About The Data

This data is from the speaker points tab of every octafinals bid tournament for the 2019-2020 season in Lincoln-Douglas debate. The data is sourced from tabroom.com, an online results software for debate tournaments.

I run it through a gender package in order to approximate the gender of each individual speaker and then attempt to see if there is a statically significant relationship between gender and speaker point average at the tournament.

A quick explanatory note: each debater gets speaker points between 20 and 30 in every debate (there are six preliminary debates). The way speaker awards are calculated is that the highest and lowest points for each debater are dropped and the remaining four points are added up. That’s called “one high low.” The analysis done in this project uses one high low in order to match the way tournaments calculate awards.

Apple Valley

Men received 1.1322 total higher speaks on average - statistically significant at the .01 level.

Bronx

Men received .5650 total higher speaks on average - not statistically significant.

Cal

Men received .2235 total higher speaks on average - not statistically significant.

Emory

Men received .2835 total higher speaks on average - not statistically significant.

Glenbrooks

Men received .7649 total higher speaks on average - statistically significant at the .05 level.

Greenhill

Men received .4951 total higher speaks on average - not statistically significant.

Harvard

Men received .7943 total higher speaks on average - statistically significant at the .01 level.

Harvard-Westlake

Men received .8551 total higher speaks on average - statistically significant at the .05 level.

St. Mark’s

Men received .3492 total higher speaks on average - not statistically significant.

Valley

Men received .4863 total higher speaks on average - not statistically significant.

All of Them

Men received .63603 total higher speaks on average - statistically significant at the .001 level!

Note: The Bronx and Glenbrooks tournaments are excluded from this total calculation because they run 7 preliminary rounds, placing their high-low points significantly higher than every other tournament. This creates two peaks in the chart artificially - all the other tournaments have six preliminary rounds, making the combination of all of them appropriate.