cross-posted from: https://beehaw.org/post/15901115
The men’s world record marathon time is 9% faster than the women’s. That’s significant. The male runner would finish over two miles ahead of the female runner.
Women were first allowed to compete in marathons in 1972. In 1972 the men’s record was 2:10:30. The current record is 2:00:35 which is about an 8% difference. Pretty close to the difference between men and women currently.
The first women’s record was 3:40:22 and the current women’s record is 2:11:53.11 which is 40% faster.
Once funding for women’s athletics reaches parity and once girls are encouraged into athletics as much as boys, then we will see if the ladies catch up. So far they’re doing a pretty good job catching up, and you can’t look at one current window in time and say you have the answer, you need to look at trends.
And that’s what people miss when quoting sports statistics. They confuse culture with biology. We live in a society that imparts certain roles based on gender. Men are encouraged to exercise and run more from a young age than women are. In an egalitarian society, that disparity wouldn’t exist. We really can’t say how things would play out. That’s why studies of paleolithic skeletons are a much better tool than just navel-gazing based on modern sports. Those statistics cannot be separated from our current society. Instead of just speculating, we can look at the actual skeletons of paleolithic people, which this article discusses. These skeletons record a record of the kinds of lives these people lived. There’s no need to speculate; we can ask these people directly how they lived.
I wouldn’t consider 9% to be that large in this context. Certainly a difference that would be overshadowed by individual variation.
Even if we assume women are physiologically 9% slower at persistence hunting (which that statistic is far from proving) it still suggests they could and likely were successful at it, albeit maybe not the very best.
How many marathons are run in a weaving path on uneven ground full of underbrush while trying to keep up with an animal that could potentially go in any direction at any time in the hopes that it will get tired before you do?
Because otherwise this marathon measurement is silly.
