No more men’s and women’s league, no more “gender eligibility” requirements, a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all
Not if you value women participating in sports.
Why? Weight classes, leauges, and divisions won’t help?
This has been explained elsewhere.
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.
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.
why does it matter?
Should we stop splitting sports by gender?
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?
Look at Olympic world records for men vs women where they have same conditions (run 100m, jump highest, throw thing far etc.) men have “better” times/scores.
There are some sports where physique isn’t a factor like certain accuracy sports like target shooting where I can agree that there’s no reason to separate by gender though.
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.
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.
Beach volleyball. Do men wear bikinis or women go topless? I’m fine with either tbh. 🤔
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.
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.
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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?
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.
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
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
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.
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/tankI 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.
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 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 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.
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.
- Which sports have an open league?
- Well observed. Why not more sports?
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.
