The Australian women’s national soccer team (no slouches; a pretty good team)lost 7-0 to an under-fifteen boy’s team.
Maria de Villota died after an injury. Another, Susie Wolff, has moved to team management. But in theory female F1 drivers should have a significant advantage because they are lighter.
Snooker was mentioned upthread: lady players can have a distinct disadvantage if they have large breasts.
While they both fall under the umbrella of “gymnastics,” men’s and women’s gymnastics can’t really be compared fairly because they are barely the same sport. Except for vault and floor exercise, they don’t even share the same events, and floor exercise is performed and scored differently.
Men and women competed in mixed doubles curling at the Olympics this year.
In theory there should be little difference in their curling ability, however statistically men can throw harder takeout weight, and probably have a slight advantage in sweeping ability due to weight and strength.
My male acquaintances would tell you that they ensure gender diversity by watching only the women’s beach volleyball matches. Watching the men play would be a little too…uh…
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
Wanting to speak for popularity aspect of the OP not the ability. Male sports are more interesting to watch may be because males are more expected to compete.
Well, that’s a ridiculous comment.
That was, in fact, a complaint that some drivers had regarding a perceived advantage that Danica Patrick had. At 5’2", she probably weighs 60 to 100 pounds less than most male drivers.
Men are known to be more variable than women. While the difference is basically irrelevant for most people most of the time, it means you find many more men who are the best or worst at something. And competitive sports generally single out the people who are the top fraction of a percent in the field.
This makes direct competition between the genders in a sport awkward, since it means that even if most women are better than most men at something, the actual top players will likely be the handful of men at the far end of the curve anyway.
It’s my understanding that men are generally better at judging ballistics than women, which would likely help in darts.
There’s also the issue that in a real sense, men and women aren’t doing the same thing when throwing darts. Women are smaller and proportioned differently; the dart is a different size relative to their hand, the board a different height relative to their throw. And the nature of competitive sports amplifies tiny differences; you may have noticed the difference in performance between winner and losers in sports is often small. If such minor details as the dart being slightly bigger than average in their hands throws their performance off by a few percentage points because they are throwing the dart at a slightly worse angle, then women will be noticeably “worse” at darts.
This is apparently a known issue in at least some sports. I just ran across an interesting study on men and women’s Olympic volleyball, and how their performances are different enough, consistently enough that in effect they are playing fifferent games that superficially look the same.
I think DT nailed it.
The male and female ability curves for pretty much any athletic or sporting event overlap, of course they do. I have no doubt that in some case the mean of that curve will be higher for females than males meaning that the average woman is better than the average man. If a plane crashed on a desert Island and competence in various criteria were needed to help you survive you may well be better off finding yourself with a load of “average” women rather a load of “average” men. (no sniggering at the back there!)
But the very best do not come from that part of the distribution do they? Average people do not compete at the top level by definition. So we see the top performers coming from the very extreme end of the tail and even when the men have a worse mean you can still have a wider spread and so many, many more men occupy (both) the extremes.
So, to the OP, men’s sports are pretty much very best there is. Faster, more skillful, more powerful, more accurate, by pretty much any objective metric you can find the men lead the way…in general. It is possible that the odd woman will match the elite men, especially in niche sports with low participation rate and where any sport has a scored element to it rather than an objective metric.
In most cases the women’s version is performed at a lower level than the men, i.e. the women could not meaningfully compete with the men and the ability difference is probably enough to make the women’s version a different sport altogether and in some cases the rules are different enough to make it so.
That says nothing about entertainment value of course. People can find entertainment value in watching two equally matched competitors, at a lower performance level, go at it hammer and tongs more so than an elite, one-sided affair. You will always get one-off situations as well that have a personal or emotional pull that make it a particular draw. But that would be an exception. You will pretty much always find the big money and audiences gravitating towards the very, very best at any given sport and that is much more likely to be the men. Tennis is often given as an example of women being a bigger draw but the prices for final tickets are more for the men at the grand slams and I have no doubt that if women had separate grand slam events they would not pull in as many crowds nor as much revenue.
Horse sports like dressage, eventing and show jumping, as well. Also most sailing.
I’m sorry but this is just wrong. The basketball example is closer to true. but you are comparing the best women in the world against teenagers. That being said, the better boys teams, say the Top 20 in California, Texas, New York, or even North Carolina or Indiana, would wipe the floor with the WNBA team.
College hockey would be much worse. Average men’s team would beat the women 100 times out of 100. Even taking away the differences in speed and strength, men are much more skilled. I mentioned this during the Olympics, after USA vs. Canada, how much less skilled the women were. Their passes were bad, they couldn’t keep control of the puck after receiving a good pass, they couldn’t skate with the puck in traffic, and they completely whiffed on shots at an alarming rate. Average High School teams would beat the Olympic teams at a high rate.
There’s a historical perspective, too. Men’s teams in pro sports have been around for decades; some even go back a century or more. The effects of that are bound to linger for many reasons. People are fans of certain teams because they remember going to games with their grandfathers when they were a child, at a time when there weren’t women’s teams to go see with their grandmothers. And there’s been a winnowing, evolutionary process as well. I remember when bowling was on ABC every Saturday, but I can barely find it on ESPN now. The fittest (that is to say, most popular) men’s sports thrive while others fade away. Maybe the path to popularity for women’s sports isn’t to just copy men’s sports, but to try different things, listen to their fans, build a base of support and become their own thing.
This might be somewhat circular, but one reason men’s sports is more driven, and more popular, is because there is more at stake for the players. NFL/NHL/MLB/NBA/Premier League/Bundesliga/La Liga players can earn millions, maybe even tens of millions of dollars a year and become household names and globally recognized. There is tremendous incentive for male athletes to drive themselves hard.
You’d have a hard time finding a random passerby who could name a handful of players in the WNBA, or perhaps even just one, and WNBA players earn only a small fraction of what male NBA players do. There is comparatively less for a woman to gain in sports than a man, thusly. The lone exception might be individual sports, where people like Michelle Wie, Fukuhara Ai or Maria Sharapova can make a name for themselves. But in team sports, there just is no comparison; it’s nearly impossible for women or a woman to get notoriety and big bucks the same way athletes on men’s teams can. Ask people from different countries - “Who is the best female soccer player in the world?” and there will be a long pause.
I’ll disagree with this. I think an average college hockey team someone like Robert Morris or Harvard would have a heck of a time beating the women’s national team. You’re saying that women’s passing and puck control is poor, but I don’t think you’ve watched average college teams. How many times have you watched soft passes from the defensemen on a power play result in short handed breakaways? Short handed goals are almost always the result of sloppy passing or sloppy vision and college hockey is absolutely full of them. I don’t see that same lack of vision among the elite women’s hockey teams.
If we use classical music as an example - and yes I know, it’s not sports, but it’s relevant - in classical piano competitions, men and women compete together; there are no gender-segregated piano competitions that I am aware of. I don’t know the stats, but it seems that women win just as often, per capita, as men. If there are more male or female winners, it seems to be a case of more male or female contestants in the entry pool to begin with, rather than either gender being better. And it looks that women who are competing in these fields practice their instruments or voices as obsessively as men.
There’s two examples above of National level women’s soccer teams losing to under 15 boys teams, but you think when the boys are actually allowed to hit the girls, as in hockey, the women have a chance? I think you are way wrong.
I think you’re completely wrong with your assessment. This year Ryan Donato went from his position as a junior at Harvard to the Bruins, and scored a goal and two assists in his first NHL game, three days after his last college game. The men/boys are much stronger, faster, and bigger and even without checking (they typically play women’s rules, no hitting) they would be outmatched in every facet of the game.
They would probably match up well against 13-15 year old boys, but have difficulty with any teams older than that.
After a little research:
Warroad High School edges Team USA women