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Underground > Games & Gameplay >

Gender Segregation in Sports

  
 
Phex: Dorset Doom
16:38 / 11.05.07
I'm not a sporty person. I work out when possible, I've done a little Karate and my Badminton volley is so shockingly powerful that it technically counts as a Mortal Kombat finishing move, but competitive, particularly team, sports aren't my thing. One thing I've never understood about it is the never-obsessive need, in every sport imaginable, for gender-segregation.
Apart from occasional Mixed-Doubles games in Tennis and Formula One driving (Wikipedia lists only six female formula one drivers in the history of the sport) how many high-profile sports are played with mixed teams? None is the answer, not a single one. Men are generally stronger than women, true, but many sports don't require players to be physically strong. Football (or Soccer) is the biggest sport in the world, and players need to be quick and skillful rather than musclebound behemoths- are there really no women in the world who could play alongside men? What about horse racing- women tend to be physically smaller than men, which is important for a jockey. What about snooker? Darts? Skiing? Snowboarding? Martial Arts (the professional kind, not Ultimate Fighting Championship) ? Every kind of motorsport, since women are better drivers?
All of the sports listed above could be played by both men and women, and yet everywhere from the schoolyard to the Olympics they're segregated along gender lines? Why is this?
 
 
Ticker
18:59 / 11.05.07
My Aikido dojo is co-ed though we occassionally offer women only beginners courses to help women overcome the intimidation factor of the sport (it's funny to think of it as a sport, but hey...)

One of the senior students taught my aikido class last night and he said "I know it's difficult as a woman to get comfortable being right snug with your male partner but you need to be a little closer." Which to me is less about sexuality and more about just trained views about personal space.

The problem I had with it was the heteronormative assumption regarding who I'd view as what sexually. Why should it be less of an issue for two women or two men to be in a butt to crotch stance?

Whenever people use the moral and lack of sexual comfort thing as a reason for segregation it confuses me. I need to not view my classmates in a sexual manner regardless of what's in their gi (training clothes) because that's not we're on the mat for.


The boston Marathon is a big mad mass of people of all types, genders and abilities. I suspect the gender seg is more about perceived morality restrictions than fairness. I know of ultimate frisbee teams that are co-ed as well.
 
 
*
07:35 / 12.05.07
Women jockeys ride alongside men, although they get a lot of shit on and off the track for it.
 
 
Gendudehashadenough
19:11 / 16.05.07
Partly, it seems that most sports (American anyway) were begun at a time when segregation along gender lines was a normative way of extending occupational, social, and familial gender divisions. Remember, in America, baseball was the female-homemaker's described solution to the fear of getting one of the letters from the Armed Services, all the while not allowing women to even think about having some fun for themselves, just allowing for some entertainment between hanging laundery and changing diapers.
Arguably, baseball (for example) requires less physical prowess than soccer (less endurance, more fine tuned differentiated sections of gameplay, etc.) so in that sense women, if they are statistically less physically capable, might take to that variety of sport more. Look at American softball leagues, many of which, granted, are extensions of good-oldie-boy clubs.

American collegiate football (possibly influenced by Title ix) has definately been broken through on some occasions (notably by Katie Hinda who, in spite of being sexually abused and harassed by here male teammates,is the first women to score inna Division 1 team-game) and upstart NFL counterparts are slowing growing there way out of the mid-west, where they were began as a "gimmick" by NFL purveyors.

Still, I think the physicality of sports and the "teamming" aspect coupled with the physicality of most organized competition simply displays the imposed heteronormativity and negative reactions to it that BoldinHerBreeches points out. Additionally, sporting events, training for same, and even the very thought of pro-sports entwine ideas of sex, gender, and physicality as if they exhibited a straight line of description. Obviously, this is not the case as I've met several polo and softball (to name but a fwe) non-male gendered participants that have screwed me into the ground with skillz and sprig of verve, leaving me with a feeling that sex and gender have nothing to do with sporting ability.

The summary, bring up 'school pitch'. How do you think it would change the current sporting climate if primay school-aged children were sexually integrated into sports? Is is necessary to have volleyball for females and flag-football for males, with no crossover just because one is seen as mass entertainment and one is played, w/o shirts on Mykonos Beach?
 
 
Happy Dave Has Left
15:08 / 22.05.07
Well now, speaking from my experience:

When I was about 11, I played in my school rugby team, which was mixed-gender. It was great, we had some really fast female wingers (a pair of twins actually) and a girl playing prop who was a total tank - I have fond memories of her being tackled by five boys, simultaneously, from a particularly snooty private school we played a lot, and her managing to score a try regardless.

When I got to third year of high school, the girls suddenly stopped coming to practice, which really confused me. I asked my Dad how come they had to go off and suddenly start playing for all-female teams when last season they'd been happily punching, gouging, stomping and tackling alongside me (and very effectively too), and it took me a while to get my head around his answer. He said that at a certain age, the girls I was with would start developing (i.e. puberty), and the kind of full-contact sports we were playing would become both awkward and wide-open to misunderstandings, misinterpretations or just plain bad behaviour. I didn't really get it for a while, until I thought about the kind of chat and behaviour that my 15 year old friends engaged in as they dealt with sexuality and hormones for the first time.

Now, whether that applies in adult-level sports is an interesting question.
 
 
Crestmere
06:00 / 02.07.07
Why are there separate chess tournaments for women?

I could at least see the argument for some of the segregation (although I don't think it is a particularly strong one) but is there really such a difference that woman can't play chess alongside men?

This has always puzzled me and I'm wondering if anyone has any kind of answer as to why someone would think this was rational.
And not rational in the 1907 "women's wombs will rot if they have an education" sense.
 
 
Jawsus-son Starship
11:07 / 02.07.07
There have been female poker players, but there are also female only poker tournements, such as at the world series. Top female players, such as Jennifer Harmen and Annie Duke, publically boycott such events, but other professional and amateur players enjoy them. I heard an interview with Jean Gluck who said that while she understands the postition such players take, she found it easier when joining the tournement circuit to play in such tournements, as she felt it was less intimdating to play with her own gender then to play in a predominantly male field.
 
  
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