By the by, if you haven’t seen any of the WFWC England-Canada match, the first England goal by Jodie Taylor is impressive. I’m not saying she would have pulled it off against a male team (particularly as it involved a defending error) but in itself it’s worth checking out.
Sorry - no link to hand.
In soccer women have worse close ball control, have less accurate passes, take longer to make decisions, don’t control passes as easily, etc. Other than decision making, those are all physical skills. Why would you expect any equivalence?
Yes, you can train skill, but you can also train athletic ability. Just because something can be improved through practice is no reason to believe that they’re equal between the sexes.
Somehow, I don’t see this working, even if you throw in gimmicks like “a 3-point shot only counts as 2 if a man shoots it” (“how do you tell which is which?” The same way you tell which player on the court is the libero in volleyball - slightly different uniforms).
My idea for “coed” basketball: the women play one half, and the men play the other. The home team gets to decide which goes first, as the second half players would also play any overtimes. (For “neutral” games like tournaments, the organizers decide in advance.) You can’t do alternating quarters without running the serious risk of the first quarter players pulling muscles during the third quarter because of the long break between when they play and when they warm up again. The main problem with this is, there will be people who “count” only the men’s score, and when it gets to a tournament game where Team X’s men score more than Team Y’s men, but Team Y wins the game and Team X is eliminated, a considerable number of fans stop caring.
I think the difference between men and women is far more complex than just differences in strength, endurance, or reaction time.
Consider Pool and Billiards. Straight Pool has been played by both men and women for over a century. It’s a game that takes no strength whatsoever - just hand-eye coordination, judgement, and concentration. You’d think that if there was a sport where men and women were equal, this would be it.
But it’s not even close. I believe the best run a woman has ever put together in competition was 93. A match goes to 150, and it’s quite common for even college-level men to run 150 balls and out. In exhibition play, the men’s record is 562 balls, set by Willie Mosconi. The women’s record is 158.
Jean Balukas, perhaps the most dominant female player of her era, played in both the men’s and women’s U.S. Open. She won the woman’s open, but was knocked out in the second round in one men’s open albeit by one of the top-ranked players. She also tried the 9-ball circuit, and had some decent matches against some pretty good male players and once finished as high as 9th place in a major tournament. But no one thought she was a real threat to challenge the top-ranked players in any sort of consistent way.
The men aren’t even necessarily athletic - there are top pool players with beer guts, and one of the best men who ever played 9 ball, Nick Varner, is smaller than most women on the pool circuit and only weighs 120 lbs.
Snooker is similar - there is no strength element to the game, yet the women are just not competitive. Allison Fisher dominated Women’s snooker, and tried to make the jump to the men’s circuit. She was not remotely competitive at the top levels.
On the other hand, female pilots compete very well against men in aerobatics, a sport that requires physical strength, intense focus, precision, and a whole lot of courage. Patty Wagstaff routinely beat men and won the world aerobatic championships several times. In addition, female pilots excelled in WWII. America didn’t allow women to fly in combat, but they did a lot of ferry flying, which is very dangerous and very difficult, and they did it with a better overall safety record than the men.
In the Soviet Union, there were women pilots in combat flying fighter aircraft, and they seemed to do as well as or better than the men.
So as I said, our differences are complex. I don’t think you’ll find any bright lines or simple rules for determining who is better at what.
This bears repeating. Don’t know if they “do better then men”. but a female fighter pilot seems to be able to advance on her own merits against male pilots, as opposed to almost all sports where she has no chance.OTH, fighter pilot training is brutal, something 19/20 of those who start training fall by the wayside…maybe that means that fighter pilots being freaks of nature avoid the gender trap.
I am surprised that motorsports don’t see many more women, and the best women have usually only moderate success in lower level competition. Women have been participating in motorsports since the beginning and for the early decades a lot of the participants were very rich and wealthy folk, those less likely to conform to gender roles anyway, so you cannot say that women were discouraged (or to the extent of other sports). Admittedly, motorsports do require a lot of physical strength at the higher levels.
FWIW, there is some medical data that suggests women are naturally more G-tolerant than men.
When doing comparisons like that, you do need to be aware of selection bias. Women in aviation, or any other STEM field, are possibly far more likely to come from the highest levels of both ability and ambition, already having overcome whatever artificial barriers or other discouragements that females face. The population of males you’re using in such a comparison includes the performances of far more second-level, and lower, people than the population of females.
Of course, that applies only to areas where unequal barriers to access truly are artificial. Sport is generally not one of those areas.