No more men’s and women’s league, no more “gender eligibility” requirements, a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all.
Edit: since it looks like people missing the word let: the suggestion isn’t to force desegregation. It’s to allow it or even make it the default. Someone else made a good suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it’s weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.
Not if you value women participating in sports.
Why? Weight classes, leauges, and divisions won’t help?
The fastest a woman has ever run the 100m dash is 10.49 seconds.
The Olympic qualifying time, that all runners needed to beat to even complete in men’s 100m dash this year was 10.00 seconds.
If we didn’t have a women’s division, there couldn’t be women in sports.
Yes, that’s a sport where segregation makes sense. But the suggestion isn’t to force desegregation, it’s to to let all genders compete against each other.
We call it the “Mens” category, but for all intents and purposes it is the same as an “open to all genders” category.
Female athletes don’t compete in it because they’re physically not strong enough to even qualify to compete in it at the world level. The gender they identify as or were assigned at birth is irrelevant. There’s no genetic testing requirement to compete at the men’s level.
In almost every sport, the world record performance from a women isn’t even good enough to meet the minimum bar for quality to compete in the men’s competitions at the world level.
Even sports like diving where you’re judged more than measured, the male athletes strength makes it possible for them to do things the female athletes simply can’t.
There was a time when they only was open to all competition, adding a protected women’s only category was to make it fair for women. And then we started calling the open category the men’s category.
We could call it the open category and the low-T category instead, and it would have the exact same participants in each.
This has been explained elsewhere.
No, men and women are not physically equal.
Why does that matter? Men also have divisions and leagues. Team in the top leagues will destroy the leagues at the bottom.
why does it matter?
Should we stop splitting sports by gender?
It’s inherently boring to watch sports competitions between unequally capable people, and there is a natural difference in that that can be clearly attributed to gender.
I admire your thought of equality but we need to talk about the differences in physique in genders as well if we wanna discuss this.
Don’t dismiss this claim, scientifically debunk it or share why not and how you come to this conclusion.
No, it’s not attributed to gender. It is attributed to sex. Sorry to be pedantic but we live in a world where that distinction is very important for education purposes.
Of course people are differently capable, that why we have divisions, leagues, weight classes, and so on, even in the same sex. Why would that change when they all compete together?
“Hey! Do you want to watch division 7 soccer? They have a woman on the team!”
Hardly inspirational to girls everywhere. Whereas whenever I’ve caught the Canadian women’s soccer team, it’s usually at a pretty full arena with lots of girls teams there stoked to watch. I would never take that away from them.
Why do you assume they’ll be in the 7th division? And do you assume it will be the case for all sports?
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Which sports do you watch both men and women play?
Soccer is the one I do most frequently. My local men’s MLS team would walk through the Canadian women’s team. The men can just kick it much farther and harder, run faster, take dangerous shots from farther out and that’s not to mention the physicality. And the Canadian women’s team is one of the top 10 or so in the world. (And MLS is several steps down from any of the serious leagues from which most national men’s teams are drawn.)
Not even going to look at a more physical sport like hockey.
I already posted comparing men and women’s times at the Olympics, but to reiterate, the gold winning woman came in slower than the bare minimum men’s time to qualify to run at the Olympics, in the 10k race, literally every one of the racers beat the women’s world record… (stats you saw but conveniently did not respond to.)
Does that answer your question?
Does that answer your question?
No, it doesn’t answer if it’ll be the same for all sports. As others have pointed out archery, shooting, curling, and other sports have men an women competing either separate or together and women can compete at the same level.
As for football, yes, there’s a good chance there’ll be stark differences, but as I pointed out in another comment, not every sport is about raw strength. And, competing against stronger opponents can also raise your ceiling. How far is of course yet to be seen because we don’t have mixed leagues.
And again, the suggestion isn’t “NO MORE SEGREGATION EVER” it’s “should we let them compete against each other”. That means there’ll be a mixed and segregated league. Maybe even, as somebody else suggested, the segregations wouldn’t always be immediately by sex or gender, but by attributes that make sense in that sport e.g weight, muscle mass, height, skill, and so on.
Because putting them together in most physical sports would push women out of the highest echelons of that sport. Just look up what female MMA fighters and female tennis players have to say. They literally can’t keep up with men. Serena Williams and her sister boasted that they’d beat any man outside the top 200, Braasch (then #203) took the challenge and on the day of the challenge played a round of golf drank 2 low ABV beers before easily beating both sisters
Probably the most detrimental thing you can do for women in sports is to get rid of the women’s league. Most “men’s” categories are already open for women, so you should ask women why they don’t want to partake. The answer is what female athletes already say, they’d get absolutely dumpstered before they even get close to the top. Of course the less physically demanding the closer men and women will be, but for most sports the physical differences make women’s leagues necessary.
Most professional sports in the United States don’t have any policies against women being in the sport. NBA, Football, Baseball, Hockey, etc.
None of them exclude women from playing in the professional leagues. Baseball did briefly in the middle of the 1900s, but that policy was reversed
It’s just that, for these sports, the best women in the game have not yet been better than the worst men in the game. A woman and a man of equal height and weight are still not generally physically equal. Muscle composition and growth, bone structure, etc. mean that on average, women are less strong and less explosive than men, and most popular sports emphasize those attributes.
WNBA teams would often scrimmage against male pick-up basketball players for practice, and they would also often lose. These were just random guys in the area, many of whom didn’t even play often.
The US Women’s National Team played against FC Dallas’s under-15 boys squad and lost 5-2. That USWNT went on to win the Olympics and the women’s World Cup. The Australian women’s team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal’s woman’s team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
There is some research on evolutionary theory specifically about the vast differences in upper-body strength: “But even with roughly uniform levels of fitness, the males’ average power during a punching motion was 162% greater than females’, with the least-powerful man still stronger than the most powerful woman. Such a distinction between genders, Carrier says, develops with time and with purpose.”
There are very few sports where this would be feasible, and most if not all those sports are not well-watched and make very little money: shooting, archery, ultra-marathons come first to mind.
To be fair, about that women’s world cup team, if i recall correctly it was a PR move to play an exhibition match with those kids and they were not trying very hard to win. I don’t think they would truly lose to U-15 if it was, for example, a tournament.
Your overall point has merit but i think that specific example gets overused a bit.
It was hardly a “PR move,” they didn’t publicize it, and it didn’t really get traction until Carli Lloyd “admitted” it on Twitter. I’m sure they were taking it a little easy though. That being said, the Australian women’s team lost to U15 boys 3-0 and again to another U15 boys team 7-0; Arsenal’s woman’s team lost 5-0 to a U15 boys club; the professional squad Athletic Feminino in Spain lost to a U16 boys squad 6-0; and there are many, many more examples.
I actually watch more women’s soccer than men’s, so I’m not denigrating the game or quality of play, but I think you’d agree the above represents a pretty clear trend.
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Same dress code, standards and rules absolutely - regardless if competition is split or not.
Same competition definitely for some sports - chess and shooting come to mind.More physical sports - I’m undecided there. I’d support everyone competing together if for example weight categories are introduced. You don’t want people of widely different physical build competing together, it’s not fun either to watch or play.
That’s already how it works. 80kg boxers don’t compete against 100kg boxers, division 1 teams don’t compete against division 5 teams.
It just means that some teams will be mixed. We might even be surprised at how many teams will be mixed.
I don’t want to see a 80kg male boxing against a 80kg female. I already know how that is going to end.
No, you don’t. You haven’t seen it yet. Nor do you know how 100 or 1000 such matches would end.
It’s also fine if you don’t want to see it. No one is going to force you too.
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The thing people do no appreciate about professional and Olympic level sports is just how far the male athletes are beyond the athletic ability of the average man.
There seems to be a notion that just because someone is a male they get to compete at the highest level of sports. This is simply not the case. The vast majority of male athletes will never even come close to reaching a professional level. Even an above average male college athlete has a snowball’s chance in hell of making it in a league like the NFL.
When we are talking about women competing with these men, we aren’t talking about competing against men with average or even above average ability (professional female athletes would mop the floor with men in the 60% percentile) we are talking about competing against the top .000001% of male athletes.
Women not only have a biological disadvantage, they have a population size disadvantage. Far more boys and men compete in sports and games. I don’t care what game or sport you are competiting in, if you have population A containing 100 randomly selected competitors and population B containing 1000 competitors, you don’t have to be a statistician to figure out that your #1 competitor and probably your entire top 10 are going to come from population B.
OK, I’ll just add an edit to the description, but for you too: the suggestion isn’t to force desegregation. It’s to allow it. Someone else made a better suggestion: segregate by attributes specific to the sport. In boxing it’s weight class, in basketball it could be height, in biking it could even be doped and non doped. Sex and gender need not be the very first thing to segregate by.
Finally, the option to compete together should still be the default, IMO. Some people probably would like to join a mixed team, but simply can’t because it isn’t allowed. For example if basketball were segregated by height, some shorter players would maybe like to play in the mixed team regardless (maybe they hit a skill ceiling in their league, maybe they don’t like the idea of segregation, etc.).
No, because the women would be at an unfair physical disadvantage in most sports.
I watched the speed rock climbing (sorry, don’t know the official name) during the Olympics. The fastest woman was amazing, she flew up the wall in about 6.75 seconds, and beat her nearest competitor by over a second to win the gold. The fastest man was nearly 2 seconds faster again with his competitors not far behind. If the women competed with the men, the female gold medal winner wouldn’t even be on the podium.
You say that but women’s tennis didn’t exist until a woman beat all the men and won a tournament.
Exception that proves the rule? That’s pretty awesome though.
IDK, men already dominate so much of the world, why not make space for women’s sports.
But imo it should be more like the weight classes in wrestling and less like the binary mens/women’s thing with different rules.
Like why are men’s and women’s gymnastics so different. Why can’t the person do the event they want to compete in?
That has always bothered me. I feel they should be doing The same activities.
That’s not what happened.
Problem is that some sports are really unfair towards one of the sexes (and it’s not always men who have the advantage). I definitely think it should be mixed for sports where there’s no advantage.
Relevant recent YT short about archery: https://youtube.com/shorts/oCi_IawIFQA
I don’t see that as a problem. For example boxing or weightlifting would probably have the top 10-100 being all men, but have more variety (trans, men, and women) below that. They could all compete together though.
You could still be the top man/woman/trans, but there would be a clear total ranking. For example one would see that the top female tennis player would rank 100th in the total ranking. It wouldn’t take away from her achievements and allow her to play against men at the same level.
But it does kind of diminish the women’s sports.
Consider say, the 100 meter sprint. The winning women’s times at the Olympics were all so far behind the men that literally none of the winning times would have even qualified to be at the Olympics! (Mens min qualifying time is under 10 seconds, Alfred won gold at 10.72 seconds, Jefferson took bronze at 10.92.) At the other end of the scale, for the 10,000 meter race, the last placing male ran it in just over 29 minutes which was 5 seconds faster than the Olympic women’s record for the same distance and was a full minute and a half faster than the gold winning woman.
Similarly for a lot of team sports you’d be relegating teams with women on them to a much lower league because at the top of the table, raw physical strength plays a role.
Splitting up by sex means we can watch and appreciate the best women play their sport at the highest level and celebrate them. Or almost every Olympic sport would just be guy guy guy.
In Finland we have lower physical requirements for women to get into the police academy. I think it’s safe to say that with equal requirements we wouldn’t have a single female police officer in the entire country.
I’d expect a similar thing to happen in sports. When it comes to physical strenght men have a massive advantage over women. It would be the women who this screws over.
Does Finland not have divisions, leagues, and classes in male sports? You don’t think that an all male team in the last division can compete against an all female team in the top division? You don’t think there are some sports where women are on equal footing where strength is not an advantage (archery, shooting, diving, etc.)? You don’t think there is overlap in some sports?
Most if not all of the highest divisions would be men only. The highest ranking females would be competing against some minor league men on games that nobody would be interested in even watching.
Obviously there would be some number of genetic outliars but that wouldn’t change the overall trend.
That is your assumption. You cannot know that across all sports. It would most certainly be true for sports limited or focused on physical strength, but beyond that, there’s no way to know for certain.
If you’ve played any sport, you’ll know that brute strength isn’t the sole determining factor for success. Technique is very important too. Tactics cannot be ignored either. In football for example, just play “try to get the ball” in a square where one chases the ball. You might be the fastest player on the team but never catch the ball even against players who don’t move.
Also, competing against stronger opponents is how people learn and “level up”. You learn how to deal with different, faster, slower, more technical, stronger, even more intelligent opponents. Again, if you’ve ever played sports (or just games), you’ll know what it feels like to think you’re the best, then get decimated by an opponent, but in doing so realize what you were doing wrong - especially when competing against that opponent multiple times. Women and men might have a higher ceiling than they think, but unless they compete against each other continuously, they won’t know.
Sure. I can’t know the outcome for sure but I’d be stunned if the trend ended up being male players being humiliated by women. I just cannot imagine this being the case. I have nothing against it per se but I have a strong feeling it would come at the expense of women.
My only personal experience on this is sparring against a purple belt female in Brazilian Jiu Jitsu while I was still a complete novice myself. She put up a good fight but she didn’t stand a chance. Granted I was also bigger and stronger than her. On the other hand, sparring against a smaller but more experienced male I stood no chance myself. He’d beat me every single time without an exception.
No.
Yes
Care to expand?
It would make most sports incredibly boring to watch, as well as frustrating for many athletes. Boring sport means less money, which would also mean less teams overall.
Why would it be boring?
I have, in other comments and the description of the thread too. Anything specific you would like to know?
That would just be men’s sports, which in fairness is all most people seem to care about anyway…
Not every sport. Dressage is already a sport where there is just one category. Synchronous swimming is also one, but only women competed this year.
The only sport that is a predominantly physical exercise (so excluding things like snooker, darts, archery etc) where women could compete competitively against men at an equivilent level in their sport (league 1 men vs league 1 women) would be ultra marathons. Most other sports is so mis-matched you’d end up with some random amateur bloke against an elite woman.
Basically if you’ve gone through male puberty you are vastly different physically from someone who hasn’t.
I’m all for removing gender as the first dividing line, but there needs to be some divisions in place.
As an example, in martial sports they are often separated by weight class to balance the fact that a larger, heavier person would have an advantage over a smaller, lighter person.
Without that, basketball would be dominated by the tallest people only, but that means there is no reason for anyone who isn’t tall to even play the game. Break it into height classes and suddenly you meet have a league of skilled, average height players that could be very compelling to watch.
Height classes for basketball actually sounds really cool. It’d be interesting to see the different strategies that come into play when people physically can’t reach the ring for example. Or at least I assume it would, I know nothing about basketball but it sounds like it’d be pretty interesting.
As the shortest person in most Basketball games during my childhood, I would have loved this so much! I enjoyed the game very much, but I always had to work twice as hard as my taller friends.
Height classes in basket ball. Hadn’t thought of that. I would suggest that it be optional though, so that people who don’t want to be excluded because of their height get to compete in the “common” league.
No. Why should we?
Yes. Why shouldn’t we?
Because I don’t see a reason to change. And changing would cost a lot of money and effort and impact. You’re the one proposing a change - why?
Ah, the typical “it’s always worked this way”. Well, there’s no need to elaborate then. Why ever change? Everything is perfect as it is.
You’ve expressed no reason to change, so yes, stay the same until there’s a reason to spend millions of dollars and upend established systems.
Why? It’s not like men and women are equal biologically.
Read my edit. Also, not every sport is about strength. Additionally, the are other ways to split than just by sex and gender.
I think all the money should be taken out of all sport and spent on things that benefit everybody, not just athletes and sports fans. People can play sport as a hobby, like children do. That would remove the gender conundrum.
