Interesting real life stats on boys/girls sports

[Ozgirl75]

My 8 year old son recently competed in a cross country event. This was for around 25 schools, each of whom did their own cross country at school and then sent the fastest 5 runners to compete in this event.
This is all primary, being age 8/9, 10, 11 and 12.
I received the results today. I would have assumed that because the 8/9 and even 10 year olds were well below puberty, that boys and girls were similar speed runners.
Well they weren’t at all.
My son came 54th in the boys, running 2k in 9minutes 24 seconds. In the girls race this would have put him in 7th place.
The fastest boy was 40 seconds faster than the fastest girl. And this is 8/9 year olds.
This is relevant as the top 15 runners go on to trial at another event where the fastest runners of that run for the state and then eventually, Australia (obviously the pool gets smaller and smaller!)
My interests firstly are, why? Why are Pre pubescent boys significantly faster runners than Pre pubescent girls? For example, my son isn’t really even a runner, he’s just an all rounder and plays lots of sport, but he would have finished one place behind a girl at his school who already runs for NSW (and obviously runs and trains pretty hard).
And secondly - wow. If this is the difference before puberty, what will the difference be like after? (Rhetorical question). It makes me see even more strongly before that sport should be segregated for the absolute protection of girls’ sports and scholarships.

My two boys are also quite different in a lot of ways, but even my older one who plays a LOT of tennis and is generally active, but not as much as his younger brother came above all but 3 girls in his year, and he’s 10, and some of the girls are already taller and edging into puberty.

This is also pertinent:

"Sophie" (actually Edward) is offered comfort toys and not...

@avacallanach
Forgot to say that I don't think it is incompatible with GC feminism to think there are also biological differences between the sexes that change our behaviour. We know that certain hormones released after birth lead to bonds being formed with babies for example. You can still consider yourself GC but recognize that we are all animals! However, most gender norms do not seem to have any biological basis - which we can see in the way they have changed over time and in different locations.

I guess this is the nature V nurture question. Isn't it always a bit of both? The middle road. It's clearly not a great idea to force gendered toys and roles on kids, but also harmful to hide anything not gender neutral or force traditionally opposite gender toy or activities where there is clearly no interest. We need to get away from expectations that one set of objects and activities is unacceptable or undesirable for one sex. That is where gender gets dismantled. Accepting that for individuals there is overlap.

The thing with physical strength and sporting prowess is, it's competitive, so it isn't the weaker, slower trans girls and women in the overlap who just want to participate. It is the actively sporty hardened trans athletes who want to win.

I mean, i guess there are only so many running events that they can do, at primary school, but in all distances the boys are faster than the girls.
Interestingly both my boys play tennis and are regularly beaten by girls of the same age. Definitely at this level there is more to it than physical ability (skill, training, mental strength).

I don't deny the massive influence of society of course not (none of mine were sexed in utero so no pre natal stereotyping). One of my boys is more cuddly than the others and he went everywhere with his baby doll as a toddler (though he is a teen now and still gentle but not at all "feminine"). My DD was still different. Hard to explain, but more tuned in.

As I say it makes sense to me on a societal and biological level that males and females as classes have different roles and that is fostered by our hormones etc in order to best facilitate survival of the species. This is echoed in other mammals. Again I am talking about a sex class level not an individual level. Do male penguins get treated differently as infants from female penguins, so as to adopt the particular roles they do in adulthood? Do female chimpanzee babies get called cute and pretty by other chimps, whereas the baby boy chimps are strong or handsome? I don't know. Yet they still develop dimorphic behaviour on average. I find it interesting.

I've always thought nature and nurture work together in all contexts.

Not sure why it has to be one or the other?

A child is born and then it's nurtured.

www.fionaoutdoors.co.uk/2019/07/women-leading-the-way-in-ultra-distance-running-races.html

I attended a single sex girls school and there were plenty of competetive sporty girls

It is interesting to note the uptake of girls doing maths, physics and other sciences is much higher in single sex schools too.

I went to an all girls school until I was 12. I was very much one of the sporty, science ones, and not interested in arts or humanities at all.

I moved to a mixed sex comp, and the difference was huge and obvious. Boys did maths, woodwork and pe, girls did home ec, typing, and art. I was the only girl in several classes.

Even now, my dd has just finished GCSE PE, where she was the only girl in her class. However she found she was much more able than nearly everyone, as her focus wasn’t just “football”, and as a national athlete she had a much better grasp of the science and thinking behind sport. Plus she was physically better than them in all of the conditioning tests - footballers aren’t so good at chin ups....

Yes swim club its very good for seeing boy/girl differences.

I read recently that pregnancy puts a woman's body into marathon mode with everything operating at peak demand, and of course it goes on for months at a time, usually while the individual holds down a full-time job or is toddler-wrangling, or both!

Yes I've read that!

It's supposed to be good to carry baby in slings and keep walking to maintain the fitness and strength.

It may surprise younger Mumsnetters that many of us now in our late 60s were convinced when younger that women could be physically as capable as men, as well as intellectually. I certainly did and for some years did a typically male and quite dangerous manual job that relied heavily on strength, dexterity and mechanical skills. However I soon realised that my strength and skill was nowhere near that if the men, though I was valued for my work ethic and commitment and never condescended to.
Even despite this, once I had children I was surprised by the very evident differences between my son and my daughter from a very early age, in everyday play and in sport (no sex stereotyping and many of the same sports). Now, they are both tall, strong, fit adults with the same basic body shape - son is 6’4” and daughter is 5’ 11” with corresponding relative strengths, for example, when swimming, DD is technically far better but DS is much faster.

I've read the stuff on the ultra runners. It was used on a running group I'm in to prove that tw should compete with women, as there's no difference. Ffs. Ultra running is nothing like the Olympics. I also thought the endurance thing was interesting too, because aren't women better at enduring pain for longer, but not short, sharp blows? That would fit with our bodies needing to withstand pregnancy and the years of aching that accompany small children and breastfeeding.

Overall stereotypes are more prevalent to their sexes but we should
Continue to support boys and girls who do not fit into their boxes. But what I now see is that we cannot keep pretending there are no significant physical differences that are obviously going to affect career choices and life choices. I.e. super elite regiments in the military, or becoming a mother. I don’t imagine many women make it through gruelling selection trials, and no XY has ever birthed a child from within themselves.

I will not tell my girls that they can do or be whatever they want if there is going to be physical limitations, or at least prepare them for a serious hard slog to make it in a physically demanding career.

About the ultrarunners, it's interesting but there was an article recently talking about the numbers - there are so few female ultrarunners that they are exceptional by definition. It IS intriguing though that in truly extreme endurance events women are less disadvantaged physically.

PermanentTemporary I would hazard a guess that there are so few women doing ultra running because 80% of us are mothers and have too many responsibilities to be able to devote the time to it. I’d be interested in giving it a go but I’d likely have to wait until I’m in my fifties before trying it.

Measuring individual boys against individual girls will always throw out anomalies. However, when comparing the best against the best ,then we see the difference between the sexes and by the time they are in secondary school, with the exception of a girl who will turn out to be a national record holder, there will be few, if any ,girls who can outrun, outjump, outthrow or lift heavier weights than her male peers.

Really interesting discussion. Like AvaCallanach, I also had children who's interests followed sex stereotypes despite my efforts for them not to be pigeon holed. It really surprised me how different they were from an early age, but of course acknowledge the societal influences they are exposed to from birth. I do believe it is a mixture of nature and nurture.
I think that while we need to continue to encourage girls to break down barriers, the physical differences need to be acknowledged. I got a real wake up call in my 20s. I took a year off to do some travelling and applied for a job in a warehouse as a forklift driver. I had a licence from a previous job, but I only used it occasionally. When I went for the interview it soon became clear I could never do the job which involved lifting heavy barrels on to a pallet and then moving the pallets with a forklift. While I could drive the forklift I couldn't come close to lifting the barrels, despite being fit and strong (for a woman). An average man could probably have lifted the barrel with ease. An exceptionally strong woman would have managed, but the fact that an average man is stronger than the vast majority of women is a fact that should not be hidden.

An exceptionally strong woman would have managed, but the fact that an average man is stronger than the vast majority of women is a fact that should not be hidden.
Agreed but that doesn't mean that women shouldn't be able to do that job. The problem is often due to sex bias from the outset. So, instead of saying "what size barrel could the average person shift?" they said "what size barrel could the average man shift?" which led to most women being excluded. This is so common - it even made the news recently when it came to light that Nasa didn't provide enough smaller sizes of spacesuits for its female astronauts. Not all physical differences can be remedied by design- but a lot can if we stop thinking of man as the default human.

I think something else that came up in the ultra runners was that men are more likely to take risks and therefore more likely to injure themselves early on. Presumably part of that is testosterone linked.

That's a very good point about the barrel size. However the experience was still eye opening. Up to that point I really believed I could do anything the boys could do, and had forged a career in a male dominated field. I suppose the physical differences need to be acknowledged first, before they can be catered for with design.
Perhaps I was particularly naive, but a lot of the narrative surrounding 'girls can do anything' glosses over the physical differences. The petite female superheroes beating the shite of men twice their size also feeds in to this.

I must admit I had never interpreted "girls can do anything " as meaning we were physically as strong! Maybe having a younger brother who was obviously stronger than me had something to do with that!

I had an older brother so not clueless. I played football with the boys through my teenage years and saw the physical gap widening. I knew boys were stronger on average, but I suppose didn't grasp how big that gulf was.

I’m bowled over by lung capacity chart. That says it all for me.
I feel really conned by the rhetoric of ‘no difference til puberty’ which has been around in recent years. Thanks for this thread.
Some of you have really interesting stories. I’d love to hear more from those of you who have determinedly forged ahead in physically demanding careers and found out the hard way.

Even in the first year of secondary school the tallest students will be boys. On average the girls might be taller than some of the boys but by years end that will have changed.
In my own children's primary school final year there were several boys all taller than any of the girls.