so I crunched some numbers

Submitted by tumbledry (United States), May 17, 2010 at 14:18

Pew research on religions (link: http://religions.pewforum.org/reports) states that .5% of the united states is Muslim.

According to the Pageant Almanac's calendar list, there will be 88 top-tier pageants in 2010 (link: http://www.pageant-almanac.com/calendar/list.php). Of those, 30 will be in the United States.

Let's assume, because nobody has better numbers, that beauty pageant submissions by religion reflect the overall religious trends in the United States - not terribly crazy, no?

That means, that assuming a winner of each pageant is picked AT RANDOM (not a bad guess for how they choose, from my perspective - also note this means NO DISCRIMINATION).

Off the back of the envelope, this means that the chance that a Muslim is picked as the winner in 2010 in ONE pageant (since that's all we have proof of here):

.5% + .5% + .5% ... 30 times over or: 30 * .5%, or 15% percent chance in 2010 Judging by the numbers, 2010 was a pretty average year for the number of US beauty pageants, going back to 2006. That's means probability wise were talking one Muslim winning a top-tier beauty pageant about every 7 years. Oh yeah, and the Miss A&T pageant and Junior Miss pageants are not in the lists I used, so I'm classifying them as NOT top tier. Top tier are the State titles and up (Miss New Jersey, Miss South Carolina, up to Miss USA and Miss America).

Even if we assume the A&T pageant and Junior Miss pageants were included that would be three muslims in 5 years. Like I said the chances are about 15% per Muslim winner per year, so the total probability that 1 Muslim would win 1 pageant over 5 years is: 15% * 5, same as above (15% the first year, or 15% the second year, etc) or 75% chance.

Only, we need three Muslims to win, so in that case it would be .75 * .75 *.75 or .75 ^ 3 (75% chance for the first, and 75% chance for the second, etc). This comes out to a 42% chance that three muslims will win major beauty pageants over the last 5 years.

Could I possibly be right? I mean, really an almost 1 in 2 chance? If you remember correctly though, I'm only asking that a Muslim win three times in 150 tries (5 years time 30 pageants a year)...

I can safely say I would be hard pressed to describe what you outline in your post as indicative of anything except random chance...

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