The Olympics and female success
in the wake of the most recent Olympics I've bumped into a bunch of articles like this one asserting that women
... dominated the U.S. team in every way: More women than men made the American team, and they won far more gold medals than the American men.
There was also that one female swimmer, Ye Shiwen, about whom headlines claimed that Ryan Lochte may be speedy...but this 16-year-old Chinese girl is even quicker!, that the Chinese 16-year-old swam faster than Ryan Lochte and that she was faster than any man. That must mean, to quote The Friendly Athiest from a post on gender testing of women that:
... Women are capable of outstanding athletic performance, but it today’s society that is something that is strictly relegated to the boys’ club. Until the Olympic committee and the general public can get it into their heads that women are also capable of extraordinary athletic feats, female athletes are going to continue to have to put up with these ridiculous double standards.
It seems fairly reasonable to ask then just how well male and female athletes performed - as apparently it's only the evil patriarchy holding women back (despite the Chinese government doing things that might qualify as child abuse in an attempt to get maximum performance out of its female [and male] athletes). How did "Faster than any man" Ye Shiwen fair against her male counterparts at the olympics? Looks up the results for the men's and women's events and compare the results. Turns out she beat Lochte by a whopping negative 23 seconds and the slowest man by negative 14 seconds. (This despite Ye Shiwen shattering the women's record by more than a second and Ryan Lochte not setting a World or Olympic record).
So maybe despite the Chinese investment in female athletes for the Olympics they can compete on other fields like the track. To test that hypothesis compare what some male athletes achieve versus the women's world record (officially 10.49 seconds, although in reality it's probably 10.61 seconds due to a faulty wind gauge recording that official world record). To compare I decided to look up men's high school athletics and see what I could find in the way of results. The first result I came across was simply for the senior boys 100 metre dash at a Toronto area track meet. How'd the winner there fair? 10.31 seconds. In other words a high school boy at a regional event in Canada can outdo the world's fastest woman in that event.
Going back to the Friendly Atheist's comments, he also said:
... Has anyone ever asked Kobe if he’s actually a man? How about Lance Armstrong? Brett Favre? It would seem that it is usually the “fairer sex” that is placed under this kind of gender scrutiny.
The answer seems simple. Given the differences in performance, some definition of "woman" seems inevitable. Verification might be necessary to enforce that given that men seem willing to run in (and win) races aimed at women. Where legally required to a let a boy play on a girl's team if no corresponding boy's team exists, there seems to be a need to develop what basically seems to be excuses to get them off the team.
The testing question doesn't seem to apply to men in the same way though. Given that the NBA doesn't appear to ban women from competing, whether Kobe [Bryant] is male or not doesn't seem to have the same relevance. The case of Brett Favre also is irrelevant given that the NFL also doesn't prohibit women from playing. The Tour de France seems to have a separate but shorter women's event rather than allowing women to compete in the men's race, but I suspect that even if the Tour de France dropped the restriction women still wouldn't be showing up on the winner's platform (unless they create a female winner category for the race which would reintroduce a slightly different version of the same problem).
If you want to argue that "man" and "woman" are artificial categories then it would seem that the only coherent way forward would be to eliminate gender distinctions in the Olympics. However, though the US women's olympic team was described as dominant over their male counterparts, if computing under such rules they'd likely be deprived of almost all medals.