Add equestrian where there is no gender distinction on either the horse or rider.
I thought archery may have been, but on checking it appears not at the Olympics.
In many of these sports strength is in fact something that is needed. Archery requires quite a bit of upper body strength. High-level motorsports need quite a lot of strength.
The Gay Games are not nearly as segregated as the Olympics.
Or more segregated, depending on how you look at it.
There’s no bar to women playing on the men’s circuits and some women have played on on the PDC circuit (the men’s circuit where most of the best male players play), but for comparison, women’s world champion Lisa Ashton has the best 3-dart average on the women’s circuit over the last two years, but that is the 237th best average over all major circuits in the same time period.
Though the prize money in men’s so much higher that the top men’s player earns about 50 times more than the top women’s player, it is still more lucrative for the best women’s players to play on the women’s circuit.
Sled dog racing
That has been true, but no longer. Mixed doubles curling will be in the next Olympics.
Not sailing. Body mass makes a big difference on a sailboat. Enough that it alone can make or break winning or not. Olympic sailing classes have always been somewhat controversial. One problem, and no doubt one that affects many sports, is that the number of medals is restricted. Sailing gets 8 medal sets. So the competitions are:
[ul]
[li]single handed dingy (Laser) male and female (the women’s class uses a slightly smaller sail), [/li][li]Double handed dingy (470) male and female, sailboards RS:X) male and female, [/li][li]skiffs (49’er) male and female, and to round it out [/li][li]heavyweight single handed dingy (Finn) male only (100kg is needed to make one of these go), and with the one remaining medal they give the catamarans a medal with a [/li][li]mandatory mixed crew cat (Nacra 17). The Nacra 17 was purpose designed for the Olympics, as the obvious boats (an F18 class) were deemed too big for a male/female pair to crew.[/li][/ul]
Arguments rage about the classes. The kite sailors are far from happy. The cat sailors still grumble.
The rider’s need for fitness is not really any less than that of an archer, shooter, or curler. You can’t stick just any human on a horse and expect anything like success. In addition to mental skills like managing the horse’s fatigue and communicating with the beast to get it through the course, the rider has to manage his own balance and grip on the critter. It’s quite taxing on the legs and back to maintain posture and balance on a moving animal, which is necessary to keep the horsie from getting confused or thrown off balance. Even if you know the technicals inside out, your focus will suffer when you become physically fatigued. It’s very much a team sport, and the beast surely appreciates a rider who knows the game and doesn’t bring a bunch of extra weight to the show.
Bolding mine.
Isn’t that the story of all elite athletics though? The elite women far outperform the average male weekend athlete. But they’re simply uncompetitive against the correspondingly elite men.
In addition to strength being important in more sports than it at first appears, I suggest another reason for segregation is 100% mental.
To become a champion anything takes a monomaniacal dedication to training for your sport. Something about men’s minds is simply better at monomania. Just as autism is highly sexually dimorphic (4-5x more in boys than girls), so is the monomania needed to train hard enough to become the one in 100,000 who is a winner in high level organized sports.
I’m not suggesting higher levels of monomania is either good or bad. It simply is.
You certainly *could *make mixed teams. Mixed doubles tennis has a long and illustrious history.
At the same time, for many sports the number of available elite men is much greater than the number of elite women. As such, to field enough teams for all the elite men you’d use all the elite women and a whole bunch more from farther (in some cases *much *farther) down the performance scale. Or alternatively use all the elite women and only a small fraction of all the elite men.
Either of those is a recipe for an image and morale problem for the men, the women, the sport, or all three.
It’s certainly reasonable to ask how much of this difference in numbers today is a holdover from more sexist times. And how much is driven by the current differences in money available in men’s and women’s sport, both pro and high amateur. Versus the numbers difference being somehow innate and inevitable.
I hold that most of the difference is the first two causes, but there is some innate residual that’s not going away no matter how gender-neutral we make athletics and the larger society. For the reason I gave in my prior post.
Biathlon also has a mixed relay team event.
Yes, but even sports which have a long history of female participation like Tennis and Golf, women cannot play against men at all. Mixed doubles is often cited as an example, but it, in fact ,proves the opposite. Men and women can play together under set parameters; each team has one person of each gender. Mixed doubles is between randomly filled gender teams; you don’t see two women playing a man and a woman or two women playing against two men. I really doubt a mixed doubles team could have any hope against a men’s doubles team, hell I doubt that a mixed doubles team will have difficulty in defeating a women’s doubles team.
I think people greatly underestimate how much a strength and size impact sports; they hear “size, strength is not everything” as “size and strength is nothing”.
When in most cases size and strength gulf between the genders is so wide that no amount of skill will bridge it.
Hell, ignore gender. Combat sports are often segregated by size and weight. There is a reason that Manny Pacquiao, possibly the best boxer of the last generation never fought the Klitchko’s
I see a couple mentions of auto racing. While men and women do compete together, there is nothing approaching similar success, let alone women outperforming men. Women have driven in NASCAR and Indy, but have had little success. In general terms, I suspect that men are better at dismissing risk, have more stamina and (perhaps) have quicker reaction times.
Can’t be totally due to sexism; for the longest time F1 and motorsports generally were the province of the super-rich, who often don’t conform to social norms anyway and these days it would be exceptionally lucrative to have a female driver.
For what it’s worth, a man apparently holds the record for swimming there and back across the Catalina Channel; Cindy Cleveland and Tina Neill and Greta Andersen and Penny Lee Dean have all done it, but none of them got close to John York’s time. (At that, the male record for swimming there and back across the English Channel beats the female record – and likewise for the record for a one-way swim of the English Channel, and for a three-way swim of the English Channel.)
I think sexism and gender roles in racing plays a big part in whether girls get into racing from the beginning. A person doesn’t just show up one day at the track and starts racing. It’s a long process that starts when they are still a kid. When 5-year-old Pat asks for a go cart, what happens? Little Patrick’s dad probably swells with pride and gets him the best one he can find. But little Patricia’s parents probably dismiss the idea and tell her she’ll get hurt and get her a Barbie Jeep instead. Patrick is likely encouraged to continue racing by his parents and the racing community. Patricia will likely have to continually press the issue, fight gender expectations as she tries to find a team, and deal with derogatory and sexist comments along the way. For a woman to be a professional racer, she will have had to deal with a much more strenuous weeding-out process along the way. This likely means many women who could be top racers are never even given the chance and aren’t in the sport at all.
And those set parameters are actually necessary - I have bowled in mixed leagues which required that each 4 person team had at least one man and one woman. Inevitably, after a year or two , nearly every team is composed of three men and a single woman. And if one is not, it’s not due to lack of trying.
I totally agree with this. In dog agility, there is no segregation by sex or age of handler (yeah, you can get beaten by an 8-year-old running the dog her mom trained). The dog does the obstacles, obviously, but the handler has to run and direct the dog at top speed, and often the handler’s skill, not the dog’s physical prowness, is what decides who wins. The sport is severely dominated by women handlers at all levels but what few men participate tend to end up at the higher levels in greater proportions. Mostly because most women think it’s a fun, social event while a lot of men actually take it seriously.
You see the same thing in equestrian sports, dominated by women but the few men who participate tend to rise to the top.
It’s difficult to know the exact causes - I tend to think it is a mixture of factors.
Going back to the example of darts:
Darts is a sport with a large female participation going back to long before professional men’s darts. Whilst there have always been more men playing than women it would be very difficult to explain the disparity between the best women’s and best men’s players purely in terms of participation.
As the most pub-sport of all pub sports, certainly it has more than its fair share of sexism. However sexism can’t explain why the absolute best female players have 3 dart averages so far below the best male players.
Darts does seem to favour those of a ‘stockier’ build, but on the other hand as one of the few sports to ever feature a morbidly obese player amongst the highest ranks, it is difficult to say whether that is because being stockier confers an advantage or because it doesn’t confer any disadvantage. Certainly there are some male darts players of a more slender build. who are far better than the bets women’s players.
I tend to think it is a confluence of a number of factors, all of which favour men, and not just pure physicality which lead to women not being able to compete at the highest level of most sports.