Obviously this won’t work for all sports, but things like football, track, soccer, it would allow for de-gendered team, even allowing athletes with the skills but not the genetically-endowed physical attributes to have a place to play.
Note: I know very little about sports and being on a sports team, so please point out anything that doesn’t make sense.
I say fuck it and let everyone compete together. Ain’t no reason men and women couldn’t compete with each other in baseball, basketball, hockey, tennis, golf, etc. Even if you believed men are capable of being bigger and supporting more muscle, there’s tons of sports where that isn’t going to be the most useful thing to win.
How would you know this gender or that gender is better anyway unless you actually let everyone compete together, regardless of what’s in their pants or their heart?
Male sports typically don’t have a gender requirement. Women just can’t compete. This is why women’s leagues were created. So they can compete with people around similar physical potential.
Look at chess for example. Anyone can compete in the world open, but you’ll see 98~99% men. So, they make a woman’s league.
Women have the option of playing in both. This is the same for most sports.
Notably Judit Polgár, probably the strongest female chess player, never competed for the Women’s World Championship and only rarely played in women-specific events.
Using chess as an example after saying women wouldn’t be able to compete makes it seem like you believe men and women aren’t even on even ground with intelligence and that’s absolute fucking bullshit.
Men and women are the same intelligence on average. There are more men at the extremes of the distribution curve for certain attributes, though. And when you are talking about chess players, you are taking a sample of the ends of the distribution curve.
There’s also evidence that chess ability and visiospatial cognitive ability are positively correlated with chess ability. Men tend to perform better than woman on average. (Stuff like rotating imaginary 3d shapes for example)
This may be partially why we only see 42 out of 2500 worldwide grandmasters being women. Men may only perform 2.5~4% better, but when you’re talking about the extremes (best chess players in world) that small % means a lot.
Tldr: It’s not because they aren’t on equal intelligence. Women for example score better on verbal cognition tests.
And on average men and women have the same IQ
Is any of this true? Or is it just post-hoc, evo-psych bullshit taken from the era of scientific racism to justify the results men see after gatekeeping their very special hobby.
Every claim I’ve made can be double checked by going on Google scholar or libgen. You’ll find multiple studies and recent studies.
And the ones I’ve made can be double-checked by taking a sociology class.
If I am to be charitable, I think you’re just glazing over the elephant in the room. When a little girl is told “they’re not as able,” they’re not as likely to continue. If only 13% of players are women at all, then yeah, duh, they won’t be represented in the grandmasters.
Women make up roughly 15% of USCF members yet they only make up roughly 1.5% of grandmasters.
That means they are underrepresented by about an order of magnitude. Women on average are about 200 ELO lower than men. It’s a very large difference and there has been research done to figure out why.
There are no real conclusive findings (as with much of this type of sociological research) but we have evidence for various different reasons. One, women are not encouraged to play chess at the same level that men are. Similar reason that more men go into Computer Science or Physics. It’s not a built in biological difference, but a cultural one.
Another one is that women are younger by 11 years on average, so their ratings haven’t peaked yet. So we should see this gap close in the coming decades. There are also various other inequities between men and women (like for example stereotype threat).
So that explains at least some of the gap. What I’m trying to say is that beyond these factors, there is also a biological difference that results in men being overrepresented in the top chess players. Notice I’m not saying average chess players, but specifically the best in the world (the grandmasters).
Why?
Well, there’s evidence for something called the "greater male variability hypothesis”. Think of every person sitting somewhere on a normal distribution. Pick a trait like aggressiveness or competitiveness.
There are the extremes on both sides of the bell curve. On the left, super passive and on the right super aggressive. Most people clump at the mean, in the center of the bell curve.
There’s evidence that more women cluster around the mean relative to men. Men are overrepresented at the extremes of the bell curve, even though the average is the same as women. Only by a little bit, but it’s statistically significant. That means that if you took a sample of all the super-aggressive and super-passive people, the majority would be men.
When you look at top chess players, they are more likely to have extreme attributes (being ultra-competitive for example helps you get better at chess).
This same effect is also theorized to be why we see that vast majority of prisoners are male. Vast majority of homeless, etc. Because extreme attributes tend to either be really good or really bad.
So that’s one biological difference. The other is the visospatial intelligence. Men tend to score better on visospatial tests when compared to women. This effect is already visible by 2 or 3 months of age, so it’s unlikely to be some sort of cultural effect.
Visiospatial cognitive ability is positively correlated with chess ability. Another biological difference between men and women that likely has some non-zero effect on chess ability.
So why are women underrepresented in grandmasters when compared to males? There is evidence for both
a) external social factors
and
b) innate biological factors
Nobody knows what % of the difference is due to a) or b). We just know there is some non-zero effect for both.
I encourage you to fact check every claim I’ve made. Don’t just look for one research paper that confirms your argument. Each claim I’ve made I’ve seen multiple studies on. There are studies that will say the opposite, but look at it in aggregate. Look at metaanalysis studies.
Ever left your computer and went out to play some sports?
I am a bit surprised that so many pro trans people seem to pick up the bait of the right and make these over the top suggestions like abolishing womens sports. Certainly proposing stuff like this will help the trans cause a lot and not make them look crazy at all.
I have played sports my whole life. Mostly in mixed gender leagues.
I am a bit surprised to see so much sexism in this thread from people who seriously think men and women can not compete at the same level in things where physical strength isn’t the be all end all of the sport.
Like basketball, tennis and hockey, right.
We’re not talking hobbyists. We’re talking top level athletes. Men aren’t just stronger. There are dozens if not hundreds of items they outperform women on.
The sports where women can actually compete with men are rare. For example marksmanship or long-distance marathon. Virtually every sport men have distinct and significant advantages.
Men have larger hearts, more lung volume per body mass, more red blood cells, more clotting factors which means they recover quicker and have a higher pain tolerance.
Testosterone allows for more rapid muscle gain as well as better recovery. So two people training the same exercises an identical amount of time, the man would have gained significantly more muscle mass and strength.
Men have higher blood pressure, which means they feel fatigue less than women. Men don’t lose iron to menstruation, which means there’s more iron for oxygen circulation in the blood.
These items basically make it so men are much better at almost all sports.
For example soccer. The US Women’s national team lost to a team of high school age boys.
Men can kick harder, sprint faster, run longer, train longer & they gain more from training & they recover faster from training so they can do it more, they feel less pain so they can stay at max exertion longer, they can convert oxygen into energy faster so they can sustain all of this more than women,
Etc
There’s a reason we have women’s leagues. If we didn’t have it, women wouldn’t get to compete at a high level.
At a lower level, like hobbyist or local leagues the story may be different. There’s more variance among the general population than amongst top athletes.
Serena Williams, #1 woman tennis player, can’t hold a candle to the 203rd best man. Look up her interview about it. She’s under no illusions about this
like abolishing womens sports
My man never heard of co-ed.
The classic kung fu paradox. We can’t compete, because this technique is so powerful it would kill the opponent! That’s why they perform so well in MMA. /s
I believe that would make it so basically no women can compete at the highest levels.
Just make an “open class” where any identification, body mods, and performance enhancing drugs are unregulated. The best athletes that science can create.
Ah yes, the Enhanced Games brought to you be Peter Theil and a dozen of the worst tech bros you haven’t heard of yet.
Part of the problem is that pro sports is already full of illicit doping. Another big part of the problem is that athletic exceptionalism is as much about winning the genetic lottery, getting lucky with no injuries at the peak of your career, and having the luxury of sponsorship/rich parents at a very age as it is doing lots of drugs.
The only real benefit you get out of an Enhanced Games exhibition is to sell dipshit frat bros the same promise Wheaties and Nike and GMC have been selling for decades - use our brand of steroid and you’ll be a world champion, too. And frankly, that market is already kinda flooded.
wait why not pump rich kids full of drugs? I don’t see a loss here
aren’t they already? isn’t that one of the pros of being rich?
I take your anti-corporate point. However, I believe pro-doping would totally work if it was a gladiatorial bloodbath decathalon within the olympics itself. And if you get caught doping in the non-doping sports, you’re forced to compete in the decathalon with the juiced up killers. Jousting, Barenuckle boxing, Pride rules MMA, Hell in a Cell, no rules water polo, shit like that.
if you get caught doping in the non-doping sports, you’re forced to compete in the decathalon with the juiced up killers
I’m listening…
Everyone would die of heart attacks. I’m glad no one is trying this, the death rate would be unreal.
You’re wrong, they are trying it. Search for the Enhanced Games
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sumo
sumo wrestlers life expectancy is 15 years shorter than an average japanese, they were already doing that
That’s not due to performance enhancing drugs and body mods though, right? That’s due to diet and associated lifestyle.
Although I think I still see your point; some sports not only encourage but require the top echelon of the sport to sacrifice their long-term health for the sake of a competitive edge. I’d use sumo as a cautionary tale as to why it’s a bad idea, rather than proof that athletes are willing to make that sacrifice.
It reminds me of that Onion episode with the shape shifters.
Finally, a sports I would watch
That has always been an excellent idea. Russia, China and the US&A - then maybe some weird shit comes out of India or Korea or somewhere, that would be nifty
It sounds fun at first but imagine the amount of heart attacks and other horrible Mengele level fuckups.
#mengeledidnothingwrong
wait, that’s the right hashtag isn’t it?
Well, on the other hand, medicine learned a lot…
put a \ in front of the # to ‘escape’ out the # so it isn’t treated like a #heading font
Hot take: Sports are not that important, and it’s not the end of the world if someone in the other team is “physically better” than you.
Sports should be just played for fun and for making exercise, not as a profession. And the whole sports industry should be taken down all together. Make all sports amateur and just for the fun of it and suddenly it really doesn’t mather who is on your team or in the other team.
But how will all those people survive with out their million dollar salaries???
Not to mention how many sports betting sites will go out of business 😱💸
Were they not taking bets on college games?
College betting is the wild wild west
Man when I was hooked on online betting I made an immense wager on the outcome of a soccer game I wasn’t even able to watch. It was Omsk vs Tomsk, and I think I won it despite knowing nothing about soccer. Of course I was deeply in the red once I stopped such irresponsible behaviour
You are crazy if you believe all olympics athletes are millionaires.
That I don’t. But look up wages for the American football and basketball players and coaches.
Unpaid college athletes have entered the chat
The salary of their coaches alone could probably pay the whole team a decent wage.
I think the harder question is how advertisers will convince underdeveloped schlubs that they call ball with Micheal Jordan if they just wear the right kind of shoes.
You mean like Oscar Pistorius shoes? I think it would be really creative and extremely entertaining to watch. Better than this shit they’re blasting out to a disengaged populace these days
Most sport is played by amateurs and for fun. It is still no fun to play against someone who is way stronger/weaker than you, of course!
Because a man tends to be stronger, faster, and more athletic than a woman of the same weight. It won’t work for football, track, or soccer.
Get rid of gendered sports. Next, legalize steroids for women; keep them illegal for men. Solves part of the problem, but I have no idea how trans people would fit into this scenario, though.
Why is everyone downvoting? This is a joke… right?
I’d hope so, and yet…
It would work for marathons though. Figure that out
Testosterone also increases red blood cell count, so even male endurance athletes have an advantage. Look at Tigst Assefa who holds the women’s World record for a marathon at 2:11, she’s 120 lbs, the top 5 male marathon runners are all at 120 lbs too and run 10 minutes faster.
You sure? I cannot find records adjusted to weight, but the male recorder is ~2:01h and the female 2:17h
Edit: Why is there a cake next to my name? It cannot be that I am in lemmy for a whole year already? Fuck.
Yeah, you should have an egg next to your name :P
why an egg? Would it be to represent the disorientation of suddenly realizing you have been on Lemmy for a whole year? Like how an animal may be disorientated when seeing the light of the world for the first time.
Menemen is a delicious Turkish breakfast dish made of eggs, tomato, paprika and some other stuff. I think that was the allusion.
Shouldn’t a woman and a man with the same height, weight, and body-muscle percentage be basically identical in terms of athleticism or am I wrong?
To add to other replies I also think that its much harder for women to develop muscles. (Just what I think I observed, coukd be wrong)
“Explosive upper body strength” specifically. Men have wider shoulders and more chest/back/shoulder muscles.
Women have to work twice as hard for half the results.
Skeletal structure and muscle connection make a huge difference in leverage and speed.
Nope, testosterone is a hell of a drug. There is a reason women dope with it.
More of a hormone, really
All a drug is a chemical substance when administered to a living organism, produces a biological effect.
Hormones are just naturally produced chemical substance. As soon as you dope with it is becomes a drug.
You are wrong, unfortunately. It sure would be a lot easier if our biology worked that way.
For team sports you can assign a point value to each player and force the team to deploy a maximum total value, like for armies in WH40K
I’m sure this would lead to injuries, but some soccer team putting out one goliath and a bunch of rule-qualifiers does sound really funny.
I’m still a fan of just removing all the rules around drugs and bodies. Let’s see what 21st century science can do!
It would be a kinda fun league to watch, but I dont want to hear about athletes dying because they took obscene amounts of steroids to be the best.
I want to say that because understanding of steroids and sports medicine they could be done in a way to prevent that for many sports. But o also know that would require rigorously enforced regulation which athletes would then try to game, which would probably lead to more deaths on the field.
Fuck that. You wanna go nuts on steroids then shoot up meth and cocaine before a race, go ahead. We’ll put defibrillators every 10m around the track. Catch that dragon, sports person.
I’d pay to see a feild full of tweakers, put a massive rock on one of those dog race things place random weapons around the track
We already have racers dying regularly in Isle of Man TT. Blood sports never died, they evolved. Why not sprinkle some steroids over it.
I imagine it would be like The Fast and The Furious where he presses the nitrous button till the screws/bolts all come out and the car falls apart very quickly.
I’m thinking more like Blood Bowl
“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust, and dead bodies to the kitchen.” Mutant League Football.
That’s a blast from the past. They should remake that game.
How many trans people are actually competing?
Are they dominating in the sports they’re competing?
Are their testosterone level similar to their competitors?
I am sincerely asking because I don’t care enough to look it up myself.
The issue is so few trans people are competing that there isn’t enough data to make any claims.
Testosterone level AND weight. Wait til they find out what happens when you’re on hormone blockers.
Low T league and high T league.
Maybe a middle T league?
I’m sure we can work it out.
Ok but what if… We just got rid of sports.
We could also get rid of fun, I guess.
Only clink-clang work from now on.Bad idea. We need games so we don’t raid each other’s monkey groups.
E Sports. Liquid bread and electronic circus.
Modern problems require modern solutions.
Ok but you see, that was part of the plan all along!
or why don’t we just keep everything as is because it’s not a big fucking deal despite what bigots say
if you really wanted to “fix” or “save” womens sport, just start by fucking paying them the same as men and giving women’s sport the same attention on tv
paying them the same as men and giving women’s sport the same attention on tv
Now you’re just being ridiculous.
You know how the market economy works?
Just merge men’s and women’s sports, nobody watches 'em anyway
So like women’s biathlon using men’s 100m dash as targets ? Women’s race walking V men’s discus ?
I would watch THAT
If you wanna get answers from a community that’s been training in 1000x earths gravity to fight anti-trans rhetoric, ask this in hexbear.
Nah fuck that shit. MMA integrated weight classes and that’s sucked. Sumo is the only true martial art, straight up, not even pulling your leg right now
Edit: Yeah, I mean, men are “stronger” pound for pound or whatever, but, we kind of, are idiots when it comes to thinking of sports, if we just suddenly think all sports are about explosive type 1 muscles, or muscular structure, or whatever. That’s dumb, that’s a brainlet comparison and a brainlet appeal, I would say. If you gain leverage in one direction, you lose it in another. If you gain a bunch of type one muscle fibers, you become a chimpanzee, but also, you gas really, really quickly, and humans are endurance predators that maximize that endurance with fine motor control even in what might be considered gross motor action. Everyone has this conception of sports as being these kinds of, oh, instant action gratification machines, where you just watch some guy get hit in the face really hard, or get tackled, and your monkey brain goes coco mode, and so obviously explosive strength is gonna be good for these displays, so, men are better at sports.
This is not the case. Or at least, not entirely. Sports is more like a long-form storytelling vehicle with many different characters and mindless teams to it. Women can fulfill that role just as easily as men can, in many of the same contexts. If we have sports that are bad for co-ed play, then I would say, we have sports that perhaps need refining.
Which everyone thinks is somehow like, a horrible thing to do, oh no, the sports, they’re too sacred, we gotta find the best of the best, but sports have always been and remain subject to change and a ton of different shitty rulesets that everyone always hates. Basketball now, apparently, rewards a bunch of aggressive highlight-reel kinds of play, and apparently the older game used to be more defensive, I say apparently because I dunno. I know nascar has had the opposite trending for quite some time with limiter plates meant to protect drivers and the audience more at the cost of more spectacular crashes and pileups for which the sport might gain more casual viewership. And also not be boring as fuck driving in a circle for like three hours. That’s not a sport getting better or worse, that’s just some arbitrary cultural shift, a decision made, realistically, because of internal cost-benefit analysis at the behest of a corporation which runs the major league.
We might have the same capacity to integrate sports into a co-ed kind of a deal, if we had the will to do so, but I think the truth of the matter is just that nobody really gives a shit about equality, except for when you bring it up.
Me, I’m a fan of sumo, because fuck weight classes. I wanna see david beat goliath. To me, that’s a more compelling casual narrative that can easily be built into a sport. Fairness is highly overrrated, and also doesn’t exist, or else every match might as well just be random chance, or end in a draw. Michael phelps is some genetic freak or whatever. Go cry me a river, and then he can swim across it and back. Give me an abstract goal like “get ball through hope” or “throw guy out of ring” and then I don’t need any more to it, I’m right there with you.
I would love to see a 4 foot nothing, lean mass of muscle absolutely wreck a 680lb stereotypical sumo body like it was nothing.
Dunno, you might wanna just watch UFC 1. If you’re really high level you might wanna watch nog vs sapp, though. Best one I’ve seen that’s actually at that level, even though the weight disparity might not be so extreme as you desire outside of like, basically carnie shitfights like eddie hall fighting twins.
Sumo’s actually a crock of shit, they predicted it in Freakonomics and it was revealed a few years later, I was living in Japan at the time and found it very trippy. I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.
Sumo is faker than WWE
I still like watching fat men in nappies with waxed hairstyles throwing salt around a clay circle then trying to push each other out of it though.
Yeah see that’s why I can’t ever take anyone’s opinion on it seriously, because they just say shit like this. It’s like, only a step away from “oh Americans should be good at sumo because Americans are all fat right and you just need to be fat and they wear diapers right?”. Which itself is about two steps away from just like, “Haha look at the funny fat men and how fat they are, what freaks for being fat.”, which is an incredibly depressing sentiment. It’s like calling baseball boring. I mean yeah, it is, but obviously, baseball fans will hate it if you say that, because it being boring as fuck is kind of the point of the sport. If you watch the matches you can tell pretty easily that most of them aren’t faked.
Nah, man, it’s a grappling art with a pretty large amount of universal applicability and no real weight classes, more similar to the conventional folk wrestling styles that many different cultures have. Mongolian jacket wrestling, mud wrestling, lots of European countries even have folk wrestling styles that they don’t care about too much anymore. It’s more similar to Judo, or something, and most people don’t question the efficacy or reality of Judo. American folk wrestling became rough-and-tumble fighting, and also became carnie circus shit right after the civil war, and then spread around everywhere until the Japanese decided to just kind of make it real with shooto and basically start MMA as we know it today, arguably with some interference from Brazilian Vale Tudo guys. The UFC’s involvement mostly being tenuous carnie shit. Go watch like the first three or four UFC’s, it’s basically garbage.
The more complicated download on the match fixing that came about in sumo is that 14 wrestlers were convicted, some stable masters. The sport as a whole, as with many sports in Japan, has a bunch of Yakuza involvement and toxic hazing and other bullshit. There’s already a Wikipedia link on it. Hakusho just got massively demoted like last year because some jackass in his stable was found to be hazing newcomers and haranguing people for money. I dunno, somehow I’m not gonna call all boxing rigged just because every now and again they find out that some high profile match was rigged due to the nature of the sport’s overarching regulatory structure.
Obviously there’s technique to it, it wouldn’t have survived as a competitive martial art otherwise. But the Japanese watch sumo for cultural reasons rather than because of their passion for the technique. It has a place in modern culture that links Japanese people to their deep-seated traditions. It’s like someone uninterested in sport knowing who’s playing on a given weekend, so they can comment on it as a neutral topic of discussion while getting their hair cut.
Doesn’t mean that it’s not a crock of shit. And I’m not saying boxing isn’t exactly the same either. Sumo is just more of a traditional practice akin to ritual than it is to actual sport or martial art. But I don’t know why I’m bothering to reply, since apparently none of this matters to you because your opening sentence demonstrates you don’t know how to structure an argument without alienating your interlocutor.
soccer
“Male” soccer is not restricted to men. Both genders are allowed. There are only men because they outperform women.
The NFL isn’t male only either. Not supporting anything but agreeing that some sports are segregated by performance
Even at lower levels of football women are typically only kickers.
Which is awesome and I hope we see one in the NFL one day! That said the reason for that is that kicker is the only position on the field that doesn’t require you be a genetic marvel. Most men and women that are born are not the size needed to play O-Line, most people that are that big are also not athletic enough(or didn’t have access to the tools to improve to that level).
I’d love to see a woman on the line or at qb or wide receiver. It’s just unlikely to happen before the sport is outlawed or I die
also it’s called football dammit :(
I think it was called soccer before football. The Englishman brought the term soccer to the US.
First England made football.
But they never set the rules, every English school had their own rules, so you went by “home teams rules”.
The biggest difference was if you could.pick the ball up like in Rugby (the school). To clarify during scheduling, that became known as “rugby football”.
It didn’t make sense to call non hand football “football” so it became “soccer football”.
Eventually they both dropped the redundant football. Then for some weird ass reason I still don’t understand, England made soccer just football and then centuries later gets mad at anyone still using the name “soccer” that they invented for the sport.
To be fair, the English invented English, so they kinda called most things in that language what it’s called…
The soccer/football argument is a little silly. It’s been called football in the UK, and many parts of the world for the better part of a full century. Call it soccer if you want, many counties have their own translation for football, or they use a different word when they have their own version of football that they like.
No one is trying to make England call it soccer again…
But the places that use soccer are the places settled by the British when they still called it soccer.
So it doesn’t make sense why the modern Brits who don’t remember soccer are so mad when we call soccer football just soccer like we literally always have.
ok cool what about the op’s thoughts?
He addresses them with that statement. There are plenty of women that are in similar weight classes as men but you don’t see any in male sports.
Even though male sports does not have a gender requirement. This is essentially an indirect way of saying that there are biological differences between male and female that go beyond weight.
There are various differences you could point out. Males have lower body fat %, which means more muscle. Their bones are shaped differently and are more dense. Men tend to be more aggressive and competitive. Men tend to have stronger bones, joints, tendons, and ligaments.
Men have more red blood cells, their hearts are bigger so they can pump more blood, and greater lung volume relative to body mass. So even a male and women same weight and height the man will be able to circulate oxygen more quickly.
There are many more examples if you go do some reading.
One of the differences may not be huge by themselves. But when you take the differences above and combine them, it creates a situation where in almost all sports, men play virtually unopposed by women.
Look up the Serena Williams interview. She’s undoubtedly the best female player in the world. She doesn’t stand a chance against a the 203rd best tennis male player.
This difference even applies to areas like chess. The highest ranking a woman ever got was 6th in the world, Judith Pulgar. Amazing player, but out of the 2500 or so grandmasters in the world, 42 are women.
Some of these differences can be explained by women around the world not being encouraged to play chess, but that does not explain all.
There are large biological differences when you look at the population in a statistical sense. And when you look at the most extreme samples from the edge of the normal distribution… that’s where the best athletes / chess players are going to come from.
Chess? What percent of woman players are GMs and what percent of male players are GMs? Because it sounds like sampling bias.
Women make up roughly 15% of US Chess Federation members. They make up roughly 1.5% of grandmasters.
That’s an order of magnitude difference.
Here’s a podcast about a study
https://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode/mens-chess-superiority-explained-08-12-29/
Normally I’d just link studies…
But I feel like if you’re this opinionated about things we figured out long ago, maybe listening would help more than reading.
Because it wouldn’t have taken much for you to Google this at some point and realize we’ve been studying this for decades, and maybe, just maybe, science is better than your assumptions.
There are a lot of factors in play, and you seem to think it’s because of…
What exactly?
Like it seems like you’re just arguing women are bad at chess?
I’ve read multiple papers on this topic. I’m a 2000 rated player and have tutored girls in chess. This is an interest of mine.
There is a very large gap in performance. The research overall implies a complex variety of factors. This includes what you mentioned, along with other inequities. It also includes the fact that women players are roughly 11 years younger on average and therefore haven’t peaked yet, which will account for some.
But there is evidence that there is also an innate biological difference. Men score better on visuospatial intelligence tests when compared to women. Chess, especially at a high level, involves a lot of this type of thinking.
I’m not arguing that women are bad at chess. Humans are individuals and there are varying levels of players in both genders.
Just that if you look at the extremes (which the top chess players will be) you’re going to see a higher level of males even if we fixed all of the inequities currently influencing the gender gap in chess.
We don’t know if the 10x difference is 5% due to biology or 50% due to biology. But we know it’s a non zero number
Essentially I used it as an example in the wider context of why we have women’s leagues and men’s league in sports.
The chess one isnt quite right. There’s been experiments where if a woman player didn’t know her opponent was a man she would perform better. It’s called stereotype threat phenomenon.
It also happens when a male player knowingly goes up against someone higher in the league than himself and he performs below his own standard average.
Basically people in general psyche themselves out of their best performance when going against someone they perceive to be better than them whether that’s factual or not. Confidence and undermining confidence can change a whole lot about how a person does in any given game or task.
You think that accounts for the differences? 42 of 2500 grandmasters are women because all the women are scared and intimidated of the men?
Maybe this plays some small effect but I doubt it’s statistically significant enough in this context
Like you said, it happens to men playing higher rated men. In order to go up in ranking, you need to play and beat progressively higher rated opponents.
By the very nature of being a high level player, that player would have had to go through that.
It’s a phenomenon that’s been observed across multiple sports, not just between men and women chess players. It’s particularly poignant in men vs women’s chess… because of people repeatedly telling women they are inherently worse than men. Like you are doing right now.
There’s been multiple studies on this. So yes, I side with the data that stereotype threat phenomenon has a significant impact on women’s performance in chess against men.
The bigger difference imo is the brain development due to hormones in the womb. Old TLC program had a whole section on this suggesting it’s why STEM fields are generally male dominated. Turns out hormones that determine biological gender also very much effect the development of the brain, and the male chemicals tend to develop the spatial reasoning part of the brain faster/more thoroughly than those who get don’t get the male chemicals and stay female. This average higher spatial reasoning capacity creates an advantage in tasks or objectives where complex visualizations are necessary, like visualizing chess moves in your head.
It’s not some massive, overwhelming difference, but it’s enough to tilt the table. Play out that average enough and you have 42 women out of 2500 chess grandmasters
TLC is name I have not heard on a long time. Did they really use the term “biological gender”?
Show me. Link me a couple.
I don’t think this effect can account for more than a small fraction of the difference. Let’s look at the research. I couldn’t find anything from a quick search but maybe I’m using wrong terms.
There’s an effect on both sides.
Contrary to what people assume, aggressive chess is a good strategy.
Due to a lot of factors I don’t really want to get into, most chess players think men are naturally better than women.
So a woman who thinks she’s playing a man is immediately on the defense, and a man who thinks he’s playing a woman starts out very aggressively.
Which means a man and woman of equal skill, the man will likely win.
It’s called stereotype difference and it’s not just chess related.
I don’t know why people always pick chess because there’s no physical difference while ignoring the mind games we even play on ourselves in those situations.
Just people completely ignorant of what they’re talking about and grasping at straws to find something that agrees with them
Not true. Some countries allow it on a national level, but many do not. I believe The Netherlands allows it, but only at lower competition levels.
I think FIFA forbids it entirely, but I’m not entirely sure.
Yes, splitting teams by sex/gender has never made sense, instead it should be by physical attributes that may or may not happen to align with sex, but irrespective of if they do.
Below the elite level, relative skill differences can be large enough that a skilled cis women can outcompete a lesser skilled cis men. And that’s where 99% of sports are played so these rules/laws just serve to make cis men not feel threatened by potentially losing in a softball game to a woman.
At the more elite levels, though, the skill gaps are much smaller, and being faster or stronger are the difference. Most WNBA players can’t dunk, most NBA players can. Elite men run 100M a full second faster than elite women. At those levels, men have a distinct physical advantage.
There have been some studies indicating trans women still have higher lung capacity than cis women, more strength etc, but there’s still some uncertainty because the number of studies are limited, and there’s even one study that indicated cis women may have an advantage over trans women.
But considering the laws currently being passed, they aren’t targeting elite athletes, and are instead targeting kids, and not out of the spirit of competition, but out of hate.
Well said.
I grew up playing soccer on a coed team. At a certain age you could be picked or tryout for a more advanced league. Up until highschool we were devided by skill not gender and I have no problem admitting there were more than a few girls that were much more skilled than I was.
highschool
Is still well below the professional leagues/elite levels… To discount high schoolers is a bit absurd to make your point. Many boys don’t even hit puberty until high school which is kind of core to the whole discussion.
I wasn’t discounting anyone. I wasn’t even offering a solution. Simply an anecdote.
