I have made this argument, but my claim is not that women were winning the top prizes. Yeah, maybe at shooting or speed puzzle solving, but not in general.
My claim is that when our society first started letting girls play sports at all (something that happened mostly in my school cohort), they often did it by letting girls into the previously all-boy little league, etc. teams. Now, this is talking about kids, and at a point before everyone is segregated by ability and only the top players “make the team”. But at that point, the most athletic girls are better players than some of the boys. Not better than the most athletic boys, but i think the top 10% of the girls were better than the bottom 30% of the boys.
And what that meant is that it was fairly common for a boy to be beaten by a girl. A friend had an unusually strong girl on his high school wrestling team, and he said a lot of boys forfeited, but when she competed, she won about half of her matches. Heck, there was a women in my college class who had a summer job as a lumber jack. She was built. My then-boyfriend described her as “large” and i assumed that was a euphemism for fat until i saw her. I’m sure she could take at least 70% of her male peers in a fair fight. She was probably top 0.1% strength for a woman, but those women exist. And they can’t beat the top 10% of men. But they can beat most of the boys in a typical highschool.
And i think that was the problem that led to uniformly segregating girls, not that girls weren’t winning often enough.