I’m a white, middle-class, greek-member male from Middle America.

I’m of average appearance, average intelligence and average athletic ability.

I’m pretty ordinary, a run-of-the-mill Joe who has a good job, likes what he’s doing and thinks he’s pretty enlightened.

But the problem isn’t my job, my athletic ability, my intelligence, my appearance, my residence, my economic status or my ethnicity. It’s that I’m not as enlightened as I thought.

See, I really never thought I could speak to the state of race or ethnic relations nationally, statewide or even on the local level. I am, after all, not a minority, not someone who has ever been subject to blatant or overt discrimination. I haven’t intensely studied the tension, or lack thereof, and in the contacts I have with my minority friends and acquaintances, discrimination is rarely a topic of casual conversation.

Perhaps it’s because I really do try to look deeper. Perhaps. Because sometimes I succeed, and sometimes I fail despite my best efforts.

But regardless, I thought I knew gender relations. I thought I knew this male-female, men-women stuff. I am, after all, a male — one half of the relationship component. And as such, I thought I was expert enough to say that gender discrimination is fast becoming a thing of the past, that it only pops up occasionally and then quickly fades.

Then college basketball tournaments started rolling around.

The Big 12 Tournament came first. Sitting in a meeting with a couple of Iowa State Daily people and a couple of Iowa State athletic department people, one of the athletic guys had a pretty good point, I thought.

The question was simple: “Why doesn’t the Daily send writers and photographers to cover the women’s Big 12 Tournament?”

We nearly always cover the men’s, even though it usually falls on the first weekend of spring break and we can’t report on it for another week because the Daily isn’t published over break. But not the women’s.

I hadn’t even given that a second thought.

Yes, it has something to do with the traditional success of the teams. Traditionally, the men have won a lot of games. Traditionally, the women haven’t. But that shouldn’t have been the determining factor. Because the fact is that the teams are both big-time Division I squads in their respective roles. Both win and lose big games. And this year, at least, both were very successful.

I was, however, surprised that some here at the Daily thought that making the road trip to Kansas City to cover the women wasn’t necessary. After all, we hadn’t covered the women’s conference tournament before. And some said “nobody cares” if the women win or lose.

I thought that was funny because I cared. And as luck would have it, there was only one opinion that mattered. So we got to the women’s tournament. I was glad we did.

Then the NCAAs rolled around. This was a little tougher.

For the first time in school history, the women qualified. So did the men, though that wasn’t a big surprise. But when budgeting way back when, I had only planned on covering the men.

I didn’t, in all honesty, expect the women to qualify since they had never before. Plane tickets and hotel rooms can get rather expensive, and the women were sent to Virginia. That’s a long way from home.

But as luck would have it, the powers that be at the Daily came up with some more cash to cover both. That too, I think, was a good thing.

Here’s where it’s time to wax philosophical

If we have a truly gender equitable thing going on in this stew we call a society, then why was covering just the men, and not the women, even open to debate? The teams had achieved the same status by virtue of the same hard work and the same system of criteria.

The answer is pretty easy. You see, one team has men. The other has women. And somewhere on the scales of equitability, somebody put a fishing sinker on the men’s side.

I’m not quite sure why the balance got thrown out of whack, but I now know two things: We’ve got a way to go before the weight evens out, and I need to do a little more to kick that sinker off the scale.

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Chris Miller is a senior in journalism and mass communication from Marshalltown. He is editor in chief of the Daily.