No more men’s and women’s league, no more “gender eligibility” requirements, a common dresscode, same standards and rules for all
Eh I’m so for just stopping sports. It at least spending all that wasted money on something meaningful, like feeding hungry people.
No.
Yes
Care to expand?
I have, in other comments and the description of the thread too. Anything specific you would like to know?
It would make most sports incredibly boring to watch, as well as frustrating for many athletes. Boring sport means less money, which would also mean less teams overall.
Why would it be boring?
No, men and women are not physically equal.
Men and men aren’t physically equal. Maybe basketball should have a rule that everyone in the team has to be the same height. Can’t have anyone with a physical advantage over anyone else.
What do you think would happen if the best NBA team played the best WNBA team? I think the men would win.
What do you think would happen if professional basketball was mixed? I’d imagine the teams would be 90% men.
Also, if track and field records are any indication, men are strong and faster. Separate divisions are more fair.
Why does that matter? Men also have divisions and leagues. Team in the top leagues will destroy the leagues at the bottom.
why does it matter?
Should we stop splitting sports by gender?
It’s inherently boring to watch sports competitions between unequally capable people, and there is a natural difference in that that can be clearly attributed to gender.
I admire your thought of equality but we need to talk about the differences in physique in genders as well if we wanna discuss this.
Don’t dismiss this claim, scientifically debunk it or share why not and how you come to this conclusion.
No, it’s not attributed to gender. It is attributed to sex. Sorry to be pedantic but we live in a world where that distinction is very important for education purposes.
Of course people are differently capable, that why we have divisions, leagues, weight classes, and so on, even in the same sex. Why would that change when they all compete together?
Because putting them together in most physical sports would push women out of the highest echelons of that sport. Just look up what female MMA fighters and female tennis players have to say. They literally can’t keep up with men. Serena Williams and her sister boasted that they’d beat any man outside the top 200, Braasch (then #203) took the challenge and on the day of the challenge played a round of golf drank 2 low ABV beers before easily beating both sisters
Probably the most detrimental thing you can do for women in sports is to get rid of the women’s league. Most “men’s” categories are already open for women, so you should ask women why they don’t want to partake. The answer is what female athletes already say, they’d get absolutely dumpstered before they even get close to the top. Of course the less physically demanding the closer men and women will be, but for most sports the physical differences make women’s leagues necessary.
“Hey! Do you want to watch division 7 soccer? They have a woman on the team!”
Hardly inspirational to girls everywhere. Whereas whenever I’ve caught the Canadian women’s soccer team, it’s usually at a pretty full arena with lots of girls teams there stoked to watch. I would never take that away from them.
Why do you assume they’ll be in the 7th division? And do you assume it will be the case for all sports?
Look at Olympic world records for men vs women where they have same conditions (run 100m, jump highest, throw thing far etc.) men have “better” times/scores.
There are some sports where physique isn’t a factor like certain accuracy sports like target shooting where I can agree that there’s no reason to separate by gender though.Which sports do you watch both men and women play?
Soccer is the one I do most frequently. My local men’s MLS team would walk through the Canadian women’s team. The men can just kick it much farther and harder, run faster, take dangerous shots from farther out and that’s not to mention the physicality. And the Canadian women’s team is one of the top 10 or so in the world. (And MLS is several steps down from any of the serious leagues from which most national men’s teams are drawn.)
Not even going to look at a more physical sport like hockey.
I already posted comparing men and women’s times at the Olympics, but to reiterate, the gold winning woman came in slower than the bare minimum men’s time to qualify to run at the Olympics, in the 10k race, literally every one of the racers beat the women’s world record… (stats you saw but conveniently did not respond to.)
Does that answer your question?
Does that answer your question?
No, it doesn’t answer if it’ll be the same for all sports. As others have pointed out archery, shooting, curling, and other sports have men an women competing either separate or together and women can compete at the same level.
As for football, yes, there’s a good chance there’ll be stark differences, but as I pointed out in another comment, not every sport is about raw strength. And, competing against stronger opponents can also raise your ceiling. How far is of course yet to be seen because we don’t have mixed leagues.
And again, the suggestion isn’t “NO MORE SEGREGATION EVER” it’s “should we let them compete against each other”. That means there’ll be a mixed and segregated league. Maybe even, as somebody else suggested, the segregations wouldn’t always be immediately by sex or gender, but by attributes that make sense in that sport e.g weight, muscle mass, height, skill, and so on.
The only sport that is a predominantly physical exercise (so excluding things like snooker, darts, archery etc) where women could compete competitively against men at an equivilent level in their sport (league 1 men vs league 1 women) would be ultra marathons. Most other sports is so mis-matched you’d end up with some random amateur bloke against an elite woman.
Basically if you’ve gone through male puberty you are vastly different physically from someone who hasn’t.
No. It wouldn’t be good for women in sport.
Why not?
Im gonna guess.
Sport is a spectacle. At the highest levels of any given sport(usually)
Women, if they cannot compete with men, will simply not exist in the highest levels of that sport.
If women cannot be part of the highest levels of that sport, the sport cant make enough money to create leagues that can convince enough women to put significant amount of systems in place to train and produce the best women capable of playing that sport.
Until we stop caring about only letting/finding/supporting/producing the best of the best, its an incredibly bad idea to ignore the many sport specific disadvantage biology plays in competition
No. Why should we?
Yes. Why shouldn’t we?
Because I don’t see a reason to change. And changing would cost a lot of money and effort and impact. You’re the one proposing a change - why?
Ah, the typical “it’s always worked this way”. Well, there’s no need to elaborate then. Why ever change? Everything is perfect as it is.
You’ve expressed no reason to change, so yes, stay the same until there’s a reason to spend millions of dollars and upend established systems.
Problem is that some sports are really unfair towards one of the sexes (and it’s not always men who have the advantage). I definitely think it should be mixed for sports where there’s no advantage.
Relevant recent YT short about archery: https://youtube.com/shorts/oCi_IawIFQA
I don’t see that as a problem. For example boxing or weightlifting would probably have the top 10-100 being all men, but have more variety (trans, men, and women) below that. They could all compete together though.
You could still be the top man/woman/trans, but there would be a clear total ranking. For example one would see that the top female tennis player would rank 100th in the total ranking. It wouldn’t take away from her achievements and allow her to play against men at the same level.
But it does kind of diminish the women’s sports.
Consider say, the 100 meter sprint. The winning women’s times at the Olympics were all so far behind the men that literally none of the winning times would have even qualified to be at the Olympics! (Mens min qualifying time is under 10 seconds, Alfred won gold at 10.72 seconds, Jefferson took bronze at 10.92.) At the other end of the scale, for the 10,000 meter race, the last placing male ran it in just over 29 minutes which was 5 seconds faster than the Olympic women’s record for the same distance and was a full minute and a half faster than the gold winning woman.
Similarly for a lot of team sports you’d be relegating teams with women on them to a much lower league because at the top of the table, raw physical strength plays a role.
Splitting up by sex means we can watch and appreciate the best women play their sport at the highest level and celebrate them. Or almost every Olympic sport would just be guy guy guy.
Sports should be segmented out by testosterone levels.
No, because the women would be at an unfair physical disadvantage in most sports.
I watched the speed rock climbing (sorry, don’t know the official name) during the Olympics. The fastest woman was amazing, she flew up the wall in about 6.75 seconds, and beat her nearest competitor by over a second to win the gold. The fastest man was nearly 2 seconds faster again with his competitors not far behind. If the women competed with the men, the female gold medal winner wouldn’t even be on the podium.
You say that but women’s tennis didn’t exist until a woman beat all the men and won a tournament.
He did say “in most sports”, not all. More specifically, sports where physical strength is an advantage (ie, weight lifting, rock climbing, football, soccer, wrestling, etc).
Women and men would be equal in sports like billiards, ping pong, badminton, gymnastics, ice skate, and even tennis.
and even tennis.
Tennis?! Not even Serena Williams believes that:
“Andy Murray has been joking about myself and him playing a match. I’m like, ‘Seriously? Are you kidding me?’ Men’s tennis and women’s tennis are two completely different sports,” Serena Williams said. “If I were to play him, I’d lose 6-0, 6-0 within 10 minutes. Men are a lot faster, they serve and hit harder. It’s a different game.”
That’s not what happened.
Exception that proves the rule? That’s pretty awesome though.
IDK, men already dominate so much of the world, why not make space for women’s sports.
But imo it should be more like the weight classes in wrestling and less like the binary mens/women’s thing with different rules.
Like why are men’s and women’s gymnastics so different. Why can’t the person do the event they want to compete in?
Yes, let’s have a bunch of blokes beating the shit out of women in boxing. What could possibly go wrong?
I remember the Brit Awards scrapping gendered awards and putting everyone in the same category. The problem was, the only ones nominated turned out to all be men.
Combat sports already have weight classes, it’s not like you’d be putting a man up against a woman he has 30 cm and 50 kg over. If you’ve got people of similar size and ability, it doesn’t seem to me like their sex or gender matters. They all went in there expecting to both hit and get hit.
, it doesn’t seem to me like their sex or gender matters
Oh, but it does. There are major physical differences between men and women, even if they’re the same weight. Men have greater muscle & bone density. A man of similar physical fitness of the same weight as a woman will be considerably stronger. There wouldn’t even be a competition. It would just be a man beating the shit out of a woman. Nobody wants to see that, despite our desires for equality.
So if a woman was in the same weight class as Mike Tyson, you think they should be allowed to fight each other? And you think this would be a good look?
These hamfisted attempts at equality are actually the complete opposite.
Is it a worse look than what Tyson did to any of his real opponents because of the history of male violence against women, or is there something else you’re getting at? And is whether or not it looks good what should be the driving force being decision making in sports?
Venus and Serena got their asses handed to them in their prime by the ranked 203 male tennis player.
https://www.theguardian.com/observer/osm/story/0,,543962,00.html
The women’s US National team lost to a regional U15 boys team.
Physiology, males are bigger, faster, and stronger. It is not fair to women to put them in the same contest as males in any sport that requires those 3 things puts women at a massive disadvantage and would lead to fewer opportunities for female athletes to succeed.
Depends on how it’s organized. In a open team, it would definitely suck. In one of my sports, Ultimate, coed divisions or leagues are pretty popular. Generally the gender ratio is 4-3 with the offensive team deciding to play 3 or 4 women for that point.
Ultimate is under appreciated
A heavyweight boxer isn’t the same for both sexes. If you mean coupling heavyweight against featherweight of the other gender or something similar to compensate, it could work but would probably be seen as unfair, it would be hard to draw the line on where it’s equivalent.
I do think it would be interesting to have mixed team sports where a certain number of each gender needs to be on each side, but it would probably end up with positions always being relegated to the same sex.
The definitions aren’t the same, but that can be fixed: heavyweight = over 90kg, whichever gender (right now it’s 91kg for men and 79 kg for women). They’d compete against each other in the same weight class by actual weight, not name of class.
You could then have multiple scenarios:
- few women in heavyweight
- no women in heavyweight
- women within the top of 70-75kg (for example)
- no women within the top 70-75kg (for example)
But we won’t know until we try.
I would love to see more co-ed team sports at the jr high and high school level. Could be interesting if the teams were required to have a certain percentage of male and female on the court/field, with transgender counting as either. People take school sports way too seriously.
Shouldn’t sports have categories based on abilities? I see people be like “trans women are stronger than cis women cause, idk, testosterone or something” and I just think, y’know, if that’s a problem, why aren’t categories based on strength or abilities or whatever?
Generally yes, but I believe it is best done on a case by case (meaning type of sports, level and skillset) basis.
Generally on the recreational level, the differences between the sexes are much smaller than the differences within one sex. The best example that comes to mind is Tennis. Although it is physical in that it requires a lot of high-speed strength, which theoretically should be an advantage (on average) for young men, the skill difference between a man and another is far greater than that between an average man and an average woman. Go to a public court and you’ll see a non-ignorable amount of women outplaying men (if they even dare to play each other) and what’s even more baffling, older people beating younger people. On the absolute elite level though, they seem to almost play a totally different sport. Ball speed, running speed, ball spin and variety in spin on average are very different on the WTA compared to the ATP and therefore similar but different tactics and even technical styles are employed in the two. The difference within the Top 100 ATP or Top 100 WTA is much smaller than the average Top 100 WTA and average Top 100 ATP. So on that level, imho the segregation is merited.
As some others have already suggested, there might be better criteria to judge this separation on, like with weight class for martial arts. It is not always clear where that divider should be, though. As for tennis: Is it body weight or height? Maybe your fastest or average first serve? Maybe your fastest or average ground stroke? 30m Sprint time? Wherever you put that line might change the nature of the game played in that group and not even eliminate the de facto separation on sex or age, but in turn make it unattractive for some people to engage in a competition in the first place.
Which comes back to my initial statement of judging it case by case depending on the average difference between sexes and the difference within sexes.
edit: replaced gender with sex. Didn’t think of it because in my native language this distinction isn’t made.
