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Let me be clear in one comment what my position is.

The position is that the way females are disadvantaged in debate is that some judges micro aggressions think that females are "worse at debate". The other is that less women participate in the first place. These are the only reasonable reason why at the highest level there are less female debaters. A female only debate camp can't solve these, I'll get back to that later.

Here's a few supposed examples given why females are at a disadvantage in debate and why they are wrong/ women's only camp can't fix it

  1. Number of women in debate: they have to be in it to go to camp. "But why don't we encourage females to recruit more females" well then the camp is being sexist, men can recruit just as well as females.

  2. Judge micro aggressions: yes problem, but if a judge consciously or unconsciously thinks females are worse debaters then no matter how good the female does, the judge is going to find something for the male to win off of no matter what. Camp won't solve it.

3.the hospitality of the debate community. Let's divide the community into three parts for this one. A. Coaches. B. Male debaters. C. Female debaters. On A, coaches who attend this camp are the ones trying to be hospitable to everyone. If they care enought to attend this camp on the basis of being hospitable, then they aren't going to be the ones inhospitable. On B, they aren't allowed to attend. If anything it makes males more inhospitable, they see that there are more chances for females to go to debate campes then men (there's no men only camps, and I have yet to see numbers on coed camps). Finally, only C, again, like A, if they care enough about these issues to attend, this won't change their mind, besides the fact it's kinda doesn't make since a female would want other females in debate because they are female.

  1. Women who attend camps. First, I've yet to see numbers, the camps that ask for your gender do so to equalize.

To be clear: I agree that there is a disadvantage females face in debate, but this is not the solution, a coed camp focused on these ideals might help solve a little more.

/r/Debate Thread Link - causes.kindsnacks.com