Claire McKay Bowen (she/her) is a senior fellow and leads the Data Governance and Privacy Practice Area at the Urban Institute. Her research focuses on developing technical and policy solutions to safely expand access to confidential data for advancing evidence-based policy-making. She also has an interest in improving science communication and ensuring everyone is responsibly represented in data. In 2024, she became an American Statistical Association Fellow “for her significant contributions in the field of statistical data privacy, leadership activities in support of the profession, and commitment to mentoring the next generation of statisticians and data scientists.” Further, she is a member of the Census Scientific Advisory Committee and several other data governance and data privacy committees as well as an adjunct professor at Stonehill College.
Episode Description
Are you ready to register for a 100-mile race that includes 60,000 feet of elevation gain? How about a 3000-mile race cycling across the United States in the race across America? These endurance competitions and events are amazing athletic achievements, and women are competing in these events in ever-increasing numbers. These amazing feats and the factors that have hindered and enhanced the participation of women in these endurance sports is the focus of today's stats and stories with guest Claire McKay Bowen.
- Full Transcript
John Bailer
Are you ready to register for 100 mile running race that includes 60,000 feet of elevation game. How about a 3000 mile race cycling across the United States in the race across America? The chunnel may pass under the English Channel, but what would you think about swimming across the channel? Yeah, maybe multiple times. These endurance competitions and events are amazing athletic achievements, and women are competing in these events in ever increasing numbers. But did you know that women did not compete in any track events in the Olympics longer than 200 meters between 1928 and then 1960 or that the first women's marathon in the Olympics was in 1984 factors that have hindered and enhanced the participation of women in these endurance events is the focus of today's stats and stories. Episode. I'm John Bailer. Stats and stories is a production of Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film, as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me is regular panelist Rosemary Pennington, chair of the department of media, journalism and film at Miami University. Our guest today is Claire McKay. Bowen. She is senior fellow and leads the statistical methods group at the Urban Institute. She is also a member of the census Scientific Advisory Committee and several other data governance and data privacy committees. An adjunct professor at Stone Hill College and a member of the significance editorial board in 2021 she was named an emerging leader in statistics by the committee of presidents of statistical societies. She is a keen participant in endurance sports, and Claire is also a returning guest to the podcast. Her recent significance article entitled significant strides women's advancement in endurance sports, provides the background for our conversation today. Claire, thank you so much for joining us today. Thank
Claire McKay Bowen
you for having me again. Well, it's great because our glutton for punishment. I think I
John Bailer
was going to ask you that. I just want to start with what inspired you to write this article?
Claire McKay Bowen
Well, if you read the first bit of the article, I was very much inspired by Jasmine Paris, who is a British ultra endurance runner, she became the first woman to finish the Barkley marathons. And so your introduction at the very beginning, talking about, are you ready to run over 100 miles with 60,000 gain fit game to be clarifying on that is, is what the Barkley marathons is, and it's considered the most brutal ultra marathon in the world, because it's unmarked. It's going through the forest and mountains of Tennessee. There's actually like these, like series of things of you get, like a specific page in a book that you have to rip out to show that you've actually hit the certain parts of the mark of the trail, because it is unmarked. So this is part of like, the brutality that is this race. And Jasmine is the first woman to finish it, and there's only think it's still like with her. It was like 20 participants who have finished that race in the history of it becoming 100 mile race, which was in 1989 so it was just incredible to follow her progress. And then she was within, just basically it was two minutes within two minutes of almost being disqualified, because you have to finish it within 60 hours. And so she finished it in the 59 like 58 minute range. So
Rosemary Pennington
in this article, you talk about how there has been this, what feels like enormous growth in women participating in endurance athletic competitions. And you talk a little bit about, sort of the importance of Title Nine, potentially for for that, can you talk us through, kind of, what, what that bit of us legislation has done for women in these sporting events?
Claire McKay Bowen
Yeah, certainly. So just to clarify for some of the people who might be interested in this article, I only focused on three aspects of what contributes to women endurance sports. There's many other factors too. But to make a nice, concise piece, it was, I've decided to focus on three, and one of them is the one that you mentioned, which is participation, like equal participation through Title Nine. And so that legislation happened. Think now it's 52 years ago, and so it allows people who go to certain schools in the United States that gets, like, certain kind of funding to have equal opportunities for for women to have in those sports and so with anything, and I believe I say this in my article, that it does take some time for for that legislation to to kick in, and for schools to be more familiar with this and to have programs start right. It doesn't happen overnight. And so you can imagine that those who are in their 30s and 40s fully benefited. Yeah. From that legislation, even though it's 52 years old. And if you look at all the major women who come out from American sports right now, in endurance, they're all in their 30s and 40s right now, hitting these and hitting these major milestones. I'm not saying this is the causation, right? We're all statistician here, but there's definitely a correlation here, and the fact that when I grew up, I'm in my 30s, and I it was never a question of whether or not we could participate in sports like, yeah, you could. You got to compete in these myriad of different activities, and it's just expected where, versus those who are now in their 50s and 60s, I talked to my colleagues, or those who are also the participant sports like, it was a very different feel when they went through school.
John Bailer
You know, I was, was fascinated by some of the different endurance events that you described as part of your as part of your article, you know, they, you know, I alluded to some of those in the introduction to the episode. Can, can you talk about some of those, those achievements ranging from the the swimmers and cyclists and and even polar runners.
Claire McKay Bowen
Oh yeah, it was really interesting because some of them I already knew beforehand, like, like, I said, I was just really inspired by Jasmine Paris's amazing Barclay marathons run. And then I started looking up into and I knew so pausing here so I already knew about Jasmine Paris's remarkable career leading up to the Barclay marathons. And I knew a couple others, like Courtney dahlwater, who is an amazing Ultra runner. And I say in my article that she won the Moab 20 240 miler, where she beat the second placer by over 10 hours. And she also did, like the Tahoe 200 miler. But the article that when, when you make these articles, they get published well before it gets published. And it was just like a month before the article was getting published that Courtney also, I think she plays second or something in the what race was this? I'm trying to think of my head. It's not the Tahoe one. It was Mount Fuji. Excuse me, Mount Fuji, and I'm looking this up now. No, she she got, she placed third overall, but she was still the overall, like winner for for women's and the second place, or just like she was barely behind the second place, or actually, it looks like 30 seconds behind the third second Placer, which is amazing, right, as a woman and the two men being her, was just not that much of a margin. So I knew about these, these individuals, but then, like, looking up more for this article, just seeing like, well, how, how have we come up from from other ones, and finding out that there was a woman, Donna, I'm not going to say her last name quite right. Your your car notion otter, endurance runner who set the record for the loggers puller run. And that just happened this year in 2024 and to say that like, well, she run 30 miles every day for 20 Antarctica like, that's that's really intense. There's a special time training you have to do for that. And then just looking up others. I I knew about the woman who ran it, who cycled across America, but I didn't know her true origins, and then looking her up and reading her her amazing career as Leah Goldstein, and it's a Canadian endurance world cyclist. So you're just seeing like all these amazing people come popping up across all the different sports, and it does create a signal that we, we as women, are dominating more and more, and it's because of certain things getting better for for us in endurance sports. When
Rosemary Pennington
I was reading this, I was actually thinking a lot about Kristen Faulkner, who won the Olympic road race this summer, and who had, you know, gone from, you know, an everyday kind of job to, like, suddenly training and then winning this race, that women, that American women, had been sort of written out of, right? And I wonder how much has like the training of female endurance athletes changed over the years that that, you know, you have this graph that shows like it's getting close their performance is getting closer to male performance, but also that we're in a situation where you can go from, you know, not being sort of in that sport to sort of being trained up to be a champion, essentially.
Claire McKay Bowen
Yeah, yeah, that was, that was amazing. Yeah, the breakaway for like, one whole kilometer. Oh, man, that was like, so, yeah, I got super excited as somebody, who does I do? It's called E racing. I do virtual bike racing through Swift. I'm on a team and, like, we all geeked out. We're like, oh my god, this happened. It was so exciting to actually see this, because it's so hard. And as somebody who's not a pro, but still does these races doing that kind of breakaway is like, really, really tough, and the fact that she did it and sustained is credible. So actually getting to your question, instead of me just geeking. I'm really excited about this. This is my other life. Rather being statistician is like, I want to be endurance athlete. I the training definitely it. We're just so much better about it. So I talk a little bit in the article, but I don't touch on everything, which is like, we're we now know that there's a difference between men and women when we train like it seems really obvious when you state that, but there isn't a lot of investment or research into it. And so we as a society have been training women to be like, Oh, we're just small men. So like, whatever we've been doing for men, we should just do the same thing for women. But there's a lot of, of course, differences, like our hormonal transitions, right? Like, it's that the fact that, like, we just have our body weights a little bit structured differently, that we need to recover differently, all these different things factor in. And so it's actually one of the reasons why, like, I actually have a coach to help me go through some of the trainings, and as a woman. And so it's really nice having somebody who's really focused on, like, what kind of nutrition do I need to have? Like, what kind of ways should I recover, or how I should train up for certain things, like having that focus is, is really nice. And it knowing that she herself is a pro athlete and knows how women should train up is, is great. So this also goes into, like, I think I talked about this article too, is there's a great book about it called roar, and it's and there's actually a podcast that goes along with it. I think it's like feisty females, and it's talks about how women hurt, like, there's a whole chapter about, like our hormones and like when we should be training, and it's very different than what people might expect, because, like, when we're closer to our cycle, for instance, we are most close, like, close to men, so you technically need to trade harder during that period of time to get certain kind of benefits, which is really interesting versus what some people might think.
Rosemary Pennington
As I was reading that I so I ran competitively in high school as a sprinter, and I had to quit my senior year because we got a new coach who was the football coach who took over our track team and started training the men and the women in the same way. And I had come back from being very ill and injured to sort of try to to run again, and he just expected us to run the exact same way. And I just I couldn't do it, because I came back sick. And I wonder, and I think about all those young female athletes you know at the middle school and the high school level, who you know, hopefully are benefiting from this changing understanding of how female athletes need to be treated to perform well. Because I know you know that was in the 90s, so it's not that long ago, but it definitely like that idea that women are not just little men kind of really resonated with me when I was reading this.
John Bailer
So, you know, you had mentioned so we've talked about a couple of the touched on a couple of the factors that you described. I mean, you talked about scientific research, representation and time were the three kind of organizing ways that you were talking about the change that has occurred in terms of society and how people are competing. I'm very interested in this. My oldest daughter ran her first marathon a few years ago, and my youngest daughter is prepping for her first marathon now. So it's neat to see this, and I'm I'm looking forward to sharing your article with them. So So can you talk a little bit about kind of you mentioned with the scientific research, the idea of of the training differences, and in reflecting that and respecting that as part of of getting people ready for endurance events. And the you talk about a little bit the representation with some of these examples that you've done, can you talk a little bit about kind of, this, this factor of time?
Claire McKay Bowen
Yeah, yeah, I think my, my, my friend's statement that I ended quoting in my article saying, like, we're seeing more women getting better at endurance sports because we have more opportunities, but because women tend to take the brunt of child care and household chores that, like, still impacts our performance negatively and on two ways. Like, one is that it just takes a ton of time to do certain events, or just to train it up, right? And I, I talk about, like, how long it took me to train up for an Iron Man, and I even qualified with the whole thing of, I'm actually in better shape than the average person. I constantly go through a cycle of, like, endurance races. And then I then take an off season, and then I reboot again, right? So I have a really strong base, and so I could do a 16 week training program to do to trade for a full Ironman. And I realize I'm saying Ironman should be said as the full distance race for the triathlon, to swim, bike and run. And training for that is just like I said, it's a lot of time. So 16 weeks is pretty short in terms of, if you're less experienced, it's also the fact like during the peak, what they call peak training, for those who don't know, it's right before you're going to take a little bit easier load right before the race. And so peak time is your most intense time. It's the longest runs or the longest swims, or the most intense, like interval training, where you just, like high impact or high high pace, or things like that. And it's usually like a three week period. And during that time, I was consistently doing like, 15 to 20 hours of workouts. So that's a lot of time to think about, like, oh, that's, that's a part time job on top of if you're working full time or have childcare duties or things like that. So so that gets into that whole, like, We need time, and if women are doing a lot of the other kind of chores or other responsibilities on top of their normal work, then that becomes very difficult for them to balance it. It's also thinking about the bandwidth too, right? It's the whole mental load of, like, I need to start this training. I need to put that effort in. And I even see that with me with who I don't have children. But sometimes I have, like, a really hard day and I need to do a workout. I'm like, gosh dang. I need to really pound through this workout. Just like, just focus on this even though I'm mentally really tired from the work day, and sometimes I have to message my coach going like I didn't push as hard as I could have for this workout just because I was mentally fatigued.
John Bailer
You're listening to stats and stories. Our guest today is Claire McKay. Bowen.
Rosemary Pennington
Claire, what got you interested in doing endurance sports in the first place?
Claire McKay Bowen
So to be honest, I was a fat kid in high school. Nobody believes me now, but I was a little overweight, and I had really low self esteem, and at some point I got asked to be the manager for the cross country team. So it was a little funny. I saw I was like, the student manager. And then at some point I was like, well, I should start running too, because then you have to sometimes, like, run from like, one point of the course to the other to to get time, or, like, cheer people on, or track all the students. And at some point, like, halfway through, I was like, well, maybe I'll just start building up. And I got it in my head that it was like, okay, everything takes a little bit of time. So I'll start running a quarter mile until I feel comfortable, and then I'll reach to, like a half mile, and then it just kept going slowly from there where I just kind of built it up. And so I actually then joined the team for the second half of the season, which was kind of crazy, and my goal was to not get last. So I never did. I do. Remember this from high school. I never got last, but one time, I did get second to last. So I wasn't super fast, right? I just was starting to run, and the team was so supportive and really nice, I got then motivated. So like, you know, I it's even though it's an individual run, it's still a team sport, because you get points for the team to rank. So I thought, well, I really need to get faster in order to help get more points for the team, because we're from a small school, so we don't have a lot of runners, and so I decided to run over the summer, I think the following year. I'm trying to remember as many years ago, but then I got I lost a ton of weight and also started running faster. So I actually got the like most improved award for the end of the season. And my coach was, like, really impressive. Like, yeah, Claire was mostly proof. She went from, I think, of like, time went from like 40 minutes to 20 something, right. So I went from being right, really, really, really slow to actually being one of the scoring members of the team for the varsity. So, like, not the fastest. I want to clarify. I was still not the fastest, but I was definitely above average at that point, and I just built off of that, because I just realized, like, I really love running, and I describe it to people as, like, my meditation, like, it's my way to just, like, clear the world and really focus on other things than like, like, stress from work or stress from life just seems to, like, melt away once I, like, start running or biking or swimming or something. It's just, it's a way to really clarify things, and it makes me feel good at the end of the day, even though sometimes I'm like, I don't want to run, I'm so tired, and then I start running, and it's like magic. So, like, there's a comic called the oatmeal I don't know if you guys, oh yes. He wrote a actual dedicated book about his love of running, because he also was overweight, and he started running. He got really into it. And he has this little comic of, like, you're sad and gloomy, and then there's this, you're running shoes on the side, and you walk up to her, and she's like, Okay, well, fine, I'll get running. And then all sudden, it's like, magic, rainbows everywhere. Like, oh, everything's better, yeah,
John Bailer
what you just said really resonated with me. I started running when I was in grad school because of stress, and it was a, I think it was, it was sort of magic, and that carried over to a faculty job, by the way, in terms of both the stress and the running, when I was reading your article, the one thing that really struck me, well, a lot of it did, but, but, but in particular, the story about the Olympics, I just did not really appreciate that there was a constraint on distance for women after, after 28 Can you talk a little bit about about what happened and then, and then how things changed again in the first in the 60s and then the 80s?
Claire McKay Bowen
That's that's a great comment about the whole Olympics. Like I. Didn't know either, until I started writing this article too. Actually, I mean, I knew about the famous incident with Catherine, who's the first woman to finish the Boston Marathon. I mean, that went all over, pretty viral, about how a woman pretended to be a man to run this race, and in the viral picture of the race director, trying to pull the bib off of her and her boyfriend trying to defend her. They're like now, let her run. So this just goes back to back. So pausing here, so going back into the early 1900s all the way through the 1980s by the time women are part of the Olympic sports, it was just still the idea that women are small and delicate. So you see some things you can, like, look this up on like YouTube, or some other videos of like, what was the exercise equipment for women? It was these really ridiculous machines, but that was all what people thought was the way to have women work out. Like, there was, like, this belt that went around your waist, and it would just like, go back and forth and just like, massage your waist. And that was a workout for women to help, like, thin out their waistline. And the idea that, like, well, if you work out your what was it, your uterus would fall out your you would start growing more hair and just become more manly if you worked out more. And so these kind of ideas really permeated society, about like how women would perform, and it didn't help that in one of the Olympic races. So this is alluding to what you were saying, John, was that during one of the, I think it was the 800 meter race. So the women passed out from the heat of that race, and then the Olympics were like, Nope, we can't have women run that far like that. That's, that's too much. It's, they're too delicate. They can't do this. And you can imagine it's because we just didn't train women properly, right? And it's obvious that when you look at women like Courtney dahlwater, who's blowing men out of the water, that's definitely not the case.
Rosemary Pennington
I wonder, given the work that you have done and what you've looked at for this, you know that again, that to go back to that graph, you have this graph of these. You know, world, what is it? World Record marathon times, where towards the end, the men and women's times are getting closer together, and then you've got these examples of women who are beating men or coming in very close to men. I just sort of wonder, what do you sort of see as kind of the next, the next thing we should be watching out for when it comes to women athletes and endurance sports like what is, what is the next headline? You imagine the next five to 10 years?
Claire McKay Bowen
Oh, that's a that's a great question. I mean, you say I'm doing research. This is all for fun. I'm not. I want to preface to, like my readers, that I'm not a sports medicine right, scientist or endurance coach or anything. It's just something I really enjoy doing, and I've been doing for a while, and I part of these groups that follow these things because we enjoy it. So I'm going to preface that, but in the next five to 10 years, I very much vision women just getting like, as fast as men in certain sports. I think there is definitely like, there is definitely a difference, and that's why I say that women aren't small men, right? So there's going to be some things that men are going to be better at than women, in terms of, just like the physiology of things, which I know that's not what people want to hear, but this is why women are better at endurance sports. We're seeing that in the, I think in its in the future is that we're going to consistently see men, like men, dominating in some sports, and women dominating in others, like these endurance ones, because women actually are better physiologically. To take this. I mean, that's why the only woman to swim the English Channel four times, like back and forth, like the only person is a woman. The fact that Coney dawater is just blowing out all these other men, or jasmine Paris also is like, coming up, she did another kind of race where she beat a lot of men too. It's this is what we're going to be seeing more and more. And so certain sports are just going to be predominated by by women versus men, and vice versa, and some other aspects. So
John Bailer
when you're working on this, this article, what, what was the most surprising thing that you learned in in, you know, doing the background and writing this
Claire McKay Bowen
Well, other than the Olympic part, because I actually didn't know that the that women weren't allowed to I knew they were allowed to run, but I didn't realize it was so soon as soon As in. I thought we as women could start racing in Star Olympics force earlier than 1982 or whatever it was like. I was just really surprised about that. The other surprising thing was the the fact that we had to do these larger studies to be saying, Hey, we. Be obviously time is a factor, or obviously getting sponsorship is a factor or better nutrition, right? These are some things that seems pretty obvious, and it's definitely obvious to me too, but at some point you have to actually be a scientist and be like, Okay, we're gonna actually survey people. We're actually gonna analyze these things. And it wasn't I thought these things happen much sooner, but it hasn't. So like the Asics one for that big survey they did that didn't happen until 2023 and looking into the challenges and barriers for women in sports, or the fact that some of this research on like whether or not it's okay for women to work out while they're pregnant, right? There's, there's still a stigma about that, even though more and more research is showing that it's actually really good for women to work out while pregnant and post pregnancy with moderation, and, of course, having certain other tests done with your doctor and checking but that was why I thought it was amazing. Like one of my friends, she she ran a six minute or like, sub six minute mile the week that she gave birth, that she incredible, yeah, she also Boston called like she's just one of those people that just just makes you feel terrible, and like, I did a half marathon with her while she was pregnant. At that point, she was 30 something plus weeks pregnant. She beat me. She beat me like 10 minutes so she was the first place here in our age because we're in the same age group, and I got second place. So I felt like, well, if I'm gonna be beaten, it would be by my Asia. But then at the same time, she was 30 plus weeks pregnant, so I was like, I don't know how, how great that makes me feel about being beaten by her, but she's, she's an amazing athlete, and she's also, like, working full time with a different career, and then doing this on the side, and just just killing it. So I think it's so incredible. And she did all while she was pregnant, and then post pregnancy, she went back to do the corona which is the World Championship for for the full distance triathlon, and she got to bring her daughter with her. And it was very, very like nice to see that post on on social media about her and her family going out and her daughters watching her race.
John Bailer
Well, well, Claire, I'm afraid that's all the time we have for this episode of stats and stories. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you for having me. Stats and stories is a partnership between Miami University's departments of statistics and media, journalism and film and the American Statistical Association, you can listen to us on Spotify, SoundCloud, Apple podcasts, or other places where you find podcasts and follow us on social media if you'd like to share your thoughts on the program, Send your email to stats and stories@miamioh.edu or check us out at stats and stories.net and Be sure to listen for future editions of stats and stories where we discuss the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics you.