Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy. Robyn Ryle
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either managing their own clothing or having their own clothing managed and patrolled for them.[3]
Girls learn to restrict their bodies partly as a result of what they’re wearing. But their movements are also patrolled by adults in ways that are much different from boys. One study found that teachers give bodily instructions to preschool boys at much higher rates than they do girls (65 percent to 26 percent). But boys obeyed the instructions of their teachers less than half the time, while girls obeyed 80 percent of the time. So even though the bodily behavior of boys was being patrolled, that patrolling wasn’t as successful as it was with girls. In addition, teachers were more likely to give girls very specific instructions about how to change a bodily behavior, as opposed to more general directions for boys. Boys might be told: stop throwing, stop jumping, stop clapping, stop splashing, and so on. But girls were likely to be told: talk to her, don’t yell, sit here, pick that up, be careful, be gentle, give it to me, put it down there. This difference means that boys are given a larger range of what they might do with their bodies than are girls.[4] In other words, while boys are being told in broad strokes what not to do, girls are being given very specific directions about what they should do in their bodies.
Given these findings, it’s not surprising that there are big differences in the bodily movements of three-year-old girls compared to five-year-old girls. Three-year-old girls in one study were much more similar to boys of the same age in the way they played physically with other children. Girls of this age engaged in more rough-and-tumble play, more physical fighting, and more arguing. But by the time they were five, these types of rough play decreased dramatically, as girls are taught not to be “too rough” with each other. From a very early age, then, girls get less practice engaging in many of the behaviors—running, jumping, wrestling—that are crucial to many sports. A girl may be at a disadvantage long before she steps onto the field for the first time.
Learning Not to Be Strong:
Moving and Playing Less
These early differences in how girls and boys move around matter for their sporting futures. On average, girls start playing organized sports a half year later than boys do.[5] A recent study in the United Kingdom found that boys spent 40 minutes on average on sports activities each day, compared to 25 minutes for girls.[6] In Australia, adolescent girls are 20 percent less active than their male peers.[7] In one survey of youth sports participation, 69 percent of girls reported playing organized sports compared to 75 percent of boys.[8] These differences between boys’ and girls’ sports participation widen with age. Many girls living in urban areas drop out of organized sports entirely. While in sixth through eighth grades, 78 percent of girls in urban areas play sports, that number drops to only 59 percent by ninth through twelfth grades.[9] Girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys by age 14, and this is especially true in underserved communities.[10] The opportunities for girls and women to play sports have certainly increased since the passage of Title IX in the United States in 1972, but girls still have an estimated 1.3 million fewer opportunities to play high school sports than boys do.[11] For example, in one young woman’s community, the boys all-star soccer league had twice as many spots available than the girl’s league.[12] That girls start playing sports later, do so at lower rates than boys, and have fewer opportunities to play high school sports are all social factors that inevitably contribute to differences in women’s competitive performances.
Girls have lower rates of sports participation partly because of fewer opportunities. But other barriers are more subtle, like the social stigma that’s still associated with girls in sports. Girls playing sports are still vulnerable to bullying, social isolation, or negative performance evaluations.[13] As teenagers, girls may fear being labeled a “lesbian” because of their participation in sports. Norms about what an ideal woman’s body should look like make it difficult for girls to develop the muscular bodies that might be needed to play many sports. In all these ways, girls receive subtle and not-so-subtle messages that sports participation is not for them.
Society, then, makes it more difficult for girls to gain the same amount of experience as boys in sports and physical activity. These social factors interact with biology in complicated ways that make it difficult to say exactly where the social ends and the biological begins. For example, studies tell us that women have less upper-body strength compared to men, while women’s lower-body strength is comparable to men’s. But as discussed above, we also know that from a very young age, girls are less active than boys. They play fewer sports. Girls and women are definitely discouraged from engaging in activities that might build strength and muscular bodies. In physical education classes, teachers themselves hold stereotypical notions about girls and strength training. If women are discouraged from engaging in activities that build strength, surely these social factors have some role to play in these physical differences.
Could a Woman Outswim a Man?
Average Differences and the Performance Gap
There are, of course, also some biological differences between women and men that may impact their athletic ability. But the first thing to understand about all gender differences that have been documented between men and women is that they’re average differences, which is an important distinction to make. Let’s look at height to understand what an average difference means. The average height for men in the United States is 5 feet, 9 inches tall while the average for women is 5 feet, 4 inches.[14] The very tallest man alive, at 8 feet, 2 inches, is taller than the tallest woman, at 7 feet, 8 inches.[15] But below those extremes, there’s a great deal of overlap. That is, there are quite a few women who are taller than many men and quite a few men who are shorter than many women. The same is true for any gender difference related to athletic performance. The fastest man in the world can still beat the fastest woman. But that doesn’t mean that many women cannot outrun many men. When we talk about average differences in athletic performance, then, we have to understand this context.
In many athletic events, there is an average performance gap, but that gap has narrowed over time. One analysis of world records set at the Olympics suggests that in running events specifically, women have closed the performance gap from 30 percent in 1922 to 10.7 percent in 1984, when women’s performances stabilized. That means that while in 1922, men’s world records were on average 30 percent faster than women’s, by 1984, men’s world records were only 10 percent faster.[16]
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