Ask Lemmy

Not if you value women participating in sports.

No, men and women are not physically equal.

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.

You should probably look up the effects of testosterone. Namely upper body strength and bone density. Women are weaker than men.

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.

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.

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.

No.

That would just be men's sports, which in fairness is all most people seem to care about anyway...

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?

Why? It's not like men and women are equal biologically.

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.

This post was clearly not made by a woman

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.

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.

No. It wouldn't be good for women in sport.