Should we stop splitting sports by gender and just let everybody compete together?
No more men's and women's league, no more "gender eligibility" requirements, a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all.
Edit: since it looks like people missing the word let: the suggestion isn't to force desegregation. It's to allow it or even make it the default. Someone else made a good suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it's weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.
Not if you value women participating in sports.
Why? Weight classes, leauges, and divisions won't help?
The fastest a woman has ever run the 100m dash is 10.49 seconds.
The Olympic qualifying time, that all runners needed to beat to even complete in men’s 100m dash this year was 10.00 seconds.
If we didn’t have a women’s division, there couldn’t be women in sports.
Yes, that's a sport where segregation makes sense. But the suggestion isn't to force desegregation, it's to to let all genders compete against each other.
We call it the “Mens” category, but for all intents and purposes it is the same as an “open to all genders” category.
Female athletes don’t compete in it because they’re physically not strong enough to even qualify to compete in it at the world level. The gender they identify as or were assigned at birth is irrelevant. There’s no genetic testing requirement to compete at the men’s level.
In almost every sport, the world record performance from a women isn’t even good enough to meet the minimum bar for quality to compete in the men’s competitions at the world level.
Even sports like diving where you’re judged more than measured, the male athletes strength makes it possible for them to do things the female athletes simply can’t.
There was a time when they only was open to all competition, adding a protected women’s only category was to make it fair for women. And then we started calling the open category the men’s category.
We could call it the open category and the low-T category instead, and it would have the exact same participants in each.
This has been explained elsewhere.
And they commented on that comment too, stating that it's an unknowable mystery.
No, men and women are not physically equal.
Men and men aren't physically equal. Maybe basketball should have a rule that everyone in the team has to be the same height. Can't have anyone with a physical advantage over anyone else.
What do you think would happen if the best NBA team played the best WNBA team? I think the men would win.
What do you think would happen if professional basketball was mixed? I'd imagine the teams would be 90% men.
Also, if track and field records are any indication, men are strong and faster. Separate divisions are more fair.
Why does that matter? Men also have divisions and leagues. Team in the top leagues will destroy the leagues at the bottom.
It's inherently boring to watch sports competitions between unequally capable people, and there is a natural difference in that that can be clearly attributed to gender.
I admire your thought of equality but we need to talk about the differences in physique in genders as well if we wanna discuss this.
Don't dismiss this claim, scientifically debunk it or share why not and how you come to this conclusion.
No, it's not attributed to gender. It is attributed to sex. Sorry to be pedantic but we live in a world where that distinction is very important for education purposes.
Of course people are differently capable, that why we have divisions, leagues, weight classes, and so on, even in the same sex. Why would that change when they all compete together?
"Hey! Do you want to watch division 7 soccer? They have a woman on the team!"
Hardly inspirational to girls everywhere. Whereas whenever I've caught the Canadian women's soccer team, it's usually at a pretty full arena with lots of girls teams there stoked to watch. I would never take that away from them.
Why do you assume they'll be in the 7th division? And do you assume it will be the case for all sports?
Which sports do you watch both men and women play?
Soccer is the one I do most frequently. My local men's MLS team would walk through the Canadian women's team. The men can just kick it much farther and harder, run faster, take dangerous shots from farther out and that's not to mention the physicality. And the Canadian women's team is one of the top 10 or so in the world. (And MLS is several steps down from any of the serious leagues from which most national men's teams are drawn.)
Not even going to look at a more physical sport like hockey.
I already posted comparing men and women's times at the Olympics, but to reiterate, the gold winning woman came in slower than the bare minimum men's time to qualify to run at the Olympics, in the 10k race, literally every one of the racers beat the women's world record... (stats you saw but conveniently did not respond to.)
Does that answer your question?
No, it doesn't answer if it'll be the same for all sports. As others have pointed out archery, shooting, curling, and other sports have men an women competing either separate or together and women can compete at the same level.
As for football, yes, there's a good chance there'll be stark differences, but as I pointed out in another comment, not every sport is about raw strength. And, competing against stronger opponents can also raise your ceiling. How far is of course yet to be seen because we don't have mixed leagues.
And again, the suggestion isn't "NO MORE SEGREGATION EVER" it's "should we let them compete against each other". That means there'll be a mixed and segregated league. Maybe even, as somebody else suggested, the segregations wouldn't always be immediately by sex or gender, but by attributes that make sense in that sport e.g weight, muscle mass, height, skill, and so on.
Because putting them together in most physical sports would push women out of the highest echelons of that sport. Just look up what female MMA fighters and female tennis players have to say. They literally can't keep up with men. Serena Williams and her sister boasted that they'd beat any man outside the top 200, Braasch (then #203) took the challenge and on the day of the challenge played a round of golf drank 2 low ABV beers before easily beating both sisters
Probably the most detrimental thing you can do for women in sports is to get rid of the women's league. Most "men's" categories are already open for women, so you should ask women why they don't want to partake. The answer is what female athletes already say, they'd get absolutely dumpstered before they even get close to the top. Of course the less physically demanding the closer men and women will be, but for most sports the physical differences make women's leagues necessary.
Most professional sports in the United States don't have any policies against women being in the sport. NBA, Football, Baseball, Hockey, etc.
None of them exclude women from playing in the professional leagues. Baseball did briefly in the middle of the 1900s, but that policy was reversed
It's just that, for these sports, the best women in the game have not yet been better than the worst men in the game. A woman and a man of equal height and weight are still not generally physically equal. Muscle composition and growth, bone structure, etc. mean that on average, women are less strong and less explosive than men, and most popular sports emphasize those attributes.
WNBA teams would often scrimmage against male pick-up basketball players for practice, and they would also often lose. These were just random guys in the area, many of whom didn't even play often.
The US Women's National Team played against FC Dallas's under-15 boys squad and lost 5-2. That USWNT went on to win the Olympics and the women's World Cup. The Australian women's team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal's woman's team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
There is some research on evolutionary theory specifically about the vast differences in upper-body strength: "But even with roughly uniform levels of fitness, the males' average power during a punching motion was 162% greater than females', with the least-powerful man still stronger than the most powerful woman. Such a distinction between genders, Carrier says, develops with time and with purpose."
There are very few sports where this would be feasible, and most if not all those sports are not well-watched and make very little money: shooting, archery, ultra-marathons come first to mind.
Muscle and bone density is a big differentiator. When I was younger I dated some women who looked very strong. Like, their legs were three times thicker than mine. Yet when it came to actual strength, their legs were a tenth as strong as mine. It was actually kind of shocking how much stronger my legs were than theirs, considering the visual differences. It wasn't until later in life that I learned about the muscle density differences between men and women, and then it made sense. My legs felt like slabs of iron when you touched them. Their legs, despite looking outstanding, still felt fairly soft. That's because of the differences in muscle density between biological males and females.
To be fair, about that women's world cup team, if i recall correctly it was a PR move to play an exhibition match with those kids and they were not trying very hard to win. I don't think they would truly lose to U-15 if it was, for example, a tournament.
Your overall point has merit but i think that specific example gets overused a bit.
It was hardly a "PR move," they didn't publicize it, and it didn't really get traction until Carli Lloyd "admitted" it on Twitter. I'm sure they were taking it a little easy though. That being said, the Australian women's team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal's woman's team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
I actually watch more women's soccer than men's, so I'm not denigrating the game or quality of play, but I think you'd agree the above represents a pretty clear trend.
Same dress code, standards and rules absolutely - regardless if competition is split or not.
Same competition definitely for some sports - chess and shooting come to mind.
More physical sports - I'm undecided there. I'd support everyone competing together if for example weight categories are introduced. You don't want people of widely different physical build competing together, it's not fun either to watch or play.
That's already how it works. 80kg boxers don't compete against 100kg boxers, division 1 teams don't compete against division 5 teams.
It just means that some teams will be mixed. We might even be surprised at how many teams will be mixed.
I don't want to see a 80kg male boxing against a 80kg female. I already know how that is going to end.
No, you don't. You haven't seen it yet. Nor do you know how 100 or 1000 such matches would end.
It's also fine if you don't want to see it. No one is going to force you too.
The latter, obviously. Actually, they should all play naked, for science.
It was good enough for the ancient Greeks
Probably boost viewership a good bit
More environmentally friendly, no micro plastics from the synthetic fabrics
Avoids the inevitable arguments about which teams uniforms are too revealing or look stupid or whatever
One less expense for the smaller/less well-funded teams to worry about, and harder to argue that one team has an advantage because they have better equipment
Probably would scare away some of the prudish religious assholes, good riddance.
Sucks to be you if you play a winter sport though.
You should probably look up the effects of testosterone. Namely upper body strength and bone density. Women are weaker than men.
Not all men. You think you can compete against any woman out there and win? Also, do you think every sport is about strength?
A lot has been written about why chess has separate tournaments for men and women despite physical strength not being a consideration for the game. Presumably, similar logic holds true for other non-physical-strength based games. I'd recommend you to look it up yourself, but the TL;DR (with some potential inaccuracies since it's been some time since I read it all) is as follows.
Historically women weren't even allowed to participate in chess tournaments because men considered them to be inferior and incapable of thinking as well as a man could. It was considered "ungentlemanly" to defeat a woman who "obviously" couldn't keep up with men. This led to a cycle of women not even learning the game because why bother, eh?
Now the thing about games like chess is that you can definitely learn it at any age and master it. BUT - doing so at a very young age tends to give people a huge edge over someone who started later (all else being equal - memory, effort etc etc). So, the same person starting at age 4 who'd probably be level 9000 Goku by the time they are 23 might never get to that level if they only start at age 35.
So, when women were allowed to participate in chess tournaments, there were very few of them who had started at the right age and could hold their own. This led to a need for a women's tournament to grow the sport.
How does that grow the sport? A little girl watching a woman on tv after winning a tournament might get inspired to pick it up. The girl might be able to point at the other women and tell her parents that she deserves to play chess too and that it's not just for boys.
These gendered leagues also give a "safe space" for women to participate in communities where people of different genders interacting is frowned upon. Etc etc etc.
Please do fact check me by looking up things on your own though -- it has been years since I went down this rabbit hole.
Thank you for the response!
I definitely agree that role models are important and that starting early is the key in chess. I can't remember the names, but it was tested by a researcher on his own daughters: he trained them in chess very early on they all became grand masters. In fact, the list of known chess grandmasters has 42 women on it.
Women are mentally capable of playing chess at the highest level if given the opportunity to do so.
So yes, giving them a space to compete against each other can serve as a "safe" space, it doesn't mean that it should be the only place they compete, nor that they are incapable of holding their own against other genders.
The question isn't either "should all sports force no segratation", but "should all sports let everybody compete together".
A lot of sports don't have a men's tournament per se. It's "women only" and "everyone allowed". So women can almost always go participate in a "men's" cricket match or whatever but they're at such a severe disadvantage physically that they can't get too far.
The only way to statistically (dis)prove all this is to repeat [this] (https://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/The-Man-Who-Beat-Venus-and-Serena-Back-to-Back.aspx) with a large enough sample set.
I recommend to make yourself familiar with the concept of some things being true even if you don't agree to them.
There are even things that still remain after nobody believes in them anymore (that is one definition of 'reality').
Even in "sports" like chess, darts and pool virtually every single world class player is a male. It's not just about strenght.
I'd really love sources on that since I don't follow those sports. Are they mixed?
But in chess, there are a definitely female grand masters (whatever that means). Pool had the famous "black widow" player. Who even plays darts? I only know of one fat Brit who has dominated against other men. No idea if women even play.
You can look up the leaderboards of any of the mentioned sports. It's not that there's not any women in there but it's still virtually all male.
Then there are plenty of examples of top level female athletes losing to males nobody has never even heard of.
Venus and Serena Williams lost to 203rd ranked male tennis player
FC Dallas under-15 boys squad beat the U.S. Women's National Team in a scrimmage
The thing people do no appreciate about professional and Olympic level sports is just how far the male athletes are beyond the athletic ability of the average man.
There seems to be a notion that just because someone is a male they get to compete at the highest level of sports. This is simply not the case. The vast majority of male athletes will never even come close to reaching a professional level. Even an above average male college athlete has a snowball's chance in hell of making it in a league like the NFL.
When we are talking about women competing with these men, we aren't talking about competing against men with average or even above average ability (professional female athletes would mop the floor with men in the 60% percentile) we are talking about competing against the top .000001% of male athletes.
Women not only have a biological disadvantage, they have a population size disadvantage. Far more boys and men compete in sports and games. I don't care what game or sport you are competiting in, if you have population A containing 100 randomly selected competitors and population B containing 1000 competitors, you don't have to be a statistician to figure out that your #1 competitor and probably your entire top 10 are going to come from population B.
OK, I'll just add an edit to the description, but for you too: the suggestion isn't to force desegregation. It's to allow it. Someone else made a better suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it's weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.
Finally, the option to compete together should still be the default, IMO. Some people probably would like to join a mixed team, but simply can't because it isn't allowed. For example if basketball were segregated by height, some shorter players would maybe like to play in the mixed team regardless (maybe they hit a skill ceiling in their league, maybe they don't like the idea of segregation, etc.).
No, because the women would be at an unfair physical disadvantage in most sports.
I watched the speed rock climbing (sorry, don’t know the official name) during the Olympics. The fastest woman was amazing, she flew up the wall in about 6.75 seconds, and beat her nearest competitor by over a second to win the gold. The fastest man was nearly 2 seconds faster again with his competitors not far behind. If the women competed with the men, the female gold medal winner wouldn’t even be on the podium.
You say that but women’s tennis didn’t exist until a woman beat all the men and won a tournament.
He did say "in most sports", not all. More specifically, sports where physical strength is an advantage (ie, weight lifting, rock climbing, football, soccer, wrestling, etc).
Women and men would be equal in sports like billiards, ping pong, badminton, gymnastics, ice skate, and even tennis.
Tennis?! Not even Serena Williams believes that:
Exception that proves the rule? That's pretty awesome though.
IDK, men already dominate so much of the world, why not make space for women's sports.
But imo it should be more like the weight classes in wrestling and less like the binary mens/women's thing with different rules.
Like why are men's and women's gymnastics so different. Why can't the person do the event they want to compete in?
That has always bothered me. I feel they should be doing The same activities.
Problem is that some sports are really unfair towards one of the sexes (and it's not always men who have the advantage). I definitely think it should be mixed for sports where there's no advantage.
Relevant recent YT short about archery: https://youtube.com/shorts/oCi_IawIFQA
I don't see that as a problem. For example boxing or weightlifting would probably have the top 10-100 being all men, but have more variety (trans, men, and women) below that. They could all compete together though.
You could still be the top man/woman/trans, but there would be a clear total ranking. For example one would see that the top female tennis player would rank 100th in the total ranking. It wouldn't take away from her achievements and allow her to play against men at the same level.
But it does kind of diminish the women's sports.
Consider say, the 100 meter sprint. The winning women's times at the Olympics were all so far behind the men that literally none of the winning times would have even qualified to be at the Olympics! (Mens min qualifying time is under 10 seconds, Alfred won gold at 10.72 seconds, Jefferson took bronze at 10.92.) At the other end of the scale, for the 10,000 meter race, the last placing male ran it in just over 29 minutes which was 5 seconds faster than the Olympic women's record for the same distance and was a full minute and a half faster than the gold winning woman.
Similarly for a lot of team sports you'd be relegating teams with women on them to a much lower league because at the top of the table, raw physical strength plays a role.
Splitting up by sex means we can watch and appreciate the best women play their sport at the highest level and celebrate them. Or almost every Olympic sport would just be guy guy guy.
In Finland we have lower physical requirements for women to get into the police academy. I think it's safe to say that with equal requirements we wouldn't have a single female police officer in the entire country.
I'd expect a similar thing to happen in sports. When it comes to physical strenght men have a massive advantage over women. It would be the women who this screws over.
Does Finland not have divisions, leagues, and classes in male sports? You don't think that an all male team in the last division can compete against an all female team in the top division? You don't think there are some sports where women are on equal footing where strength is not an advantage (archery, shooting, diving, etc.)? You don't think there is overlap in some sports?
Most if not all of the highest divisions would be men only. The highest ranking females would be competing against some minor league men on games that nobody would be interested in even watching.
Obviously there would be some number of genetic outliars but that wouldn't change the overall trend.
That is your assumption. You cannot know that across all sports. It would most certainly be true for sports limited or focused on physical strength, but beyond that, there's no way to know for certain.
If you've played any sport, you'll know that brute strength isn't the sole determining factor for success. Technique is very important too. Tactics cannot be ignored either. In football for example, just play "try to get the ball" in a square where one chases the ball. You might be the fastest player on the team but never catch the ball even against players who don't move.
Also, competing against stronger opponents is how people learn and "level up". You learn how to deal with different, faster, slower, more technical, stronger, even more intelligent opponents. Again, if you've ever played sports (or just games), you'll know what it feels like to think you're the best, then get decimated by an opponent, but in doing so realize what you were doing wrong - especially when competing against that opponent multiple times. Women and men might have a higher ceiling than they think, but unless they compete against each other continuously, they won't know.
Sure. I can't know the outcome for sure but I'd be stunned if the trend ended up being male players being humiliated by women. I just cannot imagine this being the case. I have nothing against it per se but I have a strong feeling it would come at the expense of women.
My only personal experience on this is sparring against a purple belt female in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu while I was still a complete novice myself. She put up a good fight but she didn't stand a chance. Granted I was also bigger and stronger than her. On the other hand, sparring against a smaller but more experienced male I stood no chance myself. He'd beat me every single time without an exception.
Which sports are popular and have the support to be more economically viable?
Of them, how far away from the top seeds do you get before it can no longer be done professionally?
If unisex (I know, it's a bizzare word) sports leagues were how it was done, do you think more or less women (including trans-women) would be able to be professional athletes?
Yes, let's have a bunch of blokes beating the shit out of women in boxing. What could possibly go wrong?
I remember the Brit Awards scrapping gendered awards and putting everyone in the same category. The problem was, the only ones nominated turned out to all be men.
Combat sports already have weight classes, it's not like you'd be putting a man up against a woman he has 30 cm and 50 kg over. If you've got people of similar size and ability, it doesn't seem to me like their sex or gender matters. They all went in there expecting to both hit and get hit.
So if a woman was in the same weight class as Mike Tyson, you think they should be allowed to fight each other? And you think this would be a good look?
These hamfisted attempts at equality are actually the complete opposite.
First of all, heavy weight men =/= heavy weight women at the moment. The kg's aren't the same (men start at 90kg and women 80kg or something?). Second, Mike Tyson beat the shit out of fellow men. Are you going to set the bar for being a man at Mike Tyson? Every guy he beat was actually a woman?
I can't find how much Mike Tyson weighed for every of his fights. This says 99kgs. The heaviest woman I could find (why doesn't a DB exist to sort by kgs?) is Danielle Perkins at 88kg. That's 10kg of difference. No way they're even in the same class unless you leave it open ended. The weight classes would probably have to be redistributed and a new one added. Once a woman gets as heavy as Mike, she could compete against him.
Is it a worse look than what Tyson did to any of his real opponents because of the history of male violence against women, or is there something else you're getting at? And is whether or not it looks good what should be the driving force being decision making in sports?
Oh, but it does. There are major physical differences between men and women, even if they're the same weight. Men have greater muscle & bone density. A man of similar physical fitness of the same weight as a woman will be considerably stronger. There wouldn't even be a competition. It would just be a man beating the shit out of a woman. Nobody wants to see that, despite our desires for equality.
Venus and Serena got their asses handed to them in their prime by the ranked 203 male tennis player.
https://www.theguardian.com/observer/osm/story/0,,543962,00.html
The women's US National team lost to a regional U15 boys team.
cbssports.com/soccer/news/a-dallas-fc-under-15-boys-squad-beat-the-u-s-womens-national-team-in-a-scrimmage/
Physiology, males are bigger, faster, and stronger. It is not fair to women to put them in the same contest as males in any sport that requires those 3 things puts women at a massive disadvantage and would lead to fewer opportunities for female athletes to succeed.
Depends on how it's organized. In a open team, it would definitely suck. In one of my sports, Ultimate, coed divisions or leagues are pretty popular. Generally the gender ratio is 4-3 with the offensive team deciding to play 3 or 4 women for that point.
Ultimate is under appreciated
That would just be men's sports, which in fairness is all most people seem to care about anyway...
Not every sport. Dressage is already a sport where there is just one category. Synchronous swimming is also one, but only women competed this year.
Okay so two obscure sports that require a ton of money to participate in?
No.
Care to expand?
It would make most sports incredibly boring to watch, as well as frustrating for many athletes. Boring sport means less money, which would also mean less teams overall.
Why would it be boring?
I have, in other comments and the description of the thread too. Anything specific you would like to know?
Yes
The only sport that is a predominantly physical exercise (so excluding things like snooker, darts, archery etc) where women could compete competitively against men at an equivilent level in their sport (league 1 men vs league 1 women) would be ultra marathons. Most other sports is so mis-matched you'd end up with some random amateur bloke against an elite woman.
Basically if you've gone through male puberty you are vastly different physically from someone who hasn't.
No. Why should we?
Yes. Why shouldn't we?
Because I don't see a reason to change. And changing would cost a lot of money and effort and impact. You're the one proposing a change - why?
Ah, the typical "it's always worked this way". Well, there's no need to elaborate then. Why ever change? Everything is perfect as it is.
You've expressed no reason to change, so yes, stay the same until there's a reason to spend millions of dollars and upend established systems.
Why? It's not like men and women are equal biologically.
Read my edit. Also, not every sport is about strength. Additionally, the are other ways to split than just by sex and gender.
I'm all for removing gender as the first dividing line, but there needs to be some divisions in place.
As an example, in martial sports they are often separated by weight class to balance the fact that a larger, heavier person would have an advantage over a smaller, lighter person.
Without that, basketball would be dominated by the tallest people only, but that means there is no reason for anyone who isn't tall to even play the game. Break it into height classes and suddenly you meet have a league of skilled, average height players that could be very compelling to watch.
Height classes for basketball actually sounds really cool. It'd be interesting to see the different strategies that come into play when people physically can't reach the ring for example. Or at least I assume it would, I know nothing about basketball but it sounds like it'd be pretty interesting.
As the shortest person in most Basketball games during my childhood, I would have loved this so much! I enjoyed the game very much, but I always had to work twice as hard as my taller friends.
Height classes in basket ball. Hadn't thought of that. I would suggest that it be optional though, so that people who don't want to be excluded because of their height get to compete in the "common" league.
This post was clearly not made by a woman
Why? You think women are incapable of posing such questions?
Even Serena Williams said she couldn't compete against a similarly ranked man. If you want to combine, women would just not be able to compete at that level
Nope, but as with so many discussions of this nature, this question misses the nuance of why women's sports exist.
A lot of the reason for separate sports and other competitions is because of exclusion due to sexism, not physical differences. Chess for example was riddled with men who refused to play women, or share knowledge, or anything that would help the playing field be anywhere close to equal.
While it would be technically possible to force everyone together, a lot of the separation is so that training and knowledge transfer can occur, women can feel welcome to participate in the first place, etc.
There wouldn't be anything stopping women having women only teams and competing against mens or mixed teams. And I'd like to believe that we have evolved a little bit since the 70s.
Team sports: touchy/feely becomes legal?
Individual sports: the men win nearly all.
Edit:
I agree with the argument that it would get boring to watch.
I have seen a boxing fight between a 100kg man and a 60kg woman, where she had much better skills. You could think it should be interesting, but it wasn't. It was soo boring. He kept her at a distance most of the time, and he could take her hits easily. She escaped his clumsy attacks all the time. Summary: it is soo important to find reasonable matches.
Firstly, most sports have an open league and a women's league. Women can play in the "men's" leagues if they are able. Secondly there is an olympic.sport where men and women compete against each other, dressage.
Women can play in the NFL, NBA, NHL, and MLB
To your point, Manon Rheaume played a pre season game with the Tampa Bay Lightning in the early 90s.
No. It wouldn't be good for women in sport.
Why not?
Im gonna guess.
Sport is a spectacle. At the highest levels of any given sport(usually)
Women, if they cannot compete with men, will simply not exist in the highest levels of that sport.
If women cannot be part of the highest levels of that sport, the sport cant make enough money to create leagues that can convince enough women to put significant amount of systems in place to train and produce the best women capable of playing that sport.
Until we stop caring about only letting/finding/supporting/producing the best of the best, its an incredibly bad idea to ignore the many sport specific disadvantage biology plays in competition
Again, like many others missed, the proposal isn't "NO MORE SEGREGATION!". It's to let people compete against each other regardless of sex. I'd prefer it as a default, but it doesn't preclude voluntary segregation.
And with this too, I disagree. If you've done sports, you'll know the feeling of thinking you're the best and then meeting a stronger opponent. For some, it will be demoralising, but for others it's a stimulus. It also lets you learn more about the sport, what is possible, and in certain sports also develop techniques and tactics against opponents with greater values in different attributes.
Evolution happens faster under pressure and competing against better opponents is the best pressure there is. That's how you get the best of the best. You get out of your safe zone.
Also, again for you too, the suggestion is not "no more segregation ever"! You can read my edit.
I think that by default sports should have a single league for everyone, unless data shows that some physical attribute has an undue impact on performance. Then leagues should be split by that attribute.
That attribute should not be immediately assumed to be sex. Often I feel like sex is being used as a proxy for something else, partially correlated; such as weight or height.
Yes.
Well said. I often think that discrimination in general is actually based on errors in what's known as feature selection in ML.
Humans observe the world, notice certain patterns (such as between weight and sex), but then unconsciously perform dimensionality reduction to simplify their mental model of the world. Our software is unfortunately buggy.
There's also the question of training dataset. If you always see people of certain sex in specific roles, you might conclude that's the way it's supposed to be.
There's a commonly shared but apocryphal story about models recognizing cloudy skies instead of tanks because of the data they were trained on. https://gwern.net/tank
Yes, precisely what I mean. I wasn't suggesting that all sports be forced to be exclusively mixed, yet somehow that's what people understood the question as.
I would love to see more co-ed team sports at the jr high and high school level. Could be interesting if the teams were required to have a certain percentage of male and female on the court/field, with transgender counting as either. People take school sports way too seriously.
"Everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face"
--Mike Tyson
Can you imagine Mike Tyson fighting Ronda Rousey? No, I think it's a pretty solid idea to keep most sports segregated.
They wouldn't be in the same weight class -_-
It doesn't matter. A man in her weight class would be considerably stronger and faster. That's just the reality of biology.
I think you are asking what women's sports are for? It's a reasonable question. I think of it like age grouping, it puts competitors together into groups where they are competitive.
For school sports, sure. Mixed teams and less focus on winning, more on playing.
But if you are trying to determine who is best in a particular category? So like Ironman triathlon, everyone runs together, they start pro men then pro women then age groups, technically if my time was fastest I win, but if my time is fastest among women my age, that is also a win. A pro woman would win if she beat all the female participants, and in the off chance all the top men ran off a cliff or got sick halfway through, the top man would also win in his class even if he didn't beat top woman.
Personally I love the way gymnastics handles it. Men compete in events no woman could beat them in (rings! Oh my God!) and women compete different feats of athleticism and precision geared to their bodies, the strength to weight ratio not pure power.
Could you explain more about the gymnastics thing? Because I've often wondered why women can't compete in things like the parallel bars or the rings.
Like isn't there anyone who wants to do it even if they wouldn't be competitive with a man?
Women do sometimes train rings just for strength, and the single bar for fun, but no, this really is one of those events where simply having a male body gives a ridiculous advantage, it's designed to show off what a top level male-bodied body can do with training.
Floor exercise, and vault, are the overlap events and the competitors do a lot of the same skills, but the men do lead the way here on tricks - it's funny though. The first double backflip, in my lifetime it went from being considered impossible to being something coaches train 8-9 year old girls to do! So I don't know how much of the limitation is physical but I do know that the center of balance in a super fit woman is different from the center of balance in a super fit man, and that rings and Pommel horse are designed to exploit this difference.
I know that women can stand up from a wall squat without pushing off the wall first, are there other athletic pursuits that are more geared towards women's abilities?
Also thanks for your in depth explanation, that makes a lot of sense why mostly men would practice for those disciplines.
A heavyweight boxer isn't the same for both sexes. If you mean coupling heavyweight against featherweight of the other gender or something similar to compensate, it could work but would probably be seen as unfair, it would be hard to draw the line on where it's equivalent.
I do think it would be interesting to have mixed team sports where a certain number of each gender needs to be on each side, but it would probably end up with positions always being relegated to the same sex.
The definitions aren't the same, but that can be fixed: heavyweight = over 90kg, whichever gender (right now it's 91kg for men and 79 kg for women). They'd compete against each other in the same weight class by actual weight, not name of class.
You could then have multiple scenarios:
But we won't know until we try.
The problem is that a man in the same weight class as a women would still wipe the floor with them.
I doubt even a heavy weight women against a featherweight man would be fair. Every category would be dominated by men.
I think all the money should be taken out of all sport and spent on things that benefit everybody, not just athletes and sports fans. People can play sport as a hobby, like children do. That would remove the gender conundrum.
It's their choice, but I'm just saying now, for most sports it would hurt.
Would make more sense with, say, ping pong, extreme ironing, or nascar than something like football, wrestling, or hockey.
Shouldn't sports have categories based on abilities? I see people be like "trans women are stronger than cis women cause, idk, testosterone or something" and I just think, y'know, if that's a problem, why aren't categories based on strength or abilities or whatever?
I feel like some function of actual measurements of say hormone levels over a given training period and lifetime would be a better classification systen over pure sex class system.
Most of the time it would result in the same divisions tbh, but outliers would be better accommodated and we get the added bonus of further breaking down gender roles.
Paralympic rugby has mixed teams with men and women.
I'd be completely on board with that proposal. There are many differentiators in sports that contribute to your success. Your sex might be a very important one but definitely not the only one that matters.
I would group different athletes based on skill level, strength, height or whatever is relevant in that dicipline. Being born with a penis or not shouldn't matter.
If we say that for a specific kind of sport the level of testosterone is the most important factor to success, than that should be used for the grouping. That way, men with low testorone would be the same 'league' as woman with a medium testosterone level and woman with a really high testosterone level would play along men with a medium level of testosterone.
From my perspective, this would not only end all these gender discussions in sports but also make the lower leagues way more interesting and more fair for both genders.
I wish they could be split by something more meaningful like muscle mass or weight. But maybe we don't have the technology yet to come up with new categories. This split will likely correlate with gender anyway but it would give people on either end a chance to compete with others in their level
Someone sharper than I am came up with the suggestion of categorising people in a similar way to how it's done by disability in the Paralympics. As to what those categories should be and whether it's practical, let alone possible is another thing entirely.
Basically turn the "categorisation by disability" on its head and make it "categorisation by ability".
Would you have a link to that? It sounds like an interesting concept.
https://www.paralympic.org/athletics/classification for para-athletes on their own.
As for the all-inclusive idea, I forget where I came across it. Maybe it was a Reddit comment back when I still went there. All I know is that it hadn't occurred to me as an idea and seemed like an idea that better qualified people would be able to flesh out. Or provide reasons it wouldn't work.
Who is we?
No, that is stupid.
What a nonstupid answer. I congratulate you on being so articulate.
Many sports are like that already. The NFL and NBA are not segregated by gender/sex, anyone can play. The WNBA exists and is supplemented by the NBA because women never make it through the tryouts/cuts. Same goes for the NFL, but they didn't make a WNFL.
Generally yes, but I believe it is best done on a case by case (meaning type of sports, level and skillset) basis.
Generally on the recreational level, the differences between the sexes are much smaller than the differences within one sex. The best example that comes to mind is Tennis. Although it is physical in that it requires a lot of high-speed strength, which theoretically should be an advantage (on average) for young men, the skill difference between a man and another is far greater than that between an average man and an average woman. Go to a public court and you'll see a non-ignorable amount of women outplaying men (if they even dare to play each other) and what's even more baffling, older people beating younger people. On the absolute elite level though, they seem to almost play a totally different sport. Ball speed, running speed, ball spin and variety in spin on average are very different on the WTA compared to the ATP and therefore similar but different tactics and even technical styles are employed in the two. The difference within the Top 100 ATP or Top 100 WTA is much smaller than the average Top 100 WTA and average Top 100 ATP. So on that level, imho the segregation is merited.
As some others have already suggested, there might be better criteria to judge this separation on, like with weight class for martial arts. It is not always clear where that divider should be, though. As for tennis: Is it body weight or height? Maybe your fastest or average first serve? Maybe your fastest or average ground stroke? 30m Sprint time? Wherever you put that line might change the nature of the game played in that group and not even eliminate the de facto separation on sex or age, but in turn make it unattractive for some people to engage in a competition in the first place.
Which comes back to my initial statement of judging it case by case depending on the average difference between sexes and the difference within sexes.
edit: replaced gender with sex. Didn't think of it because in my native language this distinction isn't made.
Eh I'm so for just stopping sports. It at least spending all that wasted money on something meaningful, like feeding hungry people.
Sports should be segmented out by testosterone levels.
Yeah, also weight categories in fighting sports are body shaming
Yes absolutely, gender and sex doesn't define someone but maybe actually do new rules based on certain characteristics of a person instead of sexual reproductive parts.
Fuck all the sexism and transphobic shit people on here too.