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.
Not if you value women participating in sports.
Why? Weight classes, leauges, and divisions won't help?
This has been explained elsewhere.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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's not what happened.
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?
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.
, it doesn't seem to me like their sex or gender matters
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
No. Competitions should be fair. Play mixed-sex if you want though.
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 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.
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:
- few women in heavyweight
- no women in heavyweight
- women within the top of 70-75kg (for example)
- no women within the top 70-75kg (for example)
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.
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".
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.
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.
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.