How We Get To Next

JUL
29
2016

Is Gender Segregation in Sports

Necessary?
Posted by How We Got To Now Admin on Jul 29, 2016 at 11:24 am

William Warby // CC BY 2.0

By Alice Sanders
(Originally published on How We Get to Next)
“In contests involving strength, speed and reactive
ability, women are nowhere near as good as men.” —  
Rod Liddle, writing in The Spectator, 2012

“So, Kuper baited me: ‘The top women can’t take on

the top men’. He continued by making assertions like:
women are slower than men; women are weaker than
men.”— Jennifer Doyle (speaking with sports writer
Simon Kuper), reported on her
blog TheSportSpectacle, 2014

This is the most common argument against gender

integration in sports; integrated sports teams shouldn’t
exist because men are stronger than women.

But is that actually true? And even if it is true, does it

mean that a woman shouldn’t play on the same team as
a man?

We accept, and expect, gender integration almost

everywhere else — at work, in social spaces, and we’re
even coming around to the idea of non-gender specific
bathrooms. Yet sports remain segregated, and it’s worth
examining what the social cost of that separation is.

But first, the science. A 2010 study in The Journal of

Sports Science and Medicine, which examined the year-
by-year improvement in world records and top 10
performances across 82 different sports since 1896
(the beginning of the modern Olympic era), found that
women are not as fast, nor as strong, as men. Genetic
and hormonal factors between men and women affect
“height, weight, body fat, muscle mass, aerobic
capacity or anaerobic threshold,” the authors note.

The data that they collected and examined showed that,

on average, men outperform women by a 10 percent
gap. That’s an average, so the differences can be more
or less pronounced depending on the sport — the lowest
differences are in 800-meter freestyle swimming, for
example (5.5 percent), and the highest in weightlifting
(36.8 percent). Women typically do best relative to men
in events based around aerobic stamina, like long-
distance running. Andy Lane, a sports psychologist at
the University of Wolverhampton, confirmed this to me
when I spoke with him. “There are physical differences
between males and females, typically around
strength,” he explained.

That general point obscures a more interesting one,

though, in that the historical data shows that, for a
while, women seemed to be catching up. Over the last
century, women’s times have improved more than
men’s. This is mainly because women have increasingly
had more access to the things that athletes need to
better themselves — like more invitations to
major events, and better equipment, training, and
coaching. Social politics has influenced sports
performances, going right back to when women
were enfranchised in the early 20th century, through
periods of increasing personal freedom and income that
have made it more and more possible for women to
become professional athletes.

That said, the data also shows that this constant

progress slowed in more recent decades — from 1983
onwards, the gender gap stabilized, and women’s
records started to consistently come to roughly 90
percent of the men’s records. The best men and the
best women have been getting better at the same rate
ever since.

Could that change? Could women start catching up with

men again? After all, people used to say women were
unable to handle political office. Even the slowest-
converging lines eventually do merge; the truth is
nobody knows for sure if that’s the case here. The
history of women in sports is a history of being gradually
allowed access to social privileges which have made
them better athletes, and there could yet be
undiscovered factors at play that could make the gap
smaller.

Here’s how the gender gap might start closing again, if

it’s ever going to.

For a start, history tells us that improvements in sports

science and technology are more likely to close the gap,
not widen it. Right now, top-level training is becoming
more and more specific, for example — not just to the
sport, not just to the general gender of an athlete, but
tailored to each individual person.

Lane said: “Effective training is specific. There is a great

deal of individual difference and so gender is of less
importance. An individualized training program is the
most effective and, as such, gender differences will
blur.”

David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, makes a

similar point — he argues that, as more and more has
been discovered about the human genome, training
programs can be tailored to specific types of genes
related to athletic ability. “We’re finding genes that make
some people more trainable to particular training
programs than others,” he writes. “Not only genes, but
actually direct physiology — whether it’s properties of
muscle fibers or things like that — that can help you
figure out what the best training plan is for an
individual.”

Of course, these advances are going to aid all genders

in terms of better training. But almost all major sports — 
particularly team sports like football, basketball,
baseball, and soccer — have been historically dominated
by men, and I warrant that tailored training is much more
likely to help women. Scientific studies in general focus
more on men as subjects instead of women, and this
includes medicine, health, and sports science. Much
sports research and training was specifically designed
with men in mind — women should have more to gain
from training specificity.

The second big advancement in the next few decades,

particularly in team sports, will be augmentation — that
is, using technology to physically alter and improve the
human body. This is going to take many forms, and will
be controversial, but some degree of it is inevitable — as
will be the changes of our current ideas of what sports
are.

We’re going to start seeing new ways for athletes to be

fed information while they’re on the field or the track—
think Google Glass-style data displays in contact lenses
or goggles, or discreet earpieces,
broadcasting everything from play formations to
projections about where a ball will land. Even bio-
augmentation might end up permitted, where athletes
can physically upgrade their bodies, from better limbs to
better brains for tactical decisions. (Doping, arguably, is
already a crude form of this.) Gene editing may produce
humans with every gene for athletic
performance emphasized. Many of the newest sports — 
like e-sports — don’t require any physicality at all, where
mental strength is most important.

In this world, differences in gender end up a minor

irrelevance compared to all of the other factors which
will determine sporting prowess.

“When girls like football, I think it’s OK. But I think that
the level of women’s football is too low to take it
seriously.” — Andrey Arshavin, professional soccer
player

“Women should be in the discotheque, the boutique,

and the kitchen, but not in football.” — Ron Atkinson,
former soccer player and manager

This all assumes something else, of course — that

physical attributes are the most important thing when it
comes to sports. Yet for team sports, that’s just not true.

It’s certainly not just strength and speed that make a

good player, and it doesn’t necessarily follow that team
sports should be segregated, even now, because of
those specific attributes. There are variations of speed
and strength among male players in all team sports;
there are positions where strength is much less
important; and others where speed is not so integral. If it
was all about physicality, then players would be judged
and recruited around edge case statistics like the
fractions of seconds to reaching a ball — in reality, those
are just one of myriad such stats that coaches look at.

Sure, it helps if you can make it to that ball quicker, but

other skills are equally if not more important. In soccer,
say, controlling the ball, tactical understanding, off-the-
ball movement, teamwork, and cooperation — these are
all vital parts of the game. What’s more, women are
already good, yet underrated, at endurance and stamina
in events that last longer than two hours, the one area
where there is evidence that they actually are able
to outperform men — thanks to smaller bodies radiating
heat more efficiently, and more efficient conversion of
body fat into energy.

It’s funny, isn’t it, that even though women have some
advantageous biology, and are stereotypically thought of
as being better than men in the key skills for team
sports — think cooperation, multi-tasking — you’ll
never hear, “the thing is men just aren’t as good at
soccer, they can’t play as part of a team like women
can.”

Social politics have hugely affected women’s sporting

performance over the last century — but what if sports
could affect change in social politics?

All-male sports teams exist largely within a system run

by men who went through the system themselves — men
who end up as coaches, officials, and members of
boards. It’s a system that teaches men that a version
of masculinity, that is both toxic and hierarchical, is
among the most important traits to have. Eric Anderson,
professor of sports, masculinities, and sexualities at the
University of Winchester, defines this as
“orthodox masculinity” in a 2008 study. He argues that
it’s responsible for men’s team sports cultivating a
culture of misogynistic and homophobic attitudes.

“It is a resilient system that reproduces a more

conservative form of gender expression among men,
helping make sport a more powerful gender regime,” he
explains. Ultimately, an athlete’s own choices matter
less and less, as they’re encouraged to see everyone
else through the lens of orthodox masculinity. More
often than not, men who play to a high level in an all-
male sports team also socialize mainly with their
teammates, meaning that the bonds they form with
people outside of that sporting universe — and especially
women — are colored by the masculinity they have to live
every day.

This means there is a higher chance of men having

negative attitudes about women — objectifying them, for
example. Anderson explains: “Male athletes (in general)
and team sport athletes (in particular) have been shown
to objectify women — often viewing them as sexual
objects to be conquered.” The statistics on campus
rape in America are pretty terrifying; a three-year study
by researchers Jeff Benedict and Todd Crosset in the
mid-1990s showed that while male student-athletes
comprise 3.3 percent of student populations in the
United States., they made up 19 percent of sexual
assault perpetrators and 35 percent of domestic
violence perpetrators.

Integrating team sports could do a significant amount to

change this. In his study, Anderson followed
heterosexual male university cheerleaders, who had all
previously played high school football. Before they
started cheerleading almost all of them reported that
they viewed the world through the prism of orthodox
masculinity — they held misogynistic views, both about
women as athletes, and also in a more general sense.

Overwhelmingly, the men who participated in sports

with women had their minds changed. They perceived
women as good athletes; strong, capable and skillful.
David, one participant in Anderson’s study, said: “I used
to think women were weak, but now I know that’s not
true. I never thought women were so athletic before. I
hated women’s sports. But these women are athletes.
They do stuff I’d never be able to do and I bet there are
a lot of sports women can do better in.”

Jeremy
@Des4gr8ness

Keep them ALL away from football

twitter.com/b_therealest/s…

BernieNotNice @B_TheRealest
You hate women smh RT @Des4gr8ness:
NFL female coach? Smh

10:56 AM - Jul 28, 2015

See Jeremy's other Tweets

Dr. Jen Welter @jwel… · Jul 27, 2015

Thank you @AZCardinals & @BruceArians
& everyone here in #Phoenix. I am honored
to join this amazing #footballfamily

Cody
@CKujawa22

@jwelter47 @AZCardinals @BruceArians

wtf are you guys doin?? females don't
belong on an NFL coach staff or football
field for that matter...
1 7:01 PM - Jul 27, 2015

See Cody's other Tweets

Two tweets in response to news that Jen Welter had

been appointed a coach for the Arizona Cardinals in July
2015, making her the NFL’s first woman coach.

It didn’t stop there. “All but a handful reported that they

had learned to see women as more than sex objects,”
Anderson explains. “All the athletes reported having
learned to respect and value women as friends,
teammates, and competent leaders. Thus in the sex-
integrated sport of collegiate cheerleading, once sexist
and misogynistic men were able to witness
the athleticism of women, befriend them in ways that
they were previously unable to, and to learn of their
gendered narratives, it humanized them in the process.”

Segregation in sports, it turns out, is harmful to gender

relations and society. We worry that women might twist
an ankle or break a leg if they were to play mixed sports,
when in fact, the consequences of segregation
are much, much more costly to women.

I hope that one day Marta will play on the same team
as Messi; that gender segregation in team sports will
end, and humanity will be better for it.

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