Emmoni Lopez used to take dance lessons while her older brothers wrestled – but it turned out that she liked wrestling better.

Her mom wasn’t surprised when Lopez told her she liked wrestling more than dance, and three years after Lopez took up the sport, she enjoys watching her daughter wrestle. Still, when a coach first asked Lopez to join his program, her mom hesitated– she never thought her daughter would want to be a wrestler.

Lopez is among a growing number of girls who are taking up wrestling. Officials with youth organizations in Chicago and the Illinois Kids Wrestling Federation (IKWF) said they’ve seen the number of girls participating in the sport take off in recent years.

In Lopez’s program, about half of the students participating in the organization’s free youth wrestling camp this summer are girls, coach Frankie Zepeda said.

Many of the girls Zepeda sees become interested in wrestling through their brothers, he said.

“They probably just learn to … fight back,” he said.

One of those was Yamilet Aguirre. She took up wrestling because she was bored just watching her brother wrestle, she said.

“I can have fun doing it,” she said. “And I can prove girls are just as strong as boys are.”

Though girls have competed on high school wrestling teams in Illinois for years, coaches and female wrestlers said there weren’t many participating a decade ago.

“It’s really picked up over the last few years,” said Jim Considine, president of the IKWF.

Between the 2015-16 and 2017-18 seasons, the number of girls registered with IKWF grew from 363 to 503, and more of the organization’s events are featuring a girls-only division. Girls and boys wrestle together during the season through IKWF, but there’s a girls-only championship at the end of the year.

And by adding female wrestling programs, colleges are giving girls and young women another option.

“Female wrestling isn’t something unacceptable anymore,” Considine said. “Things have happened so quickly. Ten years ago, you’d never have dreamed of doing this.”

How the economics profession should fix its gender problem

At the heart of economics is a belief in the virtues (好处) of open competition as a way of using the resources you have in the most efficient way you can. Thanks to the power of that insight, economists routinely tell politicians how to run public policy and business people how to run their firms. Yet when it comes to its own house, academic economics could have done more to observe the standards it applies to the rest of the world.

In particular, it recruits (招聘) too few women. Also, many of those who do work in the profession say they are treated unfairly and that their talents are not fully realised. As a result, economics has fewer good ideas than it should and suffers from a skewed (歪曲的) viewpoint. It is time for the dismal science to improve its dismal record on gender.

For decades relatively few women have participated in STEM subjects: science, technology, engineering and maths. Economics belongs in this list. And a survey by the American Economics Association (AEA) this week shows that many women who do become academic economists are treated badly.

To deal with its gender shortfall (缺口), economics needs two tools that it often uses to analyse and solve problems elsewhere: its ability to crunch data and its capacity to experiment. Take data first. The AEA study is commendable, but only a fifth of its 45,000 present and past members replied to its poll. Better data are needed to capture how work by female economists is discriminated against. The more comprehensive (全面的) the picture that emerges, the sooner and more easily action can be taken to change recruitment and to reform professional life.

The other priority is for economists to experiment with new ideas, as the AEA is recommending. For a discipline that values dynamism, academic economics is often conservative, sticking with teaching methods, hiring procedures and social conventions that have been around for decades. The AEA survey reveals (显示) that 46% of women have not asked a question or presented an idea at conferences for fear of being treated unfairly, compared with 18% of men. Seminars could be organised to ensure that all speakers get a fair chance. The way that authors’ names are presented on papers could ensure that it is clear who has done the intellectual heavy lifting.

Instead of moving cautiously, the economics profession should do what it is best at: recognise there is a problem, measure it objectively and find solutions. If the result is more women in economics who are treated better, there will be more competition for ideas and a more efficient use of a scarce (稀缺的) resource. What economist could possibly object to that?

Twenty-five years ago, most young Britons wanted a career in law, to be a doctor, or, if they were creatively minded, to take up singing. But today, things stand differently.

According to a survey by Tesco Mobile, a UK telecoms company, the “dream job” of young people aged between 16 and 25 in the UK is a video blogger, or “vlogger”. The survey, carried out among 1,002 people, found that as much as 40 percent of them put vlogger as their number one choice on a list of ideal jobs.

The only reason for this change is undoubtedly the Internet and social media. They have made it so much easier to reach a global user, without having to get a job in show business in the traditional way.

“In years gone by, the biggest stars were shaped and trained by the Hollywood studios; now, anyone with a computer camera can become an icon(偶像),” a Tesco Mobile spokesperson said in a news release. “These self-made stars record their hobbies to an admiring fan-base. Vloggers are the big stars of today because they are normal people interacting with their fans about everyday life.”

However, what people see is only the great side of being a vlogger and they ignore the fact that only those who are successful get fame and fortune. There are the dreams that come true and the dreams that still remain dreams.

This is why although vloggers are popular, some young people choose jobs that don’t necessarily earn them fame, but allow them to make good use of the Internet to share their hobbies. Young Israeli David Leshaw, for example, runs a business called the Finishers Club. It’s an online platform(平台) for runners to keep a record of their races. He told the website Zippia that his job allows him to express his thought, and is always a learning experience. And that’s enough for him.