Separated at Birth
Should Boys’ and Girls’ Sports be Separate?
by SpartanIlliniCub
I’m sure plenty of you have heard stories about girls playing baseball with the boys at various levels from pee-wee on up. Many also have stories about girls excelling on the baseball diamond against the boys. I don’t think I would have a problem with a girl being allowed to play baseball with the boys in high school if she really wanted to, but what about the opposite? What about if a boy really loved fastpitch softball and wanted a chance to play in high school with the girls? Should he be allowed to?
My first thought was that girls’ and boys’ sports should remain separate, but I have since changed my opinion. There are two sides to this issue: gender equality vs. respecting the intrinsic differences between boys and girls. These options are mutually exclusive; favoring one takes away from the other. On the one hand, boys and girls seem to have some differences in athletic ability. In the aggregate, however, boys and girls are equal in athletic ability (just as in any other arena such as intelligence, artistic ability, etc). But the most athletically-prone boys seem to break away and exceed girls in overall athletic ability sometime around middle school, and the differences are heightened through the college years. There are still MANY girls that have the ability to both make and become stars on boys’ teams even into college and beyond.
For example, the difference between the Olympic world record fastest man’s time in the 100-meter dash and the fastest woman’s time is only 0.8 seconds. (Usain Bolt 9.69 seconds 2008, Florence Griffith-Joyner 10.49 seconds 1988). The difference between the fastest man and fastest woman is very small, and Florence Griffish-Joyner is easily faster than 99.9% of all men. When compared against objective data, the “intrinsic differences” argument loses its bite. The distinction is largely illusory—it exists only in people’s minds. In the previous century the difference between athletic ability in boys and girls would have been extreme because girls were discouraged from playing sports and boys were encouraged, but with Title IX opening sports to both genders and more parents encouraging their daughters to participate in athletics the disparity will grow smaller and smaller.
To be sure, there are certainly some differences between boys and girls athletically—otherwise the best male track athletes would not consistently have better times and scores than the best female track athletes. But the differences in these times are so small they should not be a central argument for keeping genders 100% separate. Four-fifths of a second is not enough of a difference to automatically ban male and female athletes from each other’s teams.
In America, both genders are supposed to be equal. Yet somehow arbitrary distinctions between genders remain, such as the refusal to let women fight on the front lines in combat. Letting girls play in boys’ sports but not providing a reciprocal outlet for boys in girls’ sports is an identical arbitrary distinction based on gender. On the other hand, there are differences in the athletic ability between boys and girls. The best solution must find middle ground between these two competing arguments.
The solution should be that, as a general rule, team sports remain separate by gender. Where a school offers both a boys’ and girls’ team for a single sport (volleyball, softball/baseball, etc) no opposite-sex players should be admitted to the team. However, for schools that do not offer a boys’ and girls’ squad for a certain sport, such as boys-only football or girls-only field hockey, each team should accept applications from players of the opposite gender who would like to play for the team. The amount of opposite gender players should be capped at 1-5% of the entire roster. For example, this rule could give rise to a girls’ volleyball team with 29 girls and 1 boy, or a boys’ football team with 38 boys and 2 girls. This way the genders are still kept largely separate, which takes into account their inherent differences, but still provides wiggle room for several athletes each year who would like to play a sport not otherwise available to them because of their gender.