Stats on why we have women and men sports?

[InaConfusedState]

I came across the story of Fallon Fox shattering Tamikka Brents eye socket a while ago. It’s so patently obvious that a woman is at serious disadvantage fighting a person with a male skeleton, muscle structure and build, I really couldn’t see why Fox wanted to compete against a woman let alone be allowed to do it. It led me to here and reading fascinating (and diverse) views.

After talking to someone about this case, it got me thinking about why we have women’s sports in the first place. I always thought it was because women are structurally different to men and therefore unable to compete against them on a level playing field. But if men are now able up compete against women, is this not true?

I wondered if anyone has links to evidence and stats that show why women have their own sports.

For example, what does going through puberty as a teenager do for male strength, muscles, etc compared to a female?

What advantage does testosterone confer?

What are the typical levels of testosterone in make and female sportspeople?

If a man competes as a woman, does he have to artificially bring his testosterone levels down (and if so is it to the same level as a woman?). Does the fact he’s been through puberty give him any advantage regardless of whatever testosterone level he now has?

What else - hormones, physical build - do men have as an advantage over woman that makes them faster/stronger?

I’m really interested in these physical aspects as it’s what got me (and several friends) questioning what it means for women if a man can become a woman.

I agree that there are a few sports where some women will probably be able to beat men, but the numbers are vanishingly small.

Any schoolgirl soccer/rugby/basketball team will be hugely affected by the presence of boys. I've coached mixed mini-football and seen how the boys don't pass to the girls; the only way to get proper competition is to have girl only teams.

If any boy in a school can now self-declare himself a girl, and compete with and against the girls, and this becomes the "norm", it's going to have a hugely negative affect on girls' participation, even before we get to the fairness of international sport.

Girls' scholarships and sporting events in the US are being affected by this, and other countries seem to be happy to follow. See athletics - his time would have placed him last in the boys' race

Conversely my "boy wins girls event" google brought up this wrestling article - here a girl who is taking testosterone to become a boy is still competing and winning against girls [baffled]

Why do women and men compete separately?

In most sports, it's simply to give something of a level playing field.

It's the same as the separation by age ("masters" competitions in things like football and athletics are for 35+ year olds, as well as the younger Under 11 / Under 13 / Under 15 type competitions). Or disability (all the various categories and sub-categories in the Paralympics). Or weight (judo, boxing etc).

To all the people who snipe "well, why not have different competitions based on height then?", I suspect that if the talent pool was big enough to sustain different height competitions AND the evidence base that it makes a big difference was robust enough, then we might start seeing - in something like rowing - height based classifications. Meanwhile, classifications based on sex and (for younger competitors) age act as a proxy for physical development.

Why not competitions based on race? Apart from the historical connotations of various segregationist regimes, how would a competitor "prove" which classification they should compete in? What would be tested? How many different classifications would we need, taking into account the myriad genetic combinations most of us have? It's patently ridiculous to anyone who has given it even five minutes serious thought, rather than using it as a snippy retort to women who see their chances of ever winning slipping away

Men have larger and more dense bones even in if you match them in height and weight.
Once they’ve gone through puberty they have those dense bones. Hormones don’t reduce that.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/15746999/

As Maryz says, The testosterone level is the only thing taken into consideration - male muscles, heart, lungs, skeleton, size, weight, all are complete ignored if an individual can manage to have a (relatively) low testosterone level.

Why is only the testosterone level taken into consideration? Are the powers that be (who are they?) monitoring performance of women vs men and have they got any plans in place to reconsider if results are skewed towards men? Do they care or not?

I understand mummy’s point about the demarcation between male and female meaning there is still a spectrum of T levels, strengths within each catergory.

The inclusion of men based on T lines blurs the lines and demarcation point for women’s sport even further. So women have to be like men, or actually men, to be a top athlete and we end up with two categories - ‘traditional/typical man’ and ‘anyone who is not a traditional/typical man’.

As why says, there may be sports where actually women do have a competitive advantage. But they aren’t the sports that people watch, talk about, have a buzz around them, and energise girls into getting involved.

What can be done about all this? Have there been any formal challenges to the inclusion of men in any particular sports?

‘Olenna’ I have heard people say why not categorise by race, but then not being able to define what they mean by that. How can you define me as one race if I have a mix of Indian, English, Gaelic blood in me? It harks back to the terrible ‘one drop’ theory of slave America.

Whereas sex is either/or, with some small cases of intersex where lines are blurred.

Where those lines are not blurred - ie you are either a man or a woman - why should it be possible that someone born as a man (not intersex) gets to switch to being a “woman” in order to compete against an actual woman, knowing the actual
man will always have an advantage? How is it different to doping? I just don’t understand the logical twists you’d have to go through to think it’s acceptable for men to become women for sports competitions (excepting intersex cases).

Trans Men who take bunches of testosterone can't even achieve the muscle mass of trans women who suppress testosterone and are on estrogen, theres no way a normal woman can compete.

bjsm.bmj.com/content/39/10/695
"It should be noted, however, that even after one year of treatment, the male to female mean muscle area remained significantly greater than that observed in the female to male comparison group. Furthermore, measurements obtained at three years were not appreciably different from those at one year."

HairyBallTheorem, MaidofStars, et al.--this info is great, would be perfect for fairplayforwomen.com/sport/
which is currently blank.

Sport really helps people see why sex matters rather than "gender identity", especially for persuading men.

There's a reason why more jockeys are men, its because their bodies are better suited to the sport. They find it easier to keep their weight low without affecting their strength.
Also, mens muscles use and retain oxygen differently to womens.
Its why more men can swim a length of the pool underwater than women, and why more deep sea divers are men.

www.physoc.org/press-release/2015/oxygen-uptake-respiratory-muscles-differs-between-men-and-women-during-exercise

Motorsports has a pretty physical element to it, but weight plays a good part too.
I don't see why women can't compete equally in it though.

Right now, there may well be disparity between male and female ability at the top of the sport, but that (imo) is more likely a result of years of better training / facilities for the men and sheer weight of numbers participating. If 1000 men drive and only 100 women do, then the chances are that the fastest driver will be male - nothing to do with their sex.

Also, even if a girl were identified as the fastest driver, there are plenty of other discrimination hurdles along the road that might see her fall by the wayside to allow a male to make it to the top (or at least professional status).

Although Lewis Hamilton didn't have all the privileges that some other drivers have, I doubt he'd had made it to his current position if he were female, even with the same talent. Still too many obstacles.

OP this article might be relevant:

sportsscientists.com/2017/07/testosterone-performance-intersex-athletes-will-iaaf-evidence-enough/

Outside of formula 1 there are women drivers, pretty succesful ones, too.
Especially in America in NASCAR e.g. Danica Patrick and Germany in DTM e.g. Susie Wolff. And at lower levels.
More female drivers and less barriers and I think they'd be level with the men. (Most male drivers never win a race).

www.alltime-athletics.com/m_100ok.htm
www.alltime-athletics.com/w_100ok.htm

I was just looking at the links above, OP.
There are literally THOUSANDS of men who have been faster than the fastest ever woman.

When even ONE biological male enters a women's event, I wonder what proportion of the time they end up on the podium taking one of only three available medals.

I presume it's sexism that has different men's and women's competitions for things like darts and snooker? Curling and some types of bowling are mixed teams, even at Olympic level.

Here's something to chew on: my son plays football in an U13 team. In his league, girls can play on a mixed team or an all girls team but because the league is so small, they also play against the all boys teams. Girls can play in teams up to two years below their birth age - ie girls who would otherwise be in an U15 team can play in an U13 team. Because 15 year old girls might be bigger than 13 year old boys, but even at that age the boys are as strong and fast as girls two years older...

I think it's great that football is attempting to do something with girls in the sport, and removing the barriers (many still remain).
Trying to compensate with the age differences vs physicality might not be perfect, but it's a decent attempt at things. I'm all for it.

Once the girls become women, and the boys become men though, it's nigh on impossible to equalise (see what I did there?) the differences. I don't have any answer for that.

Snooker / darts etc I've no clue why men and women can't be equal in that, but I suspect the historical cultures of these sports doesn't help.

As TheBrilliantMistake points out we should also take into consideration male upbringing, society's expectations of boys vs girls in sport when children as well as traditional supports (including financial) and encouragement for boys.

Watching young girls and boys play team sports separately is interesting. The girls (generally) are encouraging each other, apologising for hurting the opposition, feeling guilty if they are winning by too much and are watched by parents who are enjoying watching them play. The boys, on the other hand, are pushed to win, they are yelled at aggressively by many parents and coaches, they are encouraged to beat the other team by as high a score as possible, they are belittled if they are "nice" to the other team.

Obviously there are exceptions, but I think that the boys come out with a competitive edge - apart from the many who really don't enjoy being yelled at and beaten, or who aren't deemed good enough and who give up, but that's another story.

There have been massive advances in girls' sports in the last 20/30 years or so. It will be sad to see all those go out the window as the very best women are beaten my mediocre men

I presume it's sexism that has different men's and women's competitions for things like darts and snooker?
Both are ‘open’, meaning females can compete in all competitions. That there are female-only competitions is recognition that females are not good enough to win the open competitions.

IIRC the limit of 10nmol/litre is 5 standard deviations above the mean for the female distribution
The thing that’s never been clear to me about this fact (not doubting veracity, BTW) is whether the female distribution is ‘female on street’ or ‘female athlete’. One might reasonably speculate that the distribution of T amongst female athletes is higher than your average female (because it will have been selected for in the athletic cohort).

The value appears to be for total testosterone. This website gives the detailed normal ranges for testosterone in ng/dL units. This website gives the conversion factors from nmol/L to ng/dL among other units.

10 nmol/L gives a value of 288.42 ng/dL. This is in the normal range for all males from the age of 12 years (except for 17-18 years, which seems odd) assuming this is total testosterone.

The maximum value for the normal range of testosterone for females is 60 ng/dL. This is less than a quarter of that value, even though 288.42 ng/dL is at the very low end of the male testosterone values (although still in normal range all but one of the age bands).

The standard deviations for the values are not shown. But any female with that level of testosterone has clearly abnormal blood biochemistry.

Good question, Maid

The study I was thinking of was of 2000 female olympic athletes (some with PCOS, who typically came out about 2.5nmol/litre, with women without PCOS coming out at about 1.5). Was resting levels, I think (testosterone spikes after vigorous exercise in both sexes, which is sometimes used to deliberately muddy the waters in a "look, these immediately post-race levels in natal women are close to the 10nmol/litre level").

I don't know about the general population - though Iwear's website seems to be for the population at large rather than athletes specifically.

This 2014 study suggests that elite female athletes have slightly lower-than-normal testosterone levels.

There is also evidence that endurance/strenuous exercise lowers testosterone in males, with other types of exercise increasing testosterone ( www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6429357?dopt=Abstract , www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7400007?dopt=Abstract , www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3343919?dopt=Abstract , www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/6500790?dopt=Abstract ).

This suggests that the effects of non-endurance sports increases the difference between female and male testosterone levels.

On the darts question I wonder if it's because the harder you can throw the dart the more accurate it's trajectory? (I am extrapolating from archery.)

I think darts and snooker are mostly socialisation sports. Get women on a shooting range and they golden.

Snooker tables and snooker balls are massive though - reach also makes a difference, men are at a clear advantage being bigger, and being able to hit the ball harder, and yes Waddle, it seems to me that accuracy can only be improved by speed, and also that if you're throwing at the middle of your strength range, you'll likely be more accurate than if you're having to put everything into it.

Plus of course, as everyone says, socialisation. I've been in a snooker hall, and it was intimidating.