quality read for sure. i bet these ladies are angry keep up the info!

man 2010 and we're moving backwards. Good article though, and hopefully women start getting more coverage, they def. deserve it

Good article with the best of intentions, however I must respectfully Disagreed. As a note, I despise prejudice of all sorts of reasons I wont digress into. Also, this is only my educated opinion encouraged to offer a different perspective, not retaliation in anger.

The reason I feel this article is slightly off base is that it confuses causation with correlation. I believe the root cause is profitability added to the Dew Tour by each segment. Here, Women's skiing sports have historically been shown to bring in the least return on investment and often times a loss. Furthermore, in an economic crunch, the dew tour is not obligated to keep all aspects of Dew Tour in, they are however obligated to stay in business to continue to provide future events. It's unfortunate that society as a whole is not entertained by women's skiing sufficiently enough to make it profitable. Perhaps the future growth of the demographic in the sport will help this; and I sincerely hope it does.

Moreover, the Dew Tour will include women's snowboarding. This negates any "sexual discrimination" or female prejudice arguments from existence. By definition, it would have to be prejudice the female gender across the board. You could assert that they are only prejudice against females who ski, but such an argument would be absurd as there are already skiers in the competition and already women in the competition. It wouldn't logically flow to focus in.

This brings me back to where I started, having negated that it's a prejudice based on only on sex. I would again reaffirm that it's a correlation with profitability and those least profitable areas go first in a time of economic peril. I would love to see women back in the Dew Tour. Hell, I would love to see more women skiing in general. One sided sports are never as entertaining, especially ones driven by social interaction such as skiing. Instead of focusing on discrimination, I think time would be better spent promoting the sport and getting more girls out there. If this occurred, Dew Tour would have no choice but to re-add the demographic to stay profitable.

However, if Dew Tour dropped all womens sports and barred them from participating or working from the company, you would have a sound argument. Also, if any information was brought forward by organizers stating a blatant categorical bar against femals, that would also suffice. In this event, I would be my sincere event that BOTH women AND men would protest such archaic discriminatory actions.

Hey Jex,

Thanks for the very well written response, I genuinely appreciate your comments and fully understand where you're coming from. Also, thank you for noting a difference between causation and correlation and the fact that the dew tour decision to exclude female skiers was motivated by the floundering economy and the need to eliminate less profitable events.

Regardless, as noted in the five aforementioned article points, the Dew Tour is indeed holding back women from progressing their skills, showing favoritism toward snowboarding, generating less air time, and thwarting the progress made by female rights groups in sporting events and financial compensation.

Although not all women are excluded from the event, I firmly believe the decision aggressively discriminates against female freeskiers and should not be tolerated. As you agreed, women need to be promoted and the sport would greatly benefit from "getting more girls out there." Unfortunately, without the venue of the Winter Dew Tour, which is the second largest freeskiing competition in the US, women have fewer opportunities to make themselves known. Aside from a select few pros, film companies generally do not film with women, and aside from the glorious marketing weapon that is the internet, the general public that not follow the sport from Newschoolers.com will have little knowledge of female freeskiers. Webisodes, blogs, and edits are glorious marketing tools, but without an initial platform for media attention, women will not have the same opportunities for promotion.

No, the Winter Dew Tour is not the entire issue, but by no means will this decision help female athletes from progressing beyond an expendable competition that the dew tour committee has few moral qualms about eliminating.

Earlier today i watched a fuel tv short called F word, it was a WOMAN snowboarder saying something along the lines of: women need to stop bitching about non equality in snowboarding, because they don't put in the time and effort to learn the tricks that men do. And the reason there isn't as much money behind womens skiing is because less people want to see it than other parts of the sport, people would rather watch double cork 14's than barely grabbed 7's. The same thinghappened in mens skiing in the early days of competition, there was barely any money in it because people wanted to watch snowboarding.

Hey Josh,

I must admit, I was pretty stoked to read your response as well as the one from "flatypus". I think the topic gives room for a lot of educated debate both ways and many of the underlying themes are intertwined with some the very issues that plague the financial markets and society in general. Any person, with some good thought, could write pages on the issues surrounding this debate. My post is long, be warned.

I offer another response because it provides both a refreshing break from biblical sized legal case book studies, and also relates to the sport I care about most, while simultaneously practicing the principals of debate. As a disclaimer, my response below does not necessarily arise from my beliefs, but provides an alternate theory along the lines of causation and correlation I established above. It also offers a more definitive conclusion.

As you mentioned, Dew Tour's (hereafter DT) removal of women's skiing has a negative impact on the progression and expansion of the female gender in skiing leading to further subsequent discriminatory effects. However, once again I point to an alternate theory I will describe using a hypothetical situation.

First, I assume here that women's snow-sports is not as profitable as mens to hold and derive revenues from generally; aka lower profit margin. I also assume that as a company, DT must satisfy investors by maximizing profits or risk losing to competition. This assumption is fundamental to current capitalistic economic system in the U.S.

Let's assume now that the least profitable demographic is not women, but another comprised of small blue people called smurfs. Because people favor watching non-smurfs ski in DT over smurfs, adding them to the event results in less profits and thus DT removes them to maximize profits. Under the reasoning above, this would be discrimination against smurfs. However, the underlying cause is not discrimination, but the actaul profitability of a specific category in the event regardless of smurf, gender, age race...ect. Thus, DT is not categorically discriminating based on a demographic, but an actual monetary value attached to each individual event which CORRELATES with women's skiing, or in this hypo "smurfs".

The underlying theme for categorical discrimination is money and profits. These two factors correlate with a wide variety of things in society, take Golf for an example (no need to explain this on). To attempt to fight a correlation as a cause is a circular and losing battle. It's like cutting a hole in a bucket to plug the other hole. You may have fixed one leak but in the end you've still got a hole leaking water.

This is where my final point in my first post comes into play, regardless of anything I have asserted above beyond the correlation analysis. To help women get the recognition they deserve, we of course should protest such removals as in the DT. However, this does not fix the problem. You're simply asking a company to lose money in favor of including a less profitable event, here women's skiing. In a capitalistic society, if the DT were forced to include the less profitable event, either through protest or legal action on discrimination charges, it would then induce them to either drop the event in it's entirety, or lose to another company that is still able to categorically pick and choose the most profitable events. This brings us full circle to where we started, but with a new face (lets say Coke this time). This is exactly like my leaky bucket example above, where now you have a new hole leaking the same water (discrimination of women's skiing by the Coke Tour).

To better clarify the intention of my point above, the movement to progress women's skiing must start from within the group that make skiing, or snowboarding, profitable in the first place. Since it would be nearly impossible to overthrow a capitalistic system in order to get women's skiing in DT, it seems better to fight fire with fire.

Here I risk sounding entirely corny, but we, as a community, should promote skiing (and snowboarding) across the board regardless of demographic difference. We must push each other to get better and more appealing to those audiences who's opinions are driven by ads placed in events like DT. If the market is interested, DT becomes interested by neccessity. Specifically, if we push our fellow female skiers to get better (and I'm not saying we don't) eventually the female talent will will rise and the demographic interest will expand concurrent with the profit producing markets. As a result, events like DT will have no choice but to include demographics such as women's skiing in order not to lose to an eager opponent (ie. Coke) willing to include it.

On another final note, we all share one thing in common, a love for skiing. Whether DT includes men or women, skiing or snowboarding, or even smurfs, I will not ski more or less. I think the same holds true for most here. So in sum, I propose WE keep skiing, keep having fun, keep progressing, and let the market/companies follow our example! Historically, they always have.

Well said, and while I do thinking girls need to step up their game, especially in pipe, excluding them is not a reasonable way of promoting that.
The only part I disagree with is the part about snowboarding. They have just as many if not more problems to deal with than we do. Whether it be the ongoing style war, or the split between the shaun white assholes, and the real snowboarders. Regardless, there are still a lot of snowboarders who do have soul, who show it more than most skiers, but the fact that there are shaun whites out there prevents them from being seen. We cannot afford to hate snowboarders, but we should both agree that it is unacceptable to have your own personal half pipe in the mountains somewhere, then gloat about it in front of everyone. If you are luky enough to have sponsors who have lots of money who support you in that way, you should keep that a secret, or at least bring your friends along for the ride, not be an asshole about it.