This is a chart I created that shows women's world records as a percentage of the time of men's records. men / women
I expected to see some more trends and relationships when increasing distances. I've always heard women were more equivalent to men as distance increased. I don't see that.
What do you make of Flo Jo & Paula. Are they simply very talented individuals that transcended their gender or are their performances indicative of the future? Note: the second bar in the graph is if Flo Jo and Paula never ran their 100m, 200m and marathon WRs.
http://www.cypressop.com/misc/Mens%20vs%20Womens%20WRs%202.htm