Analysis of gender equality in US college sports’ funding via spatial clustering

In this paper, we analyze the geographic differences in the level of equality of resource distribution between women’s and men’s college sports in the United States. We compute the distribution of various equality measures across universities in each of the 52 top-level administrative divisions (the 50 states plus the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico) and use a spatially corrected fuzzy clustering algorithm to explore and partition the dataset. We see the emergence of clear spatial patterns that correspond to the usual divide in American politics, which are further strengthened and smoothed using a modularity-based spatial correction term.