I don’t think there’s a simple answer to this. There’s just too much variance for a lot of different reasons. But to use so easy-to-get stats: the record hardest serves are 156 mph (men) vs 129 mph (women), and at this year’s US Open, the fastest serves are 145 mph vs. 120 mph. To dig a little deeper, we can compare average serve speeds for a full match and try to pick two similarly ranked players. I was going to use the #32 seeds because that’d seems like a decent baseline for a solid but not amazing player, but right now the site isn’t letting me get those numbers. So I’ll use the #5 seeds instead: Tomas Berdych had an average serve speed of 121 mph in his first match. Li Na averaged 103 mph. (They both won.)
There is. The service motion is pretty similar to throwing a pitch in baseball. I realize there isn’t a professional women’s baseball league comparable to MLB, but if there was, do you think the female pitchers would be throwing at the same velocity as male pitchers?
It doesn’t look like a tad to me. It looks like 15% or 20%.
If you are taller and more muscular, you’ll be faster. If you’re huge and muscular you can lose quickness, but that varies from person to person.
I think it’s far more likely that the men are both faster and stronger (and have greater stamina). If Serena played in the men’s bracket, I think she would basically be like a highly skilled but shorter than average, slower than average, weaker than average, and less conditioned than average men’s player. And not by a little bit. I think the smallest and weakest man in the top 100 is probably significantly stronger and more powerful than Serena.
Not that Serena isn’t amazing- she is. She’s my favorite tennis player of all time.
Considering that Serena Williams would crush > 99.99% of men on the planet (even among those men who have played tennis regularly before), it’s not much of a criticism to say that she wouldn’t have much of a chance against the top 20 (or top 100) men’s tennis players.
As another data point, golf is a game where small men like Rory McIlroy can not only win, but dominate, if they have exceptional skill and coordination. So you would think that a woman would have a chance against a mediocre PGA tour player. But the last time a woman made a cut (matched the 70th best score for 36 holes in a field of about 150) in a men’s PGA event was 1945. The fields that year were exceptionally weak because most of the players were in the service for WW2, and the woman was Babe Zaharias, arguably the greatest all-around woman athlete of all time.
To be fair, it’s so obvious that they can’t do it that very few have tried it. Michelle Wie came close as an amateur, though, before she turned 16 and got too old to play well. Annika Sorenstam, who was far and away the best woman golfer in the world, tried against a slightly better field, and IIRC did not get very close.
I might want to bet on Serena in an arm wrestling contest, though. And I would love to wrestle her in a vat of jello. Or even without the jello.
For nearly every variable – height, weight, IQ, personality traits – males exhibit a greater variability from the mean than females. (IIRC, this is true of most all mammals) In most fields of human activity (minus those inherently slanted to favor one gender over the other), you’ll find the rule to be that the top performers are mostly male, and that the worst performers are also male. This is part of why more men are millionaires … and also why more men are homeless, in prison, or dead via suicide.
Culture certainly may play into it, too, but even in a gender-blind society, it’s still the result you’d expect from genetics alone.
Take a sport like golf- you’d EXPECT that, since men tend to be bigger and stronger than women, the male pros would generally hit much longer drives than the women- and they do.
But what often surprises people is how much better men are than women in the short game. You’d think women could putt or make chip shots as well as men, wouldn’t you? But they don’t.
Why not? Who knows? Maybe the men spend a lot more time practicing, or maybe it’s something else. But the male advantage in golf is NOT due just to superior strength.
Beating people who don’t really play tennis is no achievement.
If you consider post-pubescent males who play tennis competitively, she is not going to beat 99% of them. She’ll probably clean up on the High School level, maybe be competitive on the low end Collegiate/Adult Amateur level, and be nowhere on the Professional level.
Men are simply too explosive athletically. Where dunking is frightfully rare in women’s basketball, my crappy HS team had multiple players who could dunk in game situations. Tennis rewards size, strength and speed, the older men who play competitively will have a big advantage over her, even if she has the skill advantage.
First of all, there is definitely an advantage to be able to drive a ball longer and harder. So men do have a natural advantage in the overall game of golf. Take out the driving, and I’m sure that the disparity in talent narrows significantly.
Also, it’s only been in the last 20 years or so that women have been given the same opportunity to play golf. For centuries, it was a male-only sport because golf courses wouldn’t allow women to play. And if they did, it was one morning per week aka “ladies day.” So it’s no wonder that men are better at golf than women.
Maybe, but I doubt it. Male golfers will always be able to use more accurate clubs due to their ability to hit it farther. They’ll be hitting a wedge when their female counterpart is hitting a 7 iron.
The antidote about Lindsay Davenport is true. She is married to an ex college player who would easily beat when he was years past his prime and she was number 1.
I was a decent sectionally ranked junior. Guys at my level could win sets off a girl who played on the pro tour. She would play them when she is home for practice. Her highest ranking was around 100. High enough to get direct entry into Grand Slams.
Isn’t this pretty much the point of the Wendy’s Three-Tour Challenge? (The women have won 5 of the 21 events.)
Then again, it also depends on the course. A long Par 5 that can be reached in 2 by the better golfers would require a sizable distance shortening for the ladies in order to be able to do the same thing.
Yup, women have won 100 mile races outright in mixed fields and often place highly. For example Pam Reed won the Badwater ultramarathon (135 miles through Death Valley, in the summer) twice in a row (2002 and 2003). Ann Trason took 2nd in the Leadville 100 and there are certainly other examples. More the exception than the rule, sure, but certainly not unheard of.
Swimming the English Channel is an interesting case: for a while a man held the all-time record, and then a woman, and then a man, and then a woman, and then a man, and then a woman, and then a man, and – well, look, an edge in strength is great, but so is combining plenty of stamina with plenty of buoyancy.
It is a woman who has swum the Channel on the most occasions, but not the shortest time. A man has done it in 6:55, a woman in 7:25. Half an hour is quite a big difference. There are also records for two- and three-way crossings, with men even further ahead.
I can find no record of a woman ever holding the record for fastest overall crossing.