Your proposal is “why don’t schools just create 4 teams and stick all the girls on the worst one.” Well, scheduling, coaching, field availability, opponent availability, ref availability. It’s a completely unworkable solution to an invented problem.
Here in Arkansas, you can find the top 10-20 record holders of various high school track & field events dating back about 30 years. The #1 girl record holder typically won’t crack the top 20 of the boy record holders for the same event. If implemented, your proposal would mean girls would rarely ever become champions. And while you might argue a lot of people won’t ever be champions, most of us don’t think it’s a good idea if one gender is pretty much prevented from being a champion. I think your proposal would discourage girls from participating in athletics.
But they can’t. Neither can the men. At least, not the vast majority of either of them.
It’s not about two different demographics. It’s about individuals. Don’t talk to me about “women, as a category, deserve to be able to win championships”. Should Sally, specifically, have a championship that she can win? What if she didn’t make the cut when she tried out for the girls’ team? How about Fred, who didn’t make the cut for the boys’ team? Should there be a championship he can win, too? And should Sally or Fred either one be somehow comforted in the fact that even though they can’t win championships, someone else who has one single trait in common with them can?
Except that the gap between black athletes and white athletes is basically non-existent while the gap between male and female athletes is huge.
Why not?
Even women who aren’t winning championships benefit from representation in the highest, most visible levels of sports.
And that’s the root of the problem. The championship culture is not beneficial to children’s education. Education would be better if post season play were completely eliminated from school sports.
So what you are saying is that sometimes the best girl beats all but the top 15-20 boys. Which is to say, she beats most of the boys.
Why should she be relegated to a second-class league? Is it so she can beat other girls, or is it to ensure that she doesn’t actually beat boys, boys who are actually pretty decent, but might might lose to a girl?
I’m pretty sure both factors are at play.
Yeah. It’s certainly possible girls might fare better when taken all competitions in the aggregate, but overall I doubt they’d be able to compete with the boys. If you’ve got evidence to show otherwise I would certainly take it into consideration.
As far as I know, girls are free to compete against the boys in most states and I have no objection to that. But let’s eliminate segregation by sex in sports and see how that works out for the girls. Maybe we’ll all be surprised.
I think you misunderstood me. The median girl is going to lose to the median boy in most sports. And the top girls will lose to the top boys, too.
But the top girl is going to beat most of the boys. And the median boy doesn’t want to lose to a girl, even the top girl.
This is a rosy view of not just biology in general, but what has actually happened in the history of mixed-gender competition at high levels.
No, Caitlin Clark would not beat the “median” competitive male basketball player. And the problem isn’t really that the eighth man on the worst Division II college team is better than her at basketball, it’s that he’s better than her without playing basketball. He’s just so much bigger, faster, and capable of jumping higher that he can ignore all elements of the actual skills and strategy of basketball and instead just play the whole game above her head, pluck the ball out of her hands on every possession, etc. It negates all of the actual content of playing the sport. That’s the degree of constant mismatch that every gradation of athletes, including but not limited to separating men and women, is intended to avoid.
The eighth man on the worst Division II college team is way above the “median competitive male basketball player”. The actual median competitive male basketball player didn’t even make it onto his high school’s varsity team. And Caitlin Clark would mop the floor with him.
Exactly. But he’s a high school kid who plays basketball.
It sounds like there’s some differences in what people mean when mean by “competitive” in “median competitive male”. Having watched many HS basketball games of both boys and girls, I can say with confidence that none of the varsity girls would have been competitive on the varsity boys team. Maybe if a Caitlin Clark level player was at the HS she could have done it, but that’s the best player in the history of women’s basketball. The typical HS is not going to have a player anywhere near that level. At pretty much every high school, the top girls will not be competitive on the teams with the top boys. If they were on the boys team, they would be a bench warmer on the varsity team or be on the lower JV team. It would be extremely rare for a girl to be competitive on a boys team at her relative level. She’d have to play at a level down. So a varsity girl would almost always end up on the JV boy’s team.
You’re right to not focus on championships. A more appropriate focus is goals.
In a gender segregated system, an 8th grade girl who loves basketball has a path to achieve something discretely identifiable in the sport. Not a championship, or MVP trophy, but a spot on the varsity team. She might not make it, but the path to that goal is real.
In a fully co-ed system, what is that girl’s goal WRT achieving something in basketball? Is her plan really to bust her ass practicing so she can get good enough to make the 4th tier team with the boys who aren’t particularly athletic or interested, but want something to do after school? That goal doesn’t seem interesting to me. Would YOU work hard to achieve that goal?
From my perspective, there’s a different root problem here: the US’s pathological focus on competition as an end to itself. We are almost the only country on Earth that monetizes youth sports through athletic scholarships. As a result, winning sports competitions can literally determine a child’s future, sometimes even offer a way out of poverty. And that’s super fucked up.
Youth sports should not prioritize championships. There should be nothing beyond the momentary thrill of a victory for winning. There should not be scholarships, and there should not be giant spectator events, and there should not be “sports families” that dedicate their resources to paying for extra training and their weekends to driving across multiple states to attend games. That’s bananas: it perverts and corrupts the sport and its benefits.
Without those perverse incentives, sports would be about socializing and exercising, and many of the ills of childhood sports would disappear.
Also, I want a pony.
I don’t think they did.
If there was a girl who was so dominant at a sport that she could beat all but a handful of boys, she can already go and participate in the “boys” version of events.
So it seems like the issue is not protecting boys from feeling bad because they lost to a girl. The rules couldn’t be about that, because the rules don’t actually prevent that from happening.
Again, i didn’t claim there is likely to be a girl who can beat “all but a handful of boys”. I said there is likely to be a girl who can beat half the boys. (Or “the median boy”.) Which means they can probably fill the varsity team with boys who are stronger players. But there will be some boys who lose a spot on the JV team to a girl. And i think that upsets the idea of male dominance.
But a girl can already try out for the male (in practice unrestricted) JV team.
It’s just that the vast, vast, vast majority of female athletes at that level would rather compete with other women and try to be the very best in the female ladder, rather than trying to compete for a slightly-better-than-benchwarmer seat on a male JV team.
That’s an interesting theory. I’m not sure it’s actually true. And even if it’s technically true, i wonder if female athletes are aware of that.
But instead of having 4 skill-based teams, we have strongly encouraged (if not actually required) the girls to play in their underfunded and underappreciated league, which everyone knows is a second-class league. And i continue to think that part of the motivation for that is to protect the boys.
(And yes, the girls teams get a lot less money and other resources than the boys teams. Heck, what fraction of all the resources go to football, which is restricted to boys?)
(And it’s criminal that we continue to encourage boys to play that game, knowing about
the brain injuries that are common from repetitive blows to the head. But i suppose that’s a rant for another thread.)
One way something like this might work is to force the teams to be mixed gender rather than skill based. Co-ed leagues work like this. They typically require the players on court to be 50/50 men and women. This way the best team is made up of the best men and the best women. There would still be the skill difference between genders, but now the best of each gender are playing on the A team. But the gender ratio would need to be enforced on the court or else one team would play just their men and have their women sit out.