A 6th grade girls team from Kentucky was set to go for the year-end championship tournament, but was told they were banned due to fears boys teams might ‘retaliate’ if they lost to the girls team.
A 6th grade girls team from Kentucky was set to go for the year-end championship tournament, but was told they were banned due to fears boys teams might ‘retaliate’ if they lost to the girls team.
Sports without contact mechanics I’ve always wondered why the split. Like men’s and women’s chess… what?
But men’s and women’s football? That kind of makes sense, not saying women’s should be banned from the men’s leagues, but let them make that choice themselves
Look at world records for any sport that requires raw strength/power, speed, and endurance. The split is pretty extreme. The marathon world record is 2:00:35, set in 2023. The women’s world record is 2:17:42, 13% slower. For the 100m, the top time is 9.58s for men. Over 180 men have broken the 10 second barrier. The top woman is 10.49; no woman has ever broken the 10 second barrier. Given that power lifting is harder to do direct comparisons (…in a way that readily makes sense to people that aren’t competitive power lifters…), I’ll just note that it’s not even close.
Any sport that has a significant speed, endurance, or strength component is going to tend to be dominated by men. When it’s purely a skill issue, the splits are much more even. When you look at archery, for instance, women sometimes beat men; the split is fairly even.
In a lot of ways, it makes sense to have a hard gender split in sports, and not try to make a solid delineation between what sports require enough skill to overcome a physical gap versus which ones don’t.
I think it is a bit more difficult than that. I have really enjoywd watching downhill bike racing in the past, and both the men’s and women’s races are incredible.
If you don’t know, It is a single rider time trial down incredibly technical courses on a mountain bike.
Unfortunately I don’t think it would be good to mix men and women, because the men are faster. This year’s world champs race had the men finishing 30s faster, the fastest woman would have been 66th. Results
I would love to see more mixed competitions in the elite level of sports where it makes sense.
I often think of the Olympic skier that was interviewed by NPR a few years ago. She described how the boys around her were encouraged to do riskier jumps, whereas when she’d bring it up coaches, parents etc would all express concern about “what if you get hurt?”
There are a lot of social factors I think we should consider before writing women off as inherently lesser in competitive sports. We don’t know how many women are held back by these narratives if they aren’t even given the chance. Even if it’s the case now, I really wonder how much is purely biological