Mixed gender race at sports day

[littlegreydevil]

Hi, long time lurker but first post and I’m aware I am stepping in with a particularly hot topic but here goes…
Our primary school organised its annual sports day this week and for unknown reasons, decided to mix boys and girls for the sprints. Teams are usually mixed genders for the less competitive activities like the sack race, egg and spoon race, etc. but this is the first time they’ve mixed genders for the competitive races. Of course this has resulted in only 2 girls making the podium across all the year groups and both “only” hitting third place.
I’m really bothered by this as I thought sports day was about celebrating sporting achievements and encouraging kids to enjoy sports (I know this can be disputed but that’s a whole other debate) and today, I have watched a ream of very sporty, very talented female runners lose to their male counterparts and I can’t see how that fits in the ethos of sports day.
I am planning to speak to the head to question their motives in making this odd decision.
imo sport is gendered for a reason and it should be about equity rather than equality. You might be able to argue that younger age groups could be mixed as supposedly their physical ability is the same up to age 7 or 8 (need to find the references for this) but from year 2 onwards, it doesn’t work anymore. Girls start going through puberty from as young as 9 so by that point, it should be gendered.
For full transparency, I have 2 children, a boy and a girl, neither of which is talented in athletics (they are very good in other sports) and usually come in at a solid bottom 3rd place so this is not about my kids being slighted.
If you were me, what questions would you ask from the head and, seeing as they have a track record of being quite obstinate, what arguments would you produce?

Always been mixed at primary school with no problem.

My primary school but my tiny like 6th percentile dd against all boys in her sprint. It was just assigned randomly. She won convincingly 😄
I was very proud.

Is it fun for girls to get the message that they can't win any of the events?

I'm sure I read a while back that older studies that showed that boys have no sporting advantage over girls were misleading because for logistical reasons they looked at 10 and 11 year olds at a time (a few decades ago) when most of the boys would not be entering puberty, but some of the girls would, and were therefore getting stronger and taller.

Studies which have looked at younger children have found that even before puberty boys have greater speed and strength, which is not that surprising, as they are exposed to high levels of testosterone in the womb.

I find it odd that some people are so resistant to accepting that boys and men are physically stronger than girls and women. It's a fact. Women's bodies are incredible and can do amazing things, e.g. ovulation, pregnancy, lactation. Female bodies are far more complicated than male bodies. It just happens (because men invented sports, I suspect) that when it comes to the kind of physical activity required in sport that male bodies have a huge advantage. After puberty males have bigger hearts, lungs, hands and feet in relation to the size of the body, their muscles are bigger and have more fast twitch fibres, and they have a big advantage in having narrower hips and having the femur join the pelvis at something more like a right angle. Some of that must apply even before puberty.

It's not no problem if it's disadvantageous to girls in sport.

OP, I wish you luck. You have some links there upthread that I posted to support your meeting.

I would ask, 'why would they wish to discourage girls from athletics knowing that boys from the age of 6 will have advantages and that the school run sprints so they must be aware of the benefits of sports for all children.'

And I would ask what message is the school trying to send to the girls by not allowing them to compete fairly.

Girls placing third in a few events is unfair. The studies now show that the physical advantages start at 6 years old or before.

They are NOT physically equal. I have posted the studies upthread if you are at all interested.

We never had single sexed races at my primary and this was 20+ years ago.

They could easily do a boys race, girls race and mixed sec race but then what about girls who are shorter or unfit or have medical issues.
We could go on forever splitting them into groups.

Females tend to have stronger leg muscles than males but males have stronger arm muscles so I think it’s unfair that a running race would be single sexed but something like javelin would be mixed sex.

It needs to be all activities mixed or all single or both.
Not just certain activities that are single sexed.

girls did better at skipping and the boys did better at scoring goals.

At my dc's school, girls don't even get skipping because kickboxing is a popular extra curricular for the boys and skipping features heavily in training. They skip and do press ups as "homework" as well as during their class so dc1 can often be found in the garden skipping.

I put yabu but my primary school only goes up to yr4 and then they go on to middle school and I think it’s fine up to yr4 but agree once you get past that it’s not fair.

Our school doesn’t do individual races though. All races consist of 4 teams of 8 boys and girls running a leg each so effectively each race, whatever it is, is like a relay. So nobody is really directly racing each other and all the teams are mixed.

We all know why they've done it. I'd ask them what they hoped to achieve, what lessons it sent the girls who competed, and whether they feel that was a mistake.

And boys have faster twitch muscles in their legs and many other physical advantages.

The 'difference between girls who are 'shorter' or 'unfit'' is not what sprinting races are for. They are for girls to compete with girls. Some girls who are shorter have a much better chance of winning against a taller girl than they may have against boys on average.

How to show you don't understand human biology - females absolutely do not have stronger leg muscles. Where on earth did you pick that up from? Have you not see what happens when we let males compete in women's running?

Women's sports were invented because women have different physiques to men, and cannot compete with men in any area except agility and suppleness. The face that some women are faster or strong than other women does not negate the basis of women's sports, just as we also have age categories in children's sports, despite children growing and developing at different rates. FFS.

And the way your school has structured it sounds like a better alternative. Mixed relays are great.

Infants mixed and juniors single sex.

This is interesting as I'd always assumed the male advantage started as they hit puberty in secondary school. No clear evidence of advantage in recent year 2 event I attended, it was the taller girls who tended to win all the races (as did I as a tall pre-teen). But they didn't have medals or a podium (just stickers) which was a good thing I think.

Male advantage of a similar magnitude was detected in a study of Greek children, where, compared with 6-year-old females, 6-year-old males completed 16.6% more shuttle runs in a given time and could jump 9.7% further from a standing position. In terms of aerobic capacity, 6- to 7-year-old males have been shown to have a higher absolute and relative (to body mass) O2max than 6- to 7-year-old females .

From the Greek study. It is even more pronounced from age 9 as The Australian study corroborates.

All the girls in my DD's year 2 class are taller than the boys. I think it depends on the class whether the boys are taller. I can see as they get older boys would have an advantage but I have not seen this in my DD's primary school where all the events are mixed. My DD can 4th and wasn't bothered at all. She literally forgot about by the evening. There is no podium but stickers are given if you come in the top 5 of an event. Some kids didn't participate at all and instead just enjoyed having a picnic and watching the fun.

Females tend to have stronger lower bodies and males have stronger upper bodies.

Which is why many fitness tests in things like the marines and navy are slightly different depending on each sex e.g. a male would cross a suspended pole using their hands/arms whilst a female wraps her legs around him.

Obviously that’s just in general but I don’t think it’s fair to have single sexed running races which many girls have an equal chance in and not have single sexed races in something that uses the upper body which most females have a lot lower chance in.

I remember at primary school, aged 9 or 10, our mixed class were made to play boys against girls, and the boys won every time but one. We used to get changed afterwards in the same room, and the boys always took the piss out of the girls. The one time the girls won, there was silence. I think there were allegations of cheating (possibly true).

Why the (male) teacher thought this was a good idea, I don't know.

Do you mean women have stronger lower bodies compared to women’s upper bodies? You don’t mean women have stronger lower bodies than men surely?

That's what I was thinking.

If you have a class of 30 kids then out of 15 boys/ 15 girls you might not even have enough that want to run the race.

That would probably be due to pelvic alignment and balance. The Q angles will influence that ability substantially.

I think you seem to be misinformed that women have 'stronger lower bodies'. You have also seemed to miss the different muscle types such as fast twitch muscles that male people have more of vs the slow twitch muscles that women and girls have.

And from the age of 6, boys can use their legs to jump further and higher than girls.

Haven't primary school sports day always been mixed genders? They were in my day, in my parents day and my son's school now do the same thing

Nope. My school sports in the 60s to 70s were always single sex events.

You keep your fingers crossed that it doesn't arise! (None of the non-binary kids I know would be likely contenders.)

If you've done any practice in PE lessons you probably know whether it might be an issue, and be ready to award a mix of overall position and "top girl" as seems most appropriate.

I work in an i can't school, so up to age 7(year 2) and it's always been mixed sex races here. The girls are just as competitive as the boys here and the boys definitely don't dominate the winners of each race.