Googling suggests this definitely isn’t so. Here’s one link, from a sportswriter:
I noticed an interesting thing last night at my kids’ swimming lessons.
On the wall outside the pool, they have a list of club records in various events, split by age and sex, for a couple of dozen events.
For the under 11’s, the girls times were mostly shorter than the boys’ - about a 70/30 split in the girls’ favour.
After 11, that pretty quickly started shifting - 11yo’s had about 5 girls’ records to 20 boys’, you only had to get to 16yo’s before the boys were completely cleaning up.
I wonder if this pattern is repeated in other sports? Swimming is a fairly strength-based ability - I wouldn’t have been surprised to see the smaller girls holding their own with the boys, but I was quite surprised to see them consistently doing better.
Synchronized Swimming?
Not a sport in my book. Anything that requires external judging doesn’t really count.
It comes under the “activity” heading of the OP but that becomes such a wide category that discussion becomes difficult. Even so. I suspect if men were competing directly against women they would probably win. They can stay submerged for longer etc.
I don’t think you can necessarily draw conclusions about innate or potential ability from how well the genders do at the olympic level.
e.g it could be that women have better potential ability at archery, say, but fewer women try the sport or aren’t encouraged to take it up professionally.
I’m not saying that that’s the case for archery, or any other sport, just cautioning against the kind of conclusions a few here are making.
IIRC, the best free diver in the world is a woman.
Archery is a pretty poor example, considering that it need a lot of strength. Nor is “the women discouraged” trope particularly credible; womens sports like Tennis and Golf have had mainstream following for decades, predating even Women’s “Lib” and no woman has ever been in any position to compete at the same level as a man.
We may not have a fair representation right now. Clearly women as a group will be at a disadvantage in sports where strength is necessary, but in other sports mentioned such as darts and billiards women should be able to compete on a par with men. However, what percentage of women do put in the effort to compete at the top level? Sports is still a ‘guy thing’ and I think there will be many more men competing in darts and billiards and it is more likely the men with the greatest potential will be actually competing than the equivalent women. In a world where women were involved with sports to the same degree as men they might dominate or share the top ratings in an area where physical strength is not a critical component of the sport.
What you say SEEMS very logical. We all expect men on the PGA tour to drive the ball a lot farther than most of the women and they do. But it seems reasonable to think women should be able to putt and chip as well as men, right? Wrong! The best women on the LPGA tour routinely miss putts and chips that journeymen male pros make every time.
Why should that be? I have no idea- but men’s advantages are NOT just in strength.
As I said, I was making a point, not talking about archery specifically. Substitute <whatever sport> for archery in that sentence.
First of all, those are indeed popular sports among women, but that still doesn’t mean they have equal participation rates between men and women.
But secondly, it’s besides the point in terms of the OP. No-one would dispute that there are many, or indeed most, sports that men have a physical advantage at. The OP is essentially based on that premise. So saying “More women play X than men and yet men are still better” is irrelevant (unless you’re making that claim about all sports).
*I know that statistics show
The man’s always the first to go
And I know that it’s true,
'Cause she won’t be ready
So when it finally comes my time
And I get to the other side
I’ll find myself a bench
If they’ve got any
Honey, take your time
‘Cause I don’t mind
Waitin’ on a woman*
Staright pool is far more similar (in terms of playing) to 8-ball pool than snooker. Snooker is much more tactical and strategic than the different varieties of pool, but also small pockets and a larger table make it by far the most difficult popular* cue sport to play and not look like a complete amateur.
Overall though in all cue sports, men dominate, nowadays there are separate men’s and women’s competitions in most cue sports, but the quality of the men’s competitions is significantly better. In snooker, I believe only one woman has a woman managed to achieve a top 100 World ranking, which she achieved after dominating the women’s competitions, beating the reigning men’s world champion in the truncated 6-red snooker World championship and then being given a wildcard and making it past the qualifying rounds of a ranking tournament. However after this she was invited to join the men’s professional tour and in her one season she lost all of her matches and was not invited back.
There are plenty of good women’s cue sport players and snooker as a spectator sport is popular with woman (snooker is very entertaining to watch and is popular with plenty of men and women who don’t play in the UK). Why the women’s game still lags far behind the men’s game is difficult to say exactly, I think personally it is a combination of cultural and physical factors.
*I say “popular” because (English) billiards is notorious for being even more difficult, but it is now it is a fairly niche sport.
don’t think so, not by quite some way if therecordsare to be believed
Name a sport where you think this is, or could be the case.
Is this anecdotal, or is there data behind it? I’m not sure how you would even directly measure organizational skills - is there an Organizational Skills Olympics that I can enter and try for a gold medal in family reunions?
Log rolling is almost all women now.
Roller Derby - all women. But thats partly due to the sex factor.,
That’s awesome!
Uneven parallel bars.
Is this based on head-to-head competition or by numbers of participants? I’ve always assumed the men’s champions would dominate any mixed competition. There are plenty of men who compete at burling.
While pole dancing/pole fitness as a sport is dominated by women in terms of participation numbers, when men do it, they tend to dominate because of the upper body strength required to pull off most of the moves. Men, in general, have better developed upper body strength, especially if they work at it. Women have to work that much harder to build up to the strength required to pull off the advanced level tricks. I’ve seen men walk into a pole room with zero training or instruction and pull off a handspring handstand, first try. That is a trick that female pole dancers work up to for years.