Should we stop splitting sports by gender and just let everybody compete together?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all
Yes.
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.
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.
No. Competitions should be fair. Play mixed-sex if you want though.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
Who is we?
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".
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.
Sports should be segmented out by testosterone levels.
Eh I'm so for just stopping sports. It at least spending all that wasted money on something meaningful, like feeding hungry people.
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.