Ellie Roscher

One of my books is about a free girls school in a slum in Kenya and we know that a country's GDP goes up the more girls go to school because girls who go to school and get to stay in school end up making more money and then they put that money back into the community.

Of course I do.

I think about the high school that I went to.

It used to be an all-boys school, an all-girls school.

It merged.

The school got better when it merged.

Now, there's this argument it was an advantage to the boys, and we still need... Until things shift with the patriarchy, we still need to create affinity spaces for women to thrive, right?

But...

That school got better when women were included in real ways.

This is happening with sport as well.

And I would say with the dugout argument, I wonder if there's this element of like, well, boys can be boys, but if there's a woman there, they have to kind of behave differently.

I had a high school teacher who had this theory.

I don't know how you'll think of this, but because we live in this patriarchy that still has toxic masculinity thriving, that boys tend to get exponentially dumber in groups and women get exponentially smarter.

And more brave.

So if you place a woman in the dugout and the men have to kind of like have a little mirror...

to their boys club.

It might be uncomfortable, but long term, isn't that what we want to develop in sport?

So that's what I want to get clear about is like, what are the long wins here?

We're having a lot of conversations about short wins.

And I will just say as someone who has two children in sports, I'm real clear on what I'm hoping is developed in them as they participate on teams.