July 30, 2012

The Gender Gap in Olympic-style events has been stable since 1983

Here's a 2010 study in the Journal of Sports Science and Medicine making the same point about a wide array of Olympic events that I made about track in my 1997 National Review article:
WOMEN AND MEN IN SPORT PERFORMANCE: THE GENDER GAP HAS NOT EVOLVED SINCE 1983 
Valérie Thibault, Marion Guillaume, Geoffroy Berthelot, Nour El Helou, Karine Schaal, Laurent Quinquis, Hala Nassif, Muriel Tafflet, Sylvie Escolano, Olivier Hermine and Jean-François. Toussaint 
© Journal of Sports Science and Medicine (2010) 9, 214 - 223 
ABSTRACT   
Sex is a major factor influencing best performances and world records. Here the evolution of the difference between men and women's best performances is characterized through the analysis of 82 quantifiable events since the beginning of the Olympic era. For each event in swimming, athletics, track cycling, weightlifting and speed skating the gender gap is fitted to compare male and female records. It is also studied through the best performance of the top 10 performers in each gender for swimming and athletics. A stabilization of the gender gap in world records is observed after 1983, at a mean difference of 10.0% ± 2.94 between men and women for all events. The gender gap ranges from 5.5% (800-m freestyle, swimming) to 18.8% (long jump). The mean gap is 10.7% for running performances, 17.5% for jumps, 8.9% for swimming races, 7.0% for speed skating and 8.7% in cycling. The top ten performers' analysis reveals a similar gender gap trend with a stabilization in 1982 at 11.7%, despite the large growth in participation of women from eastern and western countries, that coincided with later- published evidence of state-institutionalized or individual doping. These results suggest that women will not run, jump, swim or ride as fast as men.

49 comments:

Anonymous said...

True Steve, Dana Vollmer 55.98 in 100 meter butterfly is almost as fast as Doug Russell 55.80 in 1968 olympics. Women apporaching times in late 1960's and early 1970's.

Anonymous said...

Why no talk of racial gap.

Anonymous said...

Check out the US women's marathon team. Shalane Flanagan and Desiree Davila look emaciated, but Kara Goucher (half Jewish) is a fox! Also, no discussion of black Olympic swimmers Lia Neal and Cullen Jones?

Anonymous said...

You can guarantee one thing: if and when technology becomes sufficiently advanced, the Fascist Left will genetically engineer sexless people en masse in an effort to permanently rid us of the scourge of gender differences.

By analogy, what is going on now with mass immigration into the West is a deliberate attempt to eradicate the white race, via replacement and opportunistic miscegenation. There can be no other possible result, in the long term, and it amounts to a type of genetic engineering via directed procreation, as with selective breeding with farm animals.

Asexuality is only an extension of this, and all it requires is the technology, which will not take too long to develop, with cloning, transfection, etc.

We are well on the way to a totalitarian apocalypse.

Anon.

agnostic said...

You can look at it the other way around to find out what kind of physical recreation guys and girls can enjoy without the male upstaging or leaving the female in his dust without even trying.

From the sports listed, the clear winner would be the roller rink. What ever happened to those, and how are boys and girls supposed to bond without them?

(Yeah, there are still some around, but like Chuck E Cheese's, they've been taken over by The Urban Market.)

We need those leveling or egalitarian actitivies in order to get tuned into the same wavelength. It's amazing how segregated the sexes prefer their leisure activities these days, among young people anyway.

Girls are locked into texting and Facebook (and maybe jogging alone), not willing to meet guys half-way and do something physical and at least minimally dangerous.

Guys are plugged into video games and geeky websites (and maybe doing bicep curls alone), not willing to do something that involves balance, coordination, and listening to dance music.

We already had the formula figured out in the good old days. The fact that younger guys and girls don't follow it anymore, and have not replaced it with something similar, just shows how intent they are on staying apart from each other, except for the bare minimum activities, in the domain of dating, mating, and family-forming.

Anonymous said...

http://www.nbcolympics.com/video/judo/highlights-russias-mansur-isaev-wins-gold.html

GO RUSSIA!

commonwealth contrarian said...

"You can guarantee one thing: if and when technology becomes sufficiently advanced, the Fascist Left will genetically engineer sexless people en masse in an effort to permanently rid us of the scourge of gender differences.'

That kind of social/biological engineering would take an enormous feat of will, intellect and organisation.

The future isn't likely to be organised tyranny (you need a fairly homogenous society for that) it's most likely to be dysfunctional semi-anarchy.

Anonymous said...

o/t

Those racist teachers again !

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/jul/29/race-schools-edication-banks-lib-dems

Anonymous said...

By analogy, what is going on now with mass immigration into the West is a deliberate attempt to eradicate the white race, via replacement and opportunistic miscegenation. There can be no other possible result, in the long term, and it amounts to a type of genetic engineering via directed procreation, as with selective breeding with farm animals.

Asexuality is only an extension of this, and all it requires is the technology, which will not take too long to develop, with cloning, transfection, etc.


The intense promotion of homosexuality in contemporary society is related to this as well. Contemporary homosexuals are like asexual drones loyal to the dominant ideology and state (the eusocial organism).

dearieme said...

Forgive my being a little O/T, Steve, but the link contains a few mentions of Maureen Dud that you might enjoy.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvandradio/9439029/Radio-5-Live-puts-the-Olympics-in-proportion.html

jody said...

There is absolutely no doubt - none, zero, zilch - that the Chinese "women's" gymnastics team featured several little girls no older than 14 years of age - two years younger than the international federation allows for competition. Online registrations of these girls list one age, their passports list another. This is blatant cheating - no other word for it.

Guess which one the federation is taking as correct?

Half of the team would be under age, according to online sports registration lists in China. The international gymnastics federation, however, said those gymnasts were eligible and that the ages on their passports were correct...

Dartangnan19 said...

Generally what makes women athletes is they are more like men, narrow hips and small breasts. Wider hips and the characteristic motion is mechanically inefficient.

Anonymous said...


These results suggest that women will not run, jump, swim or ride as fast as men.


Hmmm. The fastest women will not blah blah ...

I wonder what the variances are?

Since it seems that sex (gender is a linguistic concept) effects physical strength and increases the physical performance of males on average, I wonder what else it effects?

Dartangnan19 said...

Generally what makes women athletes is that they are more like men, narrow hips and small breasts. Wide hips and the characteristic motion is inefficient.

jz said...

the LEAST of the gaps is the endurance gap (800 m freestyle).
Women are built for endurance.

Anonymous said...

with the expulsion of that hot greek triple jumper for 'racist' tweets (and belonging to the 'wrong' political party) and the conspicously marxist opening ceremony - the olympics have degenerated into a neopagan-marxist ritual.

Anonymous said...

It should perhaps be noted that the abstract shows numbers only for events in which the gap has stabilized. When the abstract says the largest gap is 18.8 percent, for long jump, that doesn't mean 18.8 is the largest measured gap. The body of the paper says the gap in weightlifting is 36.8 (plus-or-minus 6.2) percent. But data for weightlifting goes back only to 1998 and the gap for that class of event hasn't stabilized.

NOTA said...

Genetic meddling with human offspring is going to happen in a big way, but probably far more by individual parents' decisions than by any central authority. All else equal, people who spend $10k/yr on expensive preschool to groom their child for a slot at Yale will be very interested in getting the high-IQ, high studiousness package for their kids. And the extra height, athletic abiltiy, social skills, etc.

In a parental choice generic meddling kind of world, there will be very little homosexuality if that is a trait that can be avoided by choosing the child's genes in any way. Presumably a few lesbian couples will want to have lesbian girls to raise, but otherwise, most parents want grandkids, and straight children are a lot more likely than gay children to produce them.

Anonymous said...

Also, no discussion of black Olympic swimmers Lia Neal and Cullen Jones?

The chick who has caught my eye is the Dutch swimmer, Ranomi Kromowidjojo.

Her father is from Suriname, which is in far northern South America [near the equator], and his grandparents were from Indonesia.

Sheila said...

I cannot find any links, but I know I read (in the past year or so) that professionally-trained women can be/are often bested by high-school boys. Gender gaps, racial gaps, they all vanish into the great multikulti propaganda machine.

Anonymous said...

Remember the school test frauds in NY, Penn, Atlanta.

What should academic doping be called?

Hoping? The students were 'hoped'?

Anonymous said...

"Javier Bardem's blond Bond villain unveiled"

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-19066966

"A new trailer for the latest James Bond film Skyfall has given fans their first glimpse of Oscar-winning actor Javier Bardem's blond villain in action."

I thought Bardem looked villainous enough in No Country for Old Men as a brunet....

Anonymous said...

Very similar issue like IQ. Obama can still be smart despite of low IQ in some group. Mean value only predicts odd not absolute value for individual.

Anonymous said...

http://blogs.suntimes.com/blago/2012/04/tanned_muscular_blago_to_teach.html

lol

ham teaching hamlet

Pat Boyle said...

The Chinese girl swimmer who is the center of this doping controversy has been accused of "genetic" doping. I have been predicting just this sort of event in comments to this blog for several years.

Concern for genetic manipulations wasn't original with me. I based my comments on an article in Scientific American which described a scenario in which the government had injected DNA in a runner's legs. They injected gene sequences for "rat muscles". This kind of muscle fiber is not found in humans but if it were the recipient of those genes would be a super fast runner.

Or in this case a super fast swimmer.

Note that this technique could not be detected by current tests. To the spectators it would just appear as there were suddenly an athlete who broke all previous records. The athlete would clear all doping tests because there would be no performance enhancing drugs used. The muscles would be the athlete's own muscles. There would be no foreign substances in their bodies.

I don't know it this particular case is an example of genetic doping as the American coach suspects. But if it isn't this time, it soon will be. This genie can't be put back in the bottle.

We as a species are in a transition period. We have developed competitive sports in which we set natural variants against each other. But we are right at the threshold of having nearly complete control over our genome and its phenotypic expression.

So if I'm a 5'6" former college basketball player I will soon be able to have a son who is 6'9" - or taller. The sports center will give you your choice - center, forward or guard. Similarly if I want my kid to be an offensive tackle in the NFL, I could build my child to be seven feet tall and four hundred pounds.

Our traditional sports - baseball. football, and basketball - were all invented in the late nineteenth century. None of them will make much sense in a world where parents can create whatever style progeny they prefer.

Currently we are trying to police up an arbitrary set of standards so as to preserve the past on a case by case basis. We ban amphetamines but allow Gator-Aid. That makes sense until someone develops a sport drink with amphetamine-like properties. That will lead to more rules but it will not provide a permanent solution.

We don't discover athletes anymore. We build them.

We need new sports.

Albertosaurus

Kylie said...

"You can look at it the other way around to find out what kind of physical recreation guys and girls can enjoy without the male upstaging or leaving the female in his dust without even trying."

Target shooting.

Anonymous said...

Until we see IVF children routinely making it to term+, people should stop acting like gene-engineering is a cure all or even capable of accomplishing gattaca style results. Right now the best you can get is sickly kids who are lucky to make it to term (the rates of demise and prematurity are pretty high.) Animal clones tend to come with problems as well. The science is hardly all that impressive and unlikely to progress to the levels needed to guarantee things like a reliably super-athletic or super-intelligent infant/toddler/child/adult.

Anonymous said...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olympic_weightlifting

The sport is controlled by the International Weightlifting Federation (IWF). Based in Budapest, it was founded in 1905. Male athletes compete in one of eight divisions, and female athletes lift in one of seven divisions determined by their body mass. The men's classes are:
56 kg (123 lb)
62 kg (137 lb)
69 kg (152 lb)
77 kg (170 lb)
85 kg (187 lb)
94 kg (207 lb)
105 kg (231 lb)
and over 105 kg;

------

Ridiculous. Should be only two:

little man and big man.

I mean imagine having 50 m race, 40 m race, 30m race, 20m race, 10m race, 5m race.

Truth said...

Hey Steve, I'm late to offer my condolences on your father. He appeared to be quite a man. It's painful to lose a loved one, yet in 95 years of life, he seemed to pack in 150.

medvedev said...

These results suggest that women will not run, jump, swim or ride as fast as men.

And, the Sun raises in the East. Does someone have a reference to an academic paper describing this fact, too?

medvedev said...

Sheila: professionally-trained women can be/are often bested by high-school boys

No doubt about it. Imagine just athletic games: hockey, soccer, basketball. Any women team would be figurally murdered by any state high school champion.

Anonymous said...

"Generally what makes women athletes is that they are more like men, narrow hips and small breasts. Wide hips and the characteristic motion is inefficient."

Depends on the sport. For swimming, running, jumping...anything that is pure athleticism, that is true. But as for soccer or volleyball or softball, some of the more robust looking women have hips/breasts in addition to musculature.

Anonymous said...

"You can look at it the other way around to find out what kind of physical recreation guys and girls can enjoy without the male upstaging or leaving the female in his dust without even trying."

Target shooting."

What about croquet? Kind of an elderly person game, but it can be fun.

Anonymous said...

Meanwhile, the blond/black gap widens yet again.

Stacy said...

Until we see IVF children routinely making it to term+, people should stop acting like gene-engineering is a cure all or even capable of accomplishing gattaca style results. Right now the best you can get is sickly kids who are lucky to make it to term (the rates of demise and prematurity are pretty high.) Animal clones tend to come with problems as well. The science is hardly all that impressive and unlikely to progress to the levels needed to guarantee things like a reliably super-athletic or super-intelligent infant/toddler/child/adult.

Best comment ever on the truth of IVF (and other ART). IVF in a way is kind of like how people regard feminism as being superfantastic and out of this world and not primitive. People think it will lead to a utopia but in reality its a mess, catastrophic and horrifying.

Anonymous said...

In track and field the trend of lack thereof has become undeniable for all but the most ideologically addled feminists. The women's world records in the 100m, 200m, 400m, 800m, 4x100m relay, 4x400m relay, long jump, high jump, 100m hurdles, shot put, and discus were all set in between 1983 and 1988. There were some middle distance records set in the 1990's, but they are the exception that proves the rule. The women's record in the 1500m and 3000m were set by Chinese athletes all within a four year period in the 1990's right after East German doctors and physiologists fled to China. The Chinese hold 7 out of the top 10 times in the 1500m set by 7 different athletes all at meets in either Shanghai or Beijing and the top 3 times in the 3000m also all set in China.

The only track and field events women compete in that were not set in the 1980's are ones like the hammer throw, pole vault, and triple jump which were not women's events until after the 1980's or the javelin throw which started over in 1999 with a new model for women and the 400m hurdles which was not an official women's event until the late 1970's. In other words, the only women's event that has showed marked improvement since the 1980's that has not been tainted by certain drug use is a sport that didn't start keeping women's records until 1978. It's kind of hard to argue with those numbers even for the MSM. The Brits are aware of this lack of improvement, in fact in a book by a British mathematician/physicist I saw at Barnes and Noble he was arguing that all the women's track and field records set in the 1980's be abolished and "reset" since they are all obviously tainted by systematic doping.

Anonymous said...

http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/features/listomania


http://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/greatest-films-all-time-2012

Anonymous said...

Best comment ever on the truth of IVF (and other ART).

ART = ???

Maybe "Artificial Reproductive Therapy"?

Anonymous said...

The intense promotion of homosexuality in contemporary society is related to this as well. Contemporary homosexuals are like asexual drones loyal to the dominant ideology and state (the eusocial organism).

Boy, I tell you what, Komment Kontrol kracked down hard on any attempt to discuss the Velvet Mafia on this thread.

Weird.

Anonymous said...

I remember a short story by Dean Ing back in an early Eighties Omni Magazine about genetic engineering in the Olympics. Swimmers with proto-blowholes and flipper-like feet (like 6'1" 17-year old Missy Franklin's size 13 feet) and boxers with no pain receptors.

Anyone wanting an athlete to root for needs to Google Michelle Jenneke from the 2012 World Junior Championships in Barcelona. The total package, boobs and all. Watch the race as well as the warm up.

Anonymous said...

2008 marked the end of white self determination in politics unless whites start voting en bloc. I think another blank screen minority candidate so soon after the disastrous Obama will fully activate the Sailer strategy.

Who knows? Perhaps whites will have a demographic resurgence in the US as society becomes overtly hostile to their political ambitions and social welfare; they will relearn what the third world already knows: that there can only be relative safety among your kinsman.

Anonymous said...

"Until we see IVF children routinely making it to term+, people should stop acting like gene-engineering is a cure all or even capable of accomplishing gattaca style results. Right now the best you can get is sickly kids who are lucky to make it to term (the rates of demise and prematurity are pretty high.)"

And another commenter:

"Best comment ever on the truth of IVF (and other ART). IVF in a way is kind of like how people regard feminism as being superfantastic and out of this world and not primitive. People think it will lead to a utopia but in reality its a mess, catastrophic and horrifying."

It seems like we have more commenters that know things that just aren't so. The same proportion of IVF pregnancies and natural pregnancies end in miscarriage, i.e., about 25%. Please, do your own research before believing comments from the web.

http://www.webmd.com/infertility-and-reproduction/guide/in-vitro-fertilization?page=2

http://www.americanpregnancy.org/pregnancycomplications/miscarriage.html/

Anonymous said...

I don't think my mother liked playing croquet with my father.

He played croquet like the Texas high school football player he once was.

goatweed

Anonymous said...

soon there will be disparate impact/title ix steroids : eg only women allowed to take them.

Pat Boyle said...

There is a lot of confusion about what is being alleged. The media as far as I can tell gets it all wrong.

The charge was that China was engaging in genetic doping. This is something new, if it's true.

The simplest type of cheating is the injection of stimulants or pain medications on the day of the race. These are easy to detect.

The next level are steroids. These are taken not on race day but during the training period. Anabolic steroids send hormonal messages to your muscles to grow. These are harder to detect. Sophisticated cheaters use steroids to build up their athletes physique and then discontinue them a week or two before the race so as to let the athlete's body clear all the tell tale traces of evidence.

The charge is now that the Chinese are injecting not a chemical nor a hormone but actual DNA. Presumably this DNA would code for some enzymes or proteins that would enhance athletic performance. Such a practice would be almost impossible to detect. All of the athlete's body would be their own body, created by their own genome.

If the Chinese are doing this, they will win a lot of medals until other nations catch up. It will also accelerate science's control over genetics. This is important. Much more important than any sports event.

We need to be able to manipulate human genetics. As Herrnstein first pointed out. When you equalize all relevant environmental factors all the remaining explained variance will be genetic. That's about where we are today in terms of racial accomplishment. Low academic and economic performing blacks are no longer attributable to the environment. Their lower performance is almost all genetic. That means that to solve our racial problems we must seek genetic remedies. We must "fix" the black brain so as to make it more comparable to White or Asian brains.

We don't know quite how to do this yet but the Chinese are helping by developing genetic technology in sports. Good.

Pity about the Olympics (and Baseball, Football and Basketball).

Albertosaurus

Anonymous said...

LOL @ the anon not acknowledging the higher IVF prematurity. And fetal demise means miscarriage after the first trimester and stillbirths, not just early miscarriages. It is very well established that IVF conceptions have a higher loss rate (higher vanishing twin syndrome, for a notable example), particularly in the second and third trimesters.

Fun link illustrating several things at once-- higher rate of birth defects in IVF babies, in this case linked to vanishing twin syndrome:
http://www.adelaide.edu.au/news/news46841.html

IVF is not ready for prime time if your definition of prime time is more genetically fit children.

Anonymous said...

"soon there will be disparate impact/title ix steroids : eg only women allowed to take them."

men have too much, women can't have enough. Equality naaooo!!

Anonymous said...

The chick who has caught my eye is the Dutch swimmer, Ranomi Kromowidjojo.

Last night, in the semifinals, she qualified first for tonight's final of the 100m freestyle, and she came home so furiously on the second lap that I was sitting there thinking, "Ugh - are we looking a 'roids here?!?"

Anonymous said...

Well, she won gold, in an Olympic record time - hope she passes her drug tests.