The Catch-22 of Women's Sports

[Slant]

beach volley is a woman's sport because you play naked there and thats your thing

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i wish this post was 1st page

We saw it. It was a good post. Don't worry. :P

[Polyxo]

You're mixing up cause and effect here. 6-8 figure salaries are the result of the success of men's sports, not the cause of it. No one goes out there and says, I want to start a sports league, but the only way I can have any success is if I pay every athlete 6 figures. Every sports league starts with very small salaries that grow as it experiences success. The reason women's sports leagues don't succeed is they aren't popular. Again, take the very real example of soccer in the US - 20 years ago there were no professional soccer leagues. If you were an elite male athlete you had a ton of options that were potentially much higher paying than US Soccer, and meanwhile women's soccer was one of the most popular women's sports. Since then, 2 women's leagues have started and folded, and a 3rd is currently sputtering along. Meanwhile on the men's side, they have a 20 team league, they've built soccer specific stadiums, and they draw 20,000 fans a match.

It's difficult to attract meaningful talent when only the equivalent 'superstars' of the league can make a living wage, and the others must work other full time jobs, or be supported by friends/family. You're right in that high pay is a result of success of the leagues. However, success in the leagues are dependent largely on talent, and talent is largely dependent on incentive and participation rates, hence the application of therm catch-22.

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Polyxo, there are insurmountable physical differences between men and women, you are going to have to accept this fact, it's OK, no one else in this thread is going to be a professional athlete either.

en wikipedia org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_weightlifting

The lightest male weight class at 56kg beats even the highest* female weight class at 75kg, and quite easily too. This is a difference of ~20kg which is completely unfair in a sport like this. All of these competitors, men and women, are hand picked from young ages and trained which minimizes social differences, they also all use a whole lot of steroids (yes, even the women), which should serve to minimize hormone differences between sexes, yet the men still completely dominate the sport, its really not even close.
*(excluding open weights where the competitors weigh 100kg+)

You seem to think however that the main lack of ability in female sports stems from social conditioning and a lack of support/training/funding, and yes those all certainly do contribute to the difference between men's and women's sporting ability, however those factors are completely overshadowed by the vast biological differences that not even truck load of steroids can correct. So of course a cultural shift and an increase in funding for women's sports would increase their abilities, but it won't get them past the brick wall of biological differences in men and women that goes beyond even hormonal differences.

Which brings us to a key point, integration of sexes in sports like football, soccer, basketball, mma, will just not work, it's not a matter of money, it's a matter of biology, and that difference in biology means a difference in ability/skill, and that difference in ability/skill means a difference in popularity and funding. And if more funding can't bring womens sports up to the same level as mens then 1. its unfair to fund them similarly just because some people feel left out, and 2. people want to see the best of the best compete so inferior womens sports wont come close to as popular as mens when taking similar paths.

side note: i havent slept in 30 hours sorry in advance if some stuff is jumbled up.

One thing you don't take into account is the participation rates of women in many of these sports. There are thousands to tens of thousands to hundreds of thousands of men competing in many of these sports for every one woman. If you look through the progression of records set by males over the years, you can see how dramatic an effect participation rates have on the athletic talent in a sport.

[mizeri]

i dunno, i rather watch women playing volley ball then men playing it :P

[JohnBrown1917]

I love when people(i.e the OP) deny the biological differences between men and woman.
Men's Football also started from nothing.