I never said I believed anything of the sort. I don’t follow sports, I couldn’t tell you which ones are or are not segregated, or when the first woman played against men successfully in any given sport. All I did was offer a likely explanation for the OP’s question:
Social inertia, alone, is a sufficient explanation for the continued separation in that particular, or any other, sport. It may or may not be the only explanation, but it is a sufficient reason for continued separation. I offered up a possibility for consideration.
Why are you thinking I’m looking for some sort of argument?
Consider chess - although the physical aspect consists mainly of sitting and concentrating for long periods of time (which men and women should be equally good at), men completely dominate at the top level. Of the top 100 rated players in the world, one (Judit Polgar) is a woman - tied for #52. http://ratings.fide.com/
It’s probably due to what Der said - males are more variable, and when you’re looking at the top fraction of 1%, that will make it male-dominated (the same logic suggests that men would dominate the bottom 1% as well, but the internet, in its infinite wisdom, doesn’t tally the world’s 100 worst chess players).
Good question! Here’s a detailed summary of a paper which looked at ratings of ~250,000 players in the US Chess Federation over a period of 13 years. Their conclusion is that the dominance of male players at the top level is NOT due to a higher variance in male ratings! (They actually find that male ratings have slightly lower variance than female ratings). So, I stand corrected.
They find that overall, males have higher average ratings than females. However, average ratings of males and females are basically identical in areas where females make up at least 40% of players.
Their conclusion, since overall there are substantially more male players than female players, male players with some chess skill are more likely to play more and continue to improve (as they have lots of other male role models), while female players (seeing fewer other female players) are more likely to drop out of chess and pursue another game with higher female participation (I’m using “male” and “female” here since the study included adults and juniors, but this dynamic is probably most important for young players). The same dynamic could also hold in billiards - if there are fewer women players, then girls who are decent at billiards, but find themselves in tournaments in which they are vastly outnumbered by boys, may well pursue another sport where there are more girls.
I’m definitely in that bottom 100 list. I don’t think anyone who knows the rules could play worse than I do. On top of my moves appearing to be totally random, I’m likely to point out the ways that I’ve just exposed myself to an eventual mate.