The logic behind gender-segregated school sports is as follows:
School sports have a variety of benefits for those who participate in them.
Those benefits should be available to anyone who wants them.
Most girls can’t compete fairly against most boys, in most sports.
Therefore, in order to make sports available to girls, we have to have girls-only teams who compete against other girls-only teams.
But the problem is that gender segregation doesn’t actually solve the problem. There are some girls who aren’t good enough players to compete on the girls-only teams, and some boys who aren’t good enough players to compete on the boys’ teams. So the benefits of school sports are not, in fact, available to everyone.
The solution is to address the problem directly: If the goal is that everyone should be able to take part in school sports, then make the rule be that everyone who wants to (subject to academic eligibility requirements) can take part in school sports, and is guaranteed some minimum amount of play time (this minimum amount of play time would necessarily vary by sport). If there are too many students interested in some sport for one team, then the school fields multiple teams for that sport. You’d still have tryouts for each sport, but they wouldn’t be to determine whether you got on the team, but which team you’d get on.
You’d then have some sort of Elo-like rating system, starting with a prior based on the size of the school and the number of teams they have, and also incorporating prior performance. Similarly-rated teams would play against each other.
It may well be that a school’s A and B teams would be mostly boys, while the C and D teams are mostly girls. Or maybe they have three teams, where A is mostly older boys, B is a mix of younger boys and older girls, and C is mostly girls. And the similarly-rated teams they’re playing against are likely to have a similar composition. But you wouldn’t actually have to keep track of gender, and nobody would have to worry about what genitals anyone has, or what it says on anyone’s birth certificate.
The only place you’d need to take gender into account at all would be for single-sex schools, in the step where you’re estimating prior ratings for a school based on their size and number of teams. The A team at a school of 1000 girls is likely to be weaker than the A team at a school of 1000 boys. But that’s a simple enough statistical task.
The obvious flaw, AFAICT, is that (for example) the very best tennis playing girls would not have nearly the same chance to stand out. The scholarships, attention, best training, etc., would almost entirely go to the top boy athletes.
Included in that is that many sports include a deal of physical contact and we, as a society, don’t feel great about our 16 year old boys slamming into (or grabbing at) our 16 year old girls on the field/court even if they’re equally matched athletically.
Under the proposed system by the OP, a school would have two tiers of teams.
1st-tier: Essentially all male.
2nd-tier: Maybe 10% male and 90% female.
But in that second-tier team, the male athletes would likely still find themselves at the top of the team, skill-and-ability-wise. The women would get stifled.
One problem is that it doesn’t account for the fact that different athletes have different levels of commitment and desire to excel. At the lower levels, not only would the relative skill be less, but the desire to compete would also be less. This is the case today with the multi levels of gender segregated sports. A school may have teams at the varsity level and junior varsity 1, 2, and 3. As you go down in level, the competitive drive goes down as well. This isn’t just about skill. It’s about the athlete’s desire to be a top athlete according to their skill. At the lower levels, there isn’t the same commitment to the sport in terms of training or winning. It’s like the difference between a pro bowler and a bowler who’s bowling to hang out with friends and drink beer.
In a unified environment, the hyper competitive girls would only be competitive at the C/D level, but the boys at that level wouldn’t have that same level of competitiveness. The girls wouldn’t get the opportunity to be on a team where everyone is trying their hardest to win. With gender segregated sports, the girls who do want to train hours every day will get to compete against other athletes who also want to train hours every day. Also, the girls will often have to use different strategies than boys to account for their typical strength and power. For instance, in basketball the girls may have to have to depend on plays to get the ball close to the basket while the boys can take shots from farther away. The style of play is different and be more favorable to the boys. But with gender specific teams, the style of play is adapted to what is optimal for that specific gender.
If they were that dominant, they’d be on a different team.
Again, the teams would be sorted by total level of ability. That would be partly determined by strength, and partly by level of motivation, and so on. But the total of all of those factors should be about the same for everyone at any particular level. You can’t say “Boys are stronger than girls on average, so the boys on the C team would be stronger than the girls on the C team”, because those aren’t average boys and average girls. The strongest girls in a school are stronger than the weakest boys in a school.
OK, I see what you mean. But that would be maddeningly subjective and near-impossible to classify. The reason sports is divided by gender is also because it’s extremely simple.
Take table tennis players, for instance. To determine how good he is, you’d have to do an in-depth rigorous analysis of his hundreds of games, against hundreds of opponents, and then also analyze how tough those opponents were, to see if he belongs in Tier-I or Tier-II. Who would have the time or resources to do that at the normal high school level?
It would also ruffle lots of feathers when athletes demand to know why they aren’t in the upper tier when they think they belong there. What if you face lawsuits or complaints because some player feels he deserves to be in Tier-I but he thinks that race, sexual orientation, religion, nepotism, not being the coach’s son or whatever other unrelated reason was the true reason he got “demoted” to Tier-II? etc.
Maybe it would work in a fictional book, but I can’t see it working in the real world. I don’t see the athletes getting behind this kind of structure. It doesn’t seem like what they want the sport to be. If there was a structure like this in school, I would guess the serious athletes wouldn’t join and instead would be on club teams which were more in the traditional structure.
School ‘sports’ were the bane of my educational experience. Disheartening and demoralizing to those of us without the competitive ‘instinct’. I was a good runner - helped me stay ahead of the football players who wanted to beat up the nerds for requesting the use of the team bus to go to a science fair. I entirely support encouraging physical activity and agility training, but in light of self-improvement, not doing better than someone else. Hmmm - dance classes provide exercise & life skills accessible to nearly all levels of physicality, and notoriously work better in mixed-gender groups…
Isn’t there already a lower tier of competitiveness in gym class? That’s basically how it worked in my high school. Anyone could get some physical activity regardless of their skill level.
That’s a separate debate. I largely agree, but for purposes of this discussion, let’s take as a given the premise that participation in school sports is beneficial for students.
Children [and young adults, and full-blown grownups..] can be blithley cruel - and failing at pushups in front of your peers in a poorly fitting gym suit is a world different than discreetly getting the wrong answer on a math quiz…
One flaw is your assumption that every student should be able to participate in an extracurricular activity. Not every student can be in the orchestra, have a part in the play, participate in a Quiz Bowl competition, take care of a lamb with the FFA, etc., etc. You’re holding athletics to an unrealistic standard we don’t hold other extracurriculars to.
What I suspect would happen is we’d see a defacto segregation of sports based on sex. Do you think competitive girls on the B team are going to appreciate consistently losing to younger boys who are on the same team? Do you imagine parents or other students want to watch that?
Well, if that’s the case, then it still takes away the argument for gender-segregated sports, because gender-segregated sports are based on the premise that everyone should be able to take part in athletics.
Again, if the girls are consistently losing to the boys, then they wouldn’t be on the same team.
And what you’d end up with is defacto segregation by sex and haven’t solved the problem. You’re just pushing food around on your plate instead of eating it.
I’m still trying to figure out how the proposed plan would help girls. In any scenario, you’d end up with a highly athletic girl who could have previously stood out at the front of the pack of other less-abled girls, now finding herself in the midst of boys who are equally or more able than her. Regardless of which tier team she is put in.
The result would be fewer women winning championships and scholarships.
I disagree. Gender segregated sports are based on the premise that girls should be able to take part in athletics.
Your larger schools will already have multiple levels for many sports, Varsity, Junior Varsity and Freshman for boys and girls. An ELO based system will maybe expand that to 7-8 levels where the first 5-6 are boys and the remainder are girls, maybe, depending on interest. In that new system, the girls never get to be on a Varsity team, they never get to be THE team that represents the school in that sport. They will always be on one of the bottom dwelling teams, working out with and playing against boys who really don’t care that much but are simply larger, faster and stronger.
Question for Chronos and no, I’m not trying to make this a political thread just trying to understand where you are coming from. Is any of your premise based on the issue of transgendered atheletes?
Who is a better player than someone else in a team sport is highly subjective and would take many trials to work out and very few people would agree. What sex they are is simple, easy, unambiguous and does a pretty good job of tiering. Job done.