When a girl competes alongside boys, she's heralded as a brave, path-breaking student athlete, the kind universally worthy of praise. When a boy competes against girls in field hockey in Massachusetts, he's accused of cheating.

In 2001, the Mohawk Trail Regional High School field hockey team made the Massachusetts state semifinals on the broad shoulders of 6'5" and 205-pound Ryan Sherburne.Wearing the same plaid skirt as his teammates, Sherburne dominated many a game because he was bigger, faster and had a much harder shot than the opposing girl players.

(In case you are unfamiliar with field hockey, it is a sport in which eleven-person teams try to score goals like in ice hockey by moving a hard plastic ball about the size and weight of a baseball using only one side of a curved stick.It is played on a field about 80 percent of the size of a soccer field with a goal about as tall but only about half as wide as a soccer goal.Although it is played primarily by girls and women in the U.S. and Canada, both men's and women's field hockey are Olympic sports and men's field hockey is very popular in India, Pakistan, the Netherlands, Germany, and Australia among other countries, where it is called just "hockey".)

Today about 30 boys play high school field hockey in Massachusetts (as compared to nearly 8,000 girls), and opponents of boys playing have gone to the state government asking that they be banned.At the same time, girls on high school boy's ice hockey teams are so commonplace in Massachusetts that it is no longer considered novel and is widely accepted.

Is this discrimination against boys, who are merely playing a sport they love and have no other opportunity to play?Why or why not?Does it matter if this were professional sports rather than high school sports?Try to think about this questionlike aneconomist.