I am wondering your opinions on why women don’t do better in non strength sports?
I particularly think of Pool, Cards (poker, Gin), Darts, AND Chess.
If you play any of these three above the average player then you know what it takes to win, but why is it such a big deal when a woman (Places) in a tournament with men when she should be able to win the tournament.
Pool only requires a little bit of strength for the break, but beyond that nothing any woman couldn’t do. Cards has no strength at all, Darts very little, and Chess 100% mental.
Someone like Judit does well, but you don’t ever hear a women winning mens tournaments or even high in the rankings.
The usual explanation is that women just aren’t nearly as driven to compete in games like that. There are fewer professional women chess players because there are fewer women chess players, period. And the best women chess players being below the best men can be explained by drawing from a smaller pool.
The really interesting question, in my opinion, is to what extent this difference in competitiveness between the sexes is cultural, vs. inherently biological.
I know the female pool players and they don’t play with the top men. The top 3 players can slightly hang with the lesser pros but that is the extent of it.
I’d imagine it’s simply about the size of the pool of candidates. If you have ten times as many men playing something as women, then you’re ten times more likely to find players of high caliber amongst them.
If the same number of women as men played darts or pool or whatever, you’d see the numbers evening out much more.
With one of your examples at least, i.e. pool/snooker, I think the differences in the brains between sexes could come into the equation as well.
I understand that the male brain is better at spatial awareness type tasks. That to me seems to include the type of thinking required in pool, with calculating angles off the cushion, etc.
The others you mention like Chess and Darts, I suspect has been covered, i.e. social factors leading producing a smaller pool of potential professionals.
Men have a higher standard deviation for most measurable traits. That is, if you plot a bell curve for a trait like math or verbal skills, the vast majority of the people at the very top and the very bottom will be male. This doesn’t say anything about the vast majority of people who fall anywhere near the middle but it does explain why you see this effect when you select for the absolute top people in any individual skill or sport.
Card games are heavily math based at the highest levels and chess, pool, and darts are spatially based. Males of many mammalian species like rats and apes favor males when it comes to spatial cognition so it isn’t surprising that men would do better an average but but the effect is much more pronounced at the top levels when a few male freaks of nature are selected out.
I actually thought about this question while watching Olympic Curling and wondering why the women were so much worse than the men.
Men are biologically more disposed to enjoy competitions compared to women. The main reason men tend to do better than women is that far, far more men participate than women and they have more of a drive to succeed. If gossip or shopping were sports, I bet men would find ways to be the best at them too.
Obviously, the answer is because these things are “games”…not “sports”.
It is the same reason why men seldom win at hopscotch, jacks, Bingo, ballet, or sewing bees.
There’s quite a few good women who play Bridge. I’m afraid I don’t follow Bridge closely, so don’t know the sex ratio among the highest level players. Anyone know if it’s skewed towards men?
This is going to sound like a sweeping stereotype, however one that I think does hold some truth. I really don’t think that most women find repetitive game play very interesting, and these are all sports that require mindlessly repetitive practice. Of all the people I have ever known, most men seem to have a hobby they’re a bit obsessed about (golf, for instance, collecting stamps, whatever, however fleeting) whereas women don’t tend to be obsessional about hobby pursuits. These sports require obsession to be successful
I heard the skip of the Swedish team on the radio the other day and she said that they had deliberately taken a more masculine approach and it worked off, both in Turin and Vancouver.
At the very highest level it is heavily skewed towards men. There are both open tournaments and ones for just women. Most regular tournaments are open, but there are women’s events for national and world championships.
I looked at the winners of the World Pairs Championships since instigation in 1962 and I don’t think any were women, but could not be sure because of the foreign names.
Across the entirety of the bridge-playing population, there seem to be about equal number of men and women, so the “bigger pool” argument cannot be used to explain the dominance of men at the top.
More masculine? Like where they pull out their brooms and wave ‘em around?
And say "Hey, Opposing Skip. Wanta piece o’ THIS?"
And “I gotcher Eight-Ender RIGHT HERE, buddy!”
What did she mean? Serious question-- all the curling I’ve done has been “Mixed”, and I’ve never noticed ANY difference in skill between the women and the men.
Well, I’ve watched a lot of curling and it is clear that strength is an issue. There is likely to be at least one end (inning) in every match when the best tactic is to throw a very hard shot and try to clear away, either the house or the guard zone in front and most women just cannot do that. And even the outliers among the women cannot compete with the outliers among the men. The speed of a shot is measured in the number of seconds required to traverse a certain distance between two of the lines (hog-to-hog time). A normal soft shot may take 14 or even 15 seconds (the latter with a lot of sweeping). A hit shot may be 9 or 10 seconds. Women can do that, of course. But a clearing shot might be 6 or 7 seconds and the winner of the 2010 World Championship (named Kevin Yoe–pronounced Youie) could throw a 5.5 second shot with accuracy. AFAIK, no woman could do that. The best can maybe throw a 7 second shot accurately.
Some of the top bridge players in the world are and were women. Charles Goren’s long time partner was Helen Sobel. Today, when you read championship reports a lot of the team have women players. They just have to be pulling their weight or they wouldn’t be there. My question is, given this, why are there still women only events? There are no men only ones.
Hmm… maybe men ARE more competitive. It’d never occurred to me to time any of my curling shots (and I’ve been flinging them since… 1959? Can that be right? Damn, I’m old).
Now I want to know if I can throw a 9 sec stone with accuracy. Or a 7!. Naaah, I bet I could toss a 5.5 through the opposing hack (or I could say “back wall”, for you non-curlers)!