In other words, just what I said at first. “Why do we have lame sports for girls? If the ladies wanna play sports, they can play with the men or STFU.”
If the existence of sports for women offends you, I suggest changing the channel.
What about the female athletes who would at a minimum, like to have the opportunity to compete under the same rules as men?
How about ski jump that was denied for them until the last games?
Separate is not equal in this case.
The decision of which events to include in each Olympics is normally made well in advance of the actual occasion. Normally, IOC only wants “mature” sports and disciplines in the Olympics, that is, ones that are already being practiced in enough countries around the world at a sufficiently serious level. Until very recently, that consideration was not influenced by the PR concerns of formal gender equality to any meaningful extent.
When enough women start piloting four-person bobsleigh teams for the international federation to be able to hold actual World Cup races, as opposed to the occasional gimmick team (mixed or not) at the men’s World Cup, I am sure IOC will consider adding such an event to future Olympics. Until then, I neither see nor would support a sports event that is contested by a tiny number of competitors being “gifted” Olympic status just to appease gender equality supporters.
It’s not a strawman. If you can’t, with your own two eyes, see the differences between men and women written words here won’t help.
It doesn’t offend me. Why would you think that? It is an interesting point though. If gender or whatever it’s called nowadays is a social construct how come reality wasn’t informed?
With my own eyes I have observed no cognitive differences that can be directly assigned to XX or XY chromosomes and I am quite positive that even gender expression is not dimorphic as your cite erroneously claimed.
I have seen lots of evidence that cultural differences directly lead to divergence in cognitive attainment.
These seem to be backed up by empirical data, where the binary claims on cognitive ability seem to be unsupported.
No amount of cognitive similarity is going to make the best female biathletes, cross country skiers, ice hockey players, speed skaters, or snowboarders remotely competitive with the best males in those fields. Jury’s still out on the gravity sports like ski jump, based on the brief research I just did. Eliminating women’s divisions would mean eliminating women from Olympic competition in those categories.
It is easy to dissmiss these as “gimmicks”
But can you explain why women are incapable of race-walking 50km, canoeing 100, 200 and 5,000 metres, or swimming 1,500 metres?
These restrictions are based on bias, and are not novel desires
https://www.iaaf.org/news/press-release/world-race-walking-rome-2016-women-50km
Can you explain why women aren’t allowed to compete like men in ski jumping and Nordic combined?
It is not due to it being novel, it is due to discrimination.
:rolleyes:
Yet this global rule does ignore that women can be competitive (and were barred from) other events.
Here is an example, explain why this is the first olympics that women even get to jump.
As that article points out women rarely get to compete in the event on the same day and under the same conditions as the men, and often have to compete in other events on courses after the men have run, which in skiing impacts their times.
Note that this bias also results in women competing with less experience, and thus less total skill compared to men.
Even in this Olympics women ski jumpers are not allowed to use the large hill.
Why restrict them to the smaller hill, except possibly to protect the Men’s egos?
The fact is, men are better at all these sports. That’s the current state of affairs. rat avatar is saying “that’s only because of societal differences”. But he doesn’t have to prove this assertion. It’s up to everyone else to prove him wrong. I’m not playing that game.
There are certainly some women who have trained on and can jump well on the big hill. But is there a big enough athlete pool to make the event safe and competitive? I’m not saying this is the case with women’s jumping, but it may be a factor. Also, if you introduce a number of events at once in a sport that is early in the development stage you’ll end up awarding all the medals to the same small group of athletes since they’ll dominate at many disciplines. I don’t think men’s egos really factors into it. The athletes are almost uniformly for more opportunities for the competitors in their sport, regardless of gender.
Side note, one of my roommates and another friend in college were on the US Olympic Ski Jumping teams in 1984 and 1988. They fully supported adding women’s events back then, and they supported the adoption of women’s jumping over the past decade.
It’s a bit of a chicken and egg problem, but over time those will work themselves out.
Well, now you appear to be talking about two different issues: women having opportunity to compete in the Olympics in women’s divisions, or women having no opportunity to compete in the Olympics via the elimination of women’s divisions.
I’m fine with having women’s divisions for every event. I can’t speak to why some events have them and others don’t; I wouldn’t assume discrimination by the IOC before investigating the state of the event worldwide, the existence of sanctioning bodies for women’s divisions, and so on. Participation rates in sports are much lower for females than for males, which by itself is going to make it more difficult to establish the structures needed to feed into Olympic competition. The IOC is not responsible for this state of affairs.
I am not fine with eliminating women’s divisions in favor of gender-neutral competition, because it would almost entirely remove women from the Olympics.
A mood lightener, anybody?
Regarding mixed curling:
So: it was the woman doing the sweeping, right?
Sorry. No, really, really sorry. Won’t do it again. Promise.
j
Thank you.
He also uses the common tactic/fallacy of insisting on 100% casual relationship on one variable in a multi variable problem before giving even acknowledging that the variable is not a constant.
I don’t know at this point if you’re open to facts, but there’s an answer for this: Because there was no international federation asking the IOC to let women jump.
The International Olympic Committee does not simply choose sports and events on their own. It doesn’t work that way. The events and participation therein are largely determined by the appropriate international federation for that sport. Those federations not only pitch the events to the Olympics, but the IOC relies on them to provide most of the technical support for how they should be run. When people talk about the specific of “Olympic hockey,” that is absolutely a misconception. The hockey played at the Olympics is IIHF hockey. The reason there’s 100m, 200m and 400m sprinting events in the Summer Games but not a 60m or 300m event is that the IAAF, not the IOC, runs 100m, 200m and 400m sprints, but not 60m or 300m.
Women’s ski jumping was not an World Cup event *at all *until 2011. The Olympics could not have had it any earlier than the international federation had such a sport, and it takes a few Olympic cycles for sports or events to be adopted, if they are at all. You can say the FIS-Ski was sexist on this file, but not the IOC.
I watch a lot of curling and have seen a couple matches between a top women’s team and a good (but probably not top) men’s team and the women always lose. There are two places they fall down on: ability to throw a very hard shot and ability to sweep. It seems to be more a matter of physical size than actual skill. The top women are very skillful, just not as strong.
As it happened, a few hours ago I watched the gold medal mixed doubles game and after the Canadian team won, the male player lifted the female player over his head in celebration. He is 6’3" and she is 5’3" and his profession is as a fireman. I am sure she could not have lifted him.
Look at the sports that are measured, either time or distance, and you will find a marked disparity between the men and women’s results.
Now what I have often wondered about is why there are separate women’s competitions in bridge. Women compete on an equal basis in ordinary (open) events, so why are women’s events needed. What about chess?
http://content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1963484_1963490_1963447,00.html
Why does it seem that this only seems valid as an excuse, and not an actual limitation?
http://www.wsjusa.com/olympic-inclusion/
Do you have a cite that this BC supreme court didn’t have as information?
If we get rid of separate women’s events do we also need to lose weight divisions, youth events, the paralympics?