What if the best female soccer team played the best American NFL team in a game of baseball?
Could the female players more quickly adapt to baseball than the NFL players?
Clearly the best way to deal with this is for the USMNT and USWNT to play each other. You like series in the States, right, so let’s call it best of five. If the USWNT wins they get paid more than the USMNT. If it is as ugly as a draw between Plymouth and Brentford on a rainy Tuesday Winter night we’ call it equal.
Wait, what?
I’m sure they’ve all played baseball at some point. The NFL players would be so far beyond the female players in that scenario, it would physically be like adults playing against little kids.
I’m not sure how relevant the question is but I figured I’d entertain it.
I don’t think the baseball question was serious, but…
Both teams will have at least a passing familiarity with baseball, but neither will have any particular expertise in it. So it’d come down to general athletic ability. And both teams can be expected to be pretty much at the peak of general athletic ability, for their sex. And that peak, for men, is much higher than it is for women.
To make an athletic contest fair between men and women, you have to either find a sport where men’s advantages are essentially irrelevant, or one where there’s at least some element of physical ability for which women are superior. For the former, you might be able to do some sort of firearm sport. For the latter, maybe an age restriction? How would men and women compare in an over-80 marathon, for instance?
Not a great example, the Men’s record is 3:15:53 which is almost a full hour faster than the women’s record of 4:11:55. It appears the older you go, the more the two records diverge.
One aspect that would influence the result is the gender differences with regards to sports in general. I would guess that men have had many more “sport hours” over their life compared to women, and have also had more exposure to different kinds of sports than women. Boys likely will have been in more of the pee-wee leagues as kids, played sports more informally like at recess and with friends, played a wider range of sports, and have had sports as a larger part of their life than girls did. When introduced to a brand new sport, I would guess that men would generally do better than women since they likely will already have experience with the skills needed in that new sport from past experience they’ve gained from playing a wide range of other sports, and there’s a greater chance that they’ve actually played that sport at some point in the past. I would guess a much larger percentage of the NFL players have played baseball in their past compared to the USWNT players, so I would expect the NFL players to do better just because of that.
I could see women being better at new sports that are more about grace and poise rather than power and speed. I would expect the USWNT players to excel more than the USMNT players at sports like synchronized swimming, rhythm gymnastics, ice skating, ballroom dancing, and other sports like that. That’s not just because those sports might play to the strengths of women, but also because women will have been more likely to have been in similar activities like ballet and dance as kids. That’s not to say that the USMNT players might not eventually overtake the USWNT players in these sports with enough practice, but just that the USWNT players would likely have the initial advantage.
Per Hidden demographics of youth sports - ESPN The Magazine 60% of boys and 47% of girls are on a sports team by age 6. So there is a variance, although not such a large one as to expect that a bunch of female players capable of beating professional-level men are being ignored. The variance is almost entirely at the lower and higher age ranges of the “urban” group; in suburban and rural populations the gender differences in participation are nearly zero.
You probably want to avoid any implication that the physical differences at the top range of men and women are socially constructed. At the gym schlub level you will actually see much less divergence - some guy who topped out at the middle school JV level can easily be beaten in a basketball matchup by a more fit woman who has trained on footwork and shooting form. When you get into pro territory it’s no contest at all. Sampling NFL players and women’s soccer pros for “general athletic ability” by having them play any sport on the same field would be irresponsible since it will end not just with the soccer players losing but most likely with them being severely injured.
I still think there is still some gender or social construct aspect with regards to gender divide in sports even as adults. People don’t just play sports on official teams. Even if the sports team percentage was gender equal, it doesn’t seem to match the gender difference with recreational sports. It seems like more men play sports casually compared to women. It seems like on any random golf course, basketball court, field, etc., there will be more men playing than women. In my experience with things like sport courts at lunchtime at my work, it’s almost all men playing stuff like basketball and soccer. There are some women who play, but they are a small percentage. And one other difference is that I would not be surprised about is if most women playing had previously been on an official team but that’s less likely for the men. Like for me, I was never on any official team of any kind, but I played basketball and soccer at lunch and just picked up what I needed while playing rather than from learning from being on an actual team. Growing up, it was pretty common for my guy friends and I to play sports or sport-like activities just for fun. The same continued through college and adulthood, where me and my guy friends would often play sports just as a pastime, such as basketball, golf, catch, frisbee, etc. I don’t really see that kind of causal interest in sports with girls and women to nearly the same degree. I think that kind of casual interest in sports as a pastime is less common in girls and women and leads to women having fewer total sport-hours played over their lifetime.
There’s no amount of practice or social attitude change that’s going to change anything about the scenarios in this thread (women’s v men’s national team, top female soccer team v top male football team at baseball, etc).
There is an entire sigma of strength, speed, size, and skill, to the right of the best female athlete on Earth. In that additional deviation lies every professional male athlete - tens of thousands upon tens of thousands of them. That’s just the way biology is, and when you look at the times it’s been put to the test, there’s no denying it. I again ask what point is being made by forcing this to be articulated - the fact that the women’s team can’t beat the men’s team on the field does not in and of itself imply anything about the equal pay debate, for example.
I don’t think there is one. Certainly not one that is based purely on athletic ability and traits.
Even where you’d imagine such things were irrelevant we see things skewed in the direction of males. (snooker, darts, shooting, archery etc.) the males seem to outscore the females.
I’m not aware of any sport in which females regulary match or surpass males.
Archery definitely has a strength component, but for the likes of darts and firearm sports, I think the disparity is mostly just a disparity of interest, not in inherent ability. Same thing for chess, which has no athletic component at all.
I don’t know. I’d be happy to be proved wrong but I suspect that, even factoring for equal participation, males are always likely to occupy the bulk of the elite.
I think males do have an inherent advantage for pretty much all of the above.
If we can drift this thread towards pay difference, that seems to be more because the actual cost of talent is higher in the men’s team than the women’s. It costs more to get men to play in the the USMNT because those men are generally making higher salaries from their pro teams. If the national team did not pay that rate for the men players, they wouldn’t get the top men’s talent. That is not the same for the women players, as they don’t have as many alternative sources of soccer income. The USWNT can get top talent at lower rates than it can in the USMNT. I wonder what the results would be if rather than raising the pay of the women to the men, they instead lowered the pay of the men to the women? I wonder how the performance of the USMNT would change.
I would also suspect that investment in the USMNT is more likely to lead to higher soccer revenues long-term than in the USWNT. Although the USWNT itself may have higher support than the USMNT, men’s soccer in general has much, much higher support than women’s soccer. I would suspect that the better the men do, the more interest there is in professional soccer in the US. I don’t see that necessarily matched on the women’s side. The women can win WC after WC, yet there is no significant pro women’s league. It seems like the general revenues of pro soccer in the US are much more greatly influenced by the results of the men rather than the women.
I agree that the baseball question probably wasn’t serious. If not, I’m absolutely certain the men would dominate that game.
It got me thinking though, what about a men’s football team vs a women’s softball team playing baseball/softball. It’s not unusual for NFL players to get drafted in MLB. Those would be the best players of either gender, but I wonder if they could carry the rest of the team.
Well there is, the NWSL, but it’s not very well known (which may have been your point).
Elite male athletes usually have experience playing other sports; you will generally find that men capable of playing pro football were also among their high school’s best baseball and basketball players. At least some of those guys will be REALLY good ballplayers.
There is one that has already been mentioned: extreme endurance running (or cycling). Once you get to the point where you’re up for several days with very little sleep, women are a bit better than men. I’d like to think it’s because women have to be able to carry a little extra weight for months at a time, but https://www.bbc.com/news/world-49284389 suggests that it’s all emotional, and having the ability to suffer through childbirth is more important than being able to carry the child. Apparently at the end of 5 days straight of pushing your body, women can push on better than men and make up whatever advantages men have in the short-term.
Isn’t the same true of the women? Playing on one’s high school team is the sort of thing I meant by “familiarity but no particular expertise”. I mean, yeah, it’s a lot greater expertise than I have, but it’s not very much compared to pro players.
It also occurs to me that ability in American football might translate better to baseball than ability in soccer, even aside from gender differences: Arm strength is especially important in baseball, but of minimal importance in soccer.
I think when you take it to those niche extremes you are pushing towards the ultimate female advantage which is their greater ability for survival in general.