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.
You're viewing a single thread.
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 know that women can stand up from a wall squat without pushing off the wall first, are there other athletic pursuits that are more geared towards women's abilities?
Also thanks for your in depth explanation, that makes a lot of sense why mostly men would practice for those disciplines.