Women's Cycling Champion is a Man

[Darat]

Sure, but then I'd expect it to have essentially no difference with the current situation: open events will have almost no women, and women's events will, of course, have no men.

And Darat'll be along to say that it's because of historical discrimination.

When you resort to simply lying it is rather tedious. Never mind I'm sure you've chalked up a point on your blackboard.

 

[Darat]

The above is nothing but a dodge to avoid discussing the point I've made, throwing in an insult for good measure. My, it's good to be the king, right?

Do you think that women and men should compete against one another in sports or not? If you answer yes, then let's try that. If you answer no, then that is an overriding reason to keep them separate regardless of why women were not historically part of high-level sport events.

Just answer the question.

Totally and utterly unconcerned either way.

 

[Roboramma]

There is of course a third option, which would be to have either women's events or open events. That might be a workable middle course, because it might then be possible to arrive at a more rigorous definition of the term "woman" without excluding anyone from competition.

Dave

I had actually assumed that's the way it worked at present, but if it's not I agree that it should be.

 

[Darat]

I had actually assumed that's the way it worked at present, but if it's not I agree that it should be.

There are literally hundreds of sporting bodies/authorities/federations/associations and so on, pretty much every major sport will have a "official" governing body and they will be free (unless they've agreed to follow some other organisations rules) to decide whatever criteria they want to use as their entry criteria.

 

[Belz...]

When you resort to simply lying it is rather tedious. Never mind I'm sure you've chalked up a point on your blackboard.

What? What are you talking about now? Where did I lie? Making a prediction is not a lie.

Totally and utterly unconcerned either way.

I could've bet real money that you wouldn't answer. You know full well that women could never compete with men and that this is why they are separated into their own categories in the current day. You know full well therefore that your comment about historical causes was irrelevant.

 

[citizenzen]

As the FA put it football was ‘quite unsuitable for females’.

Despite of course it being very popular and very successful for a couple of decades before the FA in effect banned it because football was ‘quite unsuitable for females’.

I am quite surprised that people don't know how the segregation of sporting events arose. Thought it was quite common knowledge. We can go even further back in time to the original Olympiades to see the same segregation based on what society at the time considered suitable and unsuitable for women.

These are simply historical facts, I really do not understand why people have become so emotional, almost hysterical about having these facts pointed out.

Gender equality issues often bring out the worst in us. I’ve taken part in many discussions (elsewhere) where people I normally agree with just seem to to lose it a bit when debating them. I’ve only recently returned to JREF (an indication of how long it’s been) and am a little disappointed at how often people talk past each other here and claim to have all the facts when that boast is clearly a matter of opinion.

I did not see anything wrong with your initial point, and don’t understand how it could be judged as harshly as it was.

 

[JoeMorgue]

This is rather turning into a "Women and men are totally equally and I am 100% sure of that. What we should try it and find out? Oh... errrr... ah... totally unimportant! I mean really it's just silly sports stuff who even cares why are you making such a a big deal out of this?"

The question as to whether or not creating an illusion of fairness is a type of fairness (or a factor in overall fairness or however one wishes to conceptualize it) is an interesting one to a degree, although mostly in the abstract with little real world point beyond the pedantics and labeling.

Some, I am not among them but some, will argue that after a point the expectation of unevenness builds up so much that it means the system can never be fair even after all the things that make it unfair on any objective level are removed.

In other words women have been told they are inferior to men for so long it's unreasonable for us to expect them to compete against men even in a totally neutral, open, and non-rigged scenario because... I don't know the sheer burden of expectations put on them or something hashtage macroaggression check your privilege.

Tl;Dr Some people are answering the question "Are men and women comparable/competitive to each other in sports?" and some people are answering the question "If men and women non-comparable/non-competitive to each other in sports is it women's fault?" without clarifying which one they are answering.

If we take 400 people, 200 biological males and 200 biological females, and have them run the 50 meter dash and put their times on a chart the 200 women going to be almost entirely on the bottom and the men almost entirely on the top with a few scattering a statistical outliers in the middle.

The top 25 recorded times for a man doing the 50 meter dash range from 5.56 seconds to 5.64 seconds.

The top 25 record times for a woman doing the 50 meter dash range from 5.96 seconds to 6.14 seconds.

The fastest women's time is substantially slower than the 25th fastest men's time. This is not a fact we can make untrue.

And this is not a cherry picked example. The fastest marathon by a man is almost an hour faster than the fastest marathon by a woman. (2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18.4 seconds versus 3 hours, 40 minutes, and 22 seconds.)

Swimming? The men's record time is shorter than the women's record time in every single event. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_swimming

Any type of weight lifting or weight moving records... I'm not going to go there.

People have responded that A) okay but maybe there are events/skills out there that women are better at which... fine but is beside the point and different question and doesn't answer anything about direct male/female competition in specific events or just another "LOL sports are stupid" routine which.. fine if you want to think that but again beside the point and not the question being asked.

 

[Roboramma]

There are literally hundreds of sporting bodies/authorities/federations/associations and so on, pretty much every major sport will have a "official" governing body and they will be free (unless they've agreed to follow some other organisations rules) to decide whatever criteria they want to use as their entry criteria.

Sure. Add "in general" to my sentence.

 

[Belz...]

Gender equality issues often bring out the worst in us. I’ve taken part in many discussions (elsewhere) where people I normally agree with just seem to to lose it a bit when debating them. I’ve only recently returned to JREF (an indication of how long it’s been) and am a little disappointed at how often people talk past each other here and claim to have all the facts when that boast is clearly a matter of opinion.

I did not see anything wrong with your initial point, and don’t understand how it could be judged as harshly as it was.

I don't see anythinh harsh in my response, except to point out that his post was irrelevant.

 

[llwyd]

Well, I believe it is common sense to segregate sports that depend on muscle strength one way or the other, but what about such Olympic sports as shooting or archery for example? There are some sports that are not segregated and remembering the rather sad past of outright banning of women from sports on absurdly spurious grounds (I think "medical experts" argued in the 1920's that women's bodies can't handle 800m running, so any olympic runs should be at most 400 metres...), I think we should think each case separately.

 

[Belz...]

Well, I believe it is common sense to segregate sports that depend on muscle strength one way or the other, but what about such Olympic sports as shooting or archery for example? There are some sports that are not segregated and remembering the rather sad past of outright banning of women from sports on absurdly spurious grounds (I think "medical experts" argued in the 1920's that women's bodies can't handle 800m running, so any olympic runs should be at most 400 metres...), I think we should think each case separately.

I used to think that, in video games, men wouldn't enjoy such an advantage. Turns out muscle strength counts quite a bit in moving the mouse and clicking, so much that in the top 50 teams of (insert game X here, I forgot which), only one has women in it. So clearly even there men have the advantage (and yes, there are fewer women competing, but the point is that they don't perform as well individually or in teams.)

 

[JoeMorgue]

Well, I believe it is common sense to segregate sports that depend on muscle strength one way or the other, but what about such Olympic sports as shooting or archery for example?

The Men's Record score is higher than or tied with the Women's Record score in every modern Olympic archery event, other the margin is much smaller than other examples being discussed and as noted there are several ties.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_archery

Similar with shooting.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_shooting

 

[Meadmaker]

Gender equality issues often bring out the worst in us. I’ve taken part in many discussions (elsewhere) where people I normally agree with just seem to to lose it a bit when debating them. I’ve only recently returned to JREF (an indication of how long it’s been) and am a little disappointed at how often people talk past each other here and claim to have all the facts when that boast is clearly a matter of opinion.

I did not see anything wrong with your initial point, and don’t understand how it could be judged as harshly as it was.

The ,"harshness" is the responsibility of the responders, but the response itself was unresponsive.


The current segregation in sports has its roots in the inherent differences between men and women, not in some Victorian social theory.

 

[Meadmaker]

Well, I believe it is common sense to segregate sports that depend on muscle strength one way or the other, but what about such Olympic sports as shooting or archery for example?

Archery is very much a muscle sport. I don't know about shooting.

 

[JoeMorgue]

Okay let's go even further down the rabbit hole. Why are all the major, organized Chess championships segregated by gender, and in some cases age?

Hell you might as well give chess weight classes for all the sense that makes.

 

[Meadmaker]

Okay let's go even further down the rabbit hole. Why are all the major, organized Chess championships segregated by gender, and in some cases age?

Hell you might as well give chess weight classes for all the sense that makes.

Chess has women's competitions and open competitions. Women are not excluded from the top competitions.

There are very few female only competitions except for the very best players, or for school aged girls.

Why is there a difference in performance? No one knows.

 

[Disbelief]

And this is not a cherry picked example. The fastest marathon by a man is almost an hour faster than the fastest marathon by a woman. (2 hours, 55 minutes, and 18.4 seconds versus 3 hours, 40 minutes, and 22 seconds.)

I agree with your point in general, but the fastest marathon by a man is now like 2 hours and 1 minute, women's is like 2 hours and 15 minutes.

 

[JoeMorgue]

I agree with your point in general, but the fastest marathon by a man is now like 2 hours and 1 minute, women's is like 2 hours and 15 minutes.

You are correct, I misread the chart.

 

[GlennB]

Chess has women's competitions and open competitions. Women are not excluded from the top competitions.

There are very few female only competitions except for the very best players, or for school aged girls.

Why is there a difference in performance? No one knows.

In fact Judit Polgar^WP switched to open competition exclusively as she wasn't getting a decent test in the 'women only' events. She made the overall top 10 rankings and qualified for the world champs in 2005.

"She has won or shared first in the chess tournaments of Hastings 1993, Madrid 1994, León 1996, U.S. Open 1998, Hoogeveen 1999, Sigeman & Co 2000, Japfa 2000, and the Najdorf Memorial 2000"

 

[JoeMorgue]

Okay but statistical breakouts are a different thing then overall demographic data.