National Federation of State High School Associations (NFHS) Topic Selection and Wording Committee to more actively explore resolutions that include actors other than the United States federal government, to highlight the political agency of other types of individuals and organizations.

More broadly, the activity has an opportunity to join broader educational conversations (e.g. Brabazon and Schulz 2018) about how to diversity the role models and mentors in the activity, and about how to best support diverse debaters beyond giving them the skills to win debates. Participants also advised that leaders be more receptive to complaints of sexism, be more proactive about promoting a culture of consent, and explore the creation of formalized disciplinary structures for responding to allegations of sexual misconduct. These changes are increasingly urgent given growing frustration amongst debaters about the continued prevalence of gender, racial discrimination and sexual assault within the activity. Echoing the broader #MeToo movement, debaters recently initiated two Instagram accounts (@speechanddebatestories and @speakingupsafely), which became rapidly popular for featuring debater’s anonymous stories of discrimination and sexual misconduct (Gray 2020). The popularity of these Instagram accounts signal that a cultural shift is necessary and occurring. We hope that this paper contributes to that shift.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Stella Robertson

Stella Robertson is a fourth-year undergraduate at Brown University studying international relations and Mandarin Chinese.

Petra Zuniga

Petra Zuniga recently graduated from Amherst College with a B.A. in Geology and Latinx and Latin American Studies.

Hannah Christenson

Hannah Christianson is a graduate of Barnard College and an incoming PhD student in Inorganic Chemistry at UC Berkeley.

Jason Young

Jason Young is a Senior Research Scientist with the Technology & Social Change Group, Research Fellow with the Center for an Informed Public, and Associate Assistant Professor at the iSchool at the University of Washington.