Women might have an advantage in Ferret legging.
Don’t know which sex would do better at competitive sauna sitting, but the question is now moot given that the World Champships have been permanently terminated.
Just wanted to point out that in 1992, a woman won the gold in the skeet competition (when women and men competed evenly). The next Olympics it was no longer a mixed sport, and they lowered the number of targets women hit.
I’m trying to find a single way that could be interpreted generously and I can’t seem to. That sounds maliciously sexist. Does anypony know any reason other than ridiculously sexist attitudes why they would have made that change?
Kim Rhode just hit 99 of 100 in skeet shooting (for the 2012 gold medal). Not a whole lot of room for a man to do better than that…
Sounds good in isolation doesn’t it? And I have no doubt that on a given day she could beat men but that isn’t the point. Would it be fair to keep it mixed? Let’s look at some facts.
Looking at the world records for Olympic skeet I can see 11 occasions when men have shot perfect scores in qualifications and finals and exactly 0 occasions for women.
The men have to shoot 125 and 150 for perfect scores in qual/finals whereas women only have to shoot 75 and 100. And yet still there are no perfects recorded.
If we levelled the playing field up to the men’s standard I’d expect fewer women to approach perfection. Level it down to the women’s standard and I’d expect to see far more men with perfects.
On that basis it seems clear that you are going to get far more male winners than female and so keeping it segregated is probably sensible. Otherwise you’d be be waiting for a freakish display by such as the Chinese lady and that is likely to be pretty demoralising to the rest of the women.
No longer making it mixed and making a women only competition isn’t necessarily maliciously sexist. Men have a greater pool of shooters, so separating the two will allow more female shooters to compete, and that will make more women try to take up shooting. Which is the case since 2001, the number of women shooters has increased dramatically.
The number of targets is maliciously sexist though, and only allows people to point at the final number, despite the fact that women have medalled when competing against men on the same level.
But lots of sports are “sexist” to that extent. Hurdles are lower, Discuss and shot are lighter, golf courses are shorter. The number of targets being reduced is hardly “malicious”. As long as it is good enough to distinguish between the top women then it is doing its job.
( as mentioned in my previous post, it doesn’t seem like any woman has shot a perfect in qualifying or finals whereas men have, makes sense to me that the men therefore have to shoot more to be sure of finding a winner)
The thing about shooting is recovery time. We’ve all seen the old canard where a little skinny guy/girl shoots off GrandPa’s double barrel and gets thrown backwards a mile.
The more muscle/weight you’ve got the less you are affected by the kickback and therefore the better you are able to recover your sight picture and make the next shot. I can beat pretty much anybody on the first five shots with any gun I can lift. I won riflery competitions against grown men when I was seven years old.
But long about shot ten my muscles stop recovering as well and tiny trembles set in. If I were an athlete I could of course increase that number, but a man would always have the advantage unless he had a hormone deficiency.
It’s the same with ping pong. I don’t have a cite, but it seems obvious that men have a huge advantage in any sport which requires strength of grip or muscle recovery in the small muscles of the hand. Tennis, racquetball, shooting, all the same.
I can see how that would have an effect for shotguns and full-powered rifles but don’t most Olympic shooting events use .177 BB guns and .22lr? Fatigue can set in for a healthy human shooting those?
Those guns can be quite heavy. .22 rifles can be 18 lbs for men, 14 lbs for women, .22 pistols must weight at least 3.09 lbs.
Air rifle/pistol max weights are 12/3.3 lbs
I’ve heard one of our local Olympians who won gold in women’s curling in Nagano discuss this point. She said that the difference in upper body strength between men and women has a marked effect on the game and strategy. In her opinion, men are better at the shots that require a lot of strength and at brushing; women tend to rely more on finesse shots. She didn’t think men and women could compete directly; mixed curling yes, but not an all men’s team against an all women’s team.
Came here to post this. It’s a sport where sheer physical strength and speed, or athlete weight, aren’t factors.
Strength, speed and weight are obvious factors. Some non-obvious factors include hand-eye coordination, spatial orientation, math-like understanding of multifactorial and non-linear relationships and obsessive specialization. Maybe those non-obvious factors could be changed with different education and gender expectations but for a while at least, they give men quite a statistical edge.
I may have to walk back on my wrestling comment. Funny - probably NSFW twitter pic of an amateur women’s wrestling bout:
The original Olympics had poetry competition. I’m guessing men and women could compete against each other in that.
People just watching curling can easily underestimate how physical it can be. Men can deliver the rock with more strength and power, but I think the biggest difference between men and women would be in sweeping. It isn’t done just to remove debris on the ice from the path of the rock - it’s also done to determine the path the rocks takes, and it can make a huge difference in how far the rock travels (if a rock is thrown too lightly, good sweepers can “drag” a rock several meters farther than it would have gone on its own), and sweeping can dramatically increase or decrease how much the rock curls and thus where the rock ends up (especially when curling a rock in behind another rock).
Watching curling competitions in the past, I’ve noticed a trend towards having younger people competing at higher levels. Of course, experience, knowledge and finesse is very important, but more and more teams have recognized the importance of having stronger (and often younger) members playing, especially in lead or second position and thus doing the majority of the sweeping.
Stamina is also important, especially in tournaments. It might not seem like a game of curling is that difficult compared to other sports, but playing multiple games in a short period of time is actually quite physically demanding. Not to the level of a triathalon or anything, but being more physically conditioned than your competition is a definite advantage.
I found this article - The Sports Science of Curling: A Practical Review (pdf file), which points out that: (my emphasis added in bold in the last quote)
This, exactly. Zhang Shan won the competition with an olympic record. And look what happened after that: skeet shooting had been a mixed event since 1968, with no female medalists yet, then in 1992 they have a woman winning, so suddenly in 1996 the skeet shooting event was men-only. Needless to say, this was a controversial decision, especially as the 1996 olympics didn’t have a skeet event for women, so Zhang had no way at all to defend her victory. Only from 2000 onwards has there been a separate skeet competition for women, and currently there’s no shooting competition in olympics that is open to both genders.
Zhang is still doing well, and though she didn’t qualify to these olympics, it’s clear that some of the current top female shooters would be very competitive in men’s skeet too. After all, looking at the finalists in 1992, no other women were among the 24 qualifiers from the first round, even though two female athletes missed the qualification just by 1 shot. Women’s participation to sports as well as the intensity of training has increased during the last 20 years all around the world, not only absolutely but also in relation to men. This is probably true for shooting also, which increases the number of competitive participants and their chances for winning.
Consider the following hypothetical: imagine this year’s olympic skeet shooting were a mixed competition using the rules of the female competition (fewer shots). So there would be 3 sets of 25 shots for qualification round, after which the top 6 competitors shoot a further 1 set for final. To correspond to the 100 shots women had we can take the first 100 shots from men’s event. And if we use the results of men’s first 3 sets for qualification and then men’s 4th qualification set for final in this hypothetical, this would lead to a female gold medalist: after qualification round, one woman and one man at 74 shots, three more men at 72, six more men at 71, again six men and one woman at 70 and so on. Those at 71 would need to shoot tiebreaks to determine which one of them is the sixth finalist, but this doesn’t affect others. In the final round then (using the women’s final and the 4th qualification set from men), Kim Rhode shoots a perfect 25, leading to 74+25=99, leaving Vincent Hancock with 74+24=98 to silver and Anders Golding with 72+25=97 to bronze, and giving mixed skeet competition again a female winner. Though once again this hypothetical competition wouldn’t have any other women in top 10, it illustrates that the 1992 olympics result was not just some one time lucky exception and that at least in some shooting competitions it’s possible for women and men to compete with a reasonable chance for gold to either sex.
But by your own example, only one of the top ten would be women so I’m not sure that such an unequal split would be seen as a “reasonable” chance and I suspect if the competition requirements were set at the men’s level then the situation would likely be worse for the women.
I have no idea morally or ethically what the rights and wrongs of mixed gender sports are. If I am watching for entertainment then it doesn’t matter and I don’t care. I take each on it’s own merits and both can have great value.
If I’m interested in knowing who is the “best” at a given discipline then it has to be mixed and in pretty much every case it’ll be a man.
Rare exceptions occur of course but if you want to see female recognition outside of those then segregation is necessary.
The difference between men and women isn’t just strength, speed and weight on average. It is about outliers. Nature has taken more chances with the male of the species; men have more outliers in every direction. While a “good enough” female will have a decent chance at procreating, men’s genes have better odds if they take a genetic gamble. And that gamble can have pos or neg results.
So, we find higher percentages of males in most congenital diseases (physical and mental), and in crime. But we also find more males as genetic outliers on the positive side.
That difference becomes bigger the nearer you get to the absolute world top. So while men and women may be on average matched in, for instance, chess, the top ten of a county will have 6 men to 4 women. The best ten of a country wil have 8 men to 2 women, and at the world class level that is the Olympics, it isn’t likely that any women makes it to the top 10.
Mixed doubles in raquet sports and canoeing.