Things What Things » The Amazing Race: Overthinking The Female-Team Problem

FOR ONCE, MARIA WAS THE MAN IN THE RELATIONSHIP: Miss Alli has a lot to say about the poker players' elimination from last week's Race. After a detailed review of what the Detour required -- and it wasn't so much the strength -- she notes:

For some reason, people keep saying that all-female teams are always knocked out for lack of physical strength and that’s why they’ve never won, which is not true in the slightest. The BQs were knocked out in All-Stars by the final task, which was a quiz, and in their original season by wandering around looking for a Detour. They were probably the team with the best chance of winning, no? Charla and Mirna were knocked out in their first season by bad navigating and slow consumption of scrambled eggs, and in All-Stars by that same final task that killed the BQs. Strength is not how Lena and Kristy went out. It’s not how Emily and Nancy or Dark Hair and Light Hair went out. It’s not how Heather and Eve went out, or Christie and Jodi (remember them?), or Kisha and Jen, or Jaime and Cara. It’s certainly not how Debbie and Bianca went out, given that they drove literally hours in the wrong direction. You could go on and on, but this isn’t really how the all-female teams have typically gone out, at all, so when People hands Tiffany and Maria the excuse, “It must hurt to be yet another all-female team knocked out due to a lack of strength,” I’m not sure what they’re talking about. I think people are thinking of the Bowling Moms, and it’s true that Colin passed them on that ascender thing, but Colin was a super-athlete. Being passed by Colin on that task is something that would have happened to anyone who wasn’t a super-athlete.

... Their being knocked out says absolutely nothing about whether the whole thing is biased against women, because we all know it’s biased — not hopelessly, but somewhat — against teams where one person is trying to do all the work.