Karen (at Miami University) writes:
 
 
>Also, to even suggest as the lawyers for the Colgate women have that
>they are not treated equally because only 32% of Colgate athletes are
>women while they account for 47% of the student body is ridiculous.
>This says that 68% of the women at Colgate participate in athletics
>which I would guess is not that unusual a percentage for women at any
>college.
 
Unless I am misunderstanding something, this information doesn't say
that 68% of the women at Colgate participate in athletics.  Unless we
are told the percentage of students at Colgate that are athletes, we
cannot deduce the percentage of women who are athletes.
 
If you like math, this is a nice exercise in conditional probability.
If W = "woman," A = "athlete" and P means "probability of," then we are
told that P(W|A) = .32 (this is the conditional probability that a
student is a woman given that this student is an athlete) and
P(W)=.47.  If P(W) is known, then we can calculate
 
                P(A|W) = P(W|A) P(A) / P(W),
 
which is the percentage of women who are athletes.
 
 
David Ruppert
 
Cornell '70
UVM '73
Michigan State '77