Sex Differences in Sports

There's a pretty fascinating piece in the NYT today (you will have to register to read it, but it's not a bad trade-off) about the role that society plays in gender differentiation. It's mostly about how less industrial societies have fewer gender differences than people in more industrial societies, since they are doing more similar jobs. But where it matters to us in this little corner of the blogosphere is how it relates to sports.

Running is mentioned as the perfect test case. It's a nearly universal sporting activity, and what you'd expect to happen -- i.e., males to be more competitive, and have greater separation from best to worst then females -- turns out to be the case on a damn near universal basis -- even in places where men and women have the same roles and jobs and fewer pronounced differences between genders. So there is, as per the study, an enduring "sex difference in competitiveness."

Now, I realize this is all a little dry, but the takeaway is this... in my lifetime, there has been an increasing amount of interest in women's team sports, with folks trying to get people interested in events like soccer and basketball.

It hasn't really worked from a ratings standpoint, with the occasional burst/fluke moment like the US women's soccer team, or the compromised effort that is beach volleyball, where you've got prurient interest adding to the competition. (I'm going to avoid talking about the individual events like golf, tennis, figure skating and gymnastics for the most part, because those seem to be more about individual personalities.)

Many people have posited that this is because of a lack of coverage, or the older generations not having grown up with the endeavor, or some other more nefarious plot, mostly involving patriarchy.

But what this study is showing you is that, on some level, there's just less variance in performance, independent of the culture. You can give me any reason you like as to why that is, but it doesn't really matter; the sun rises in the East, water is wet, and men have greater competitive differences.

Strong variances make for better viewing. When teams and athletes are similar in abilities and performance, you don't have upsets, drama, storylines; you have parity on an individual competitor basis, which is to say you've got a lot of the middle muddling about.

Sports is about seeing who is better, and feeling that the differences are not utterly random, and that the differences matter. Women's sports simply have less of that; you can juice it up all you like with all kinds of reverse engineering and marketing, but it is what it is.

And I wish it weren't so, being the father of daughters and someone who feels the odd twinge of guilt over the fact that my kids don't see Dad watching girls play sports. Moving on...