Would it be sexist to have more male than female prize money at road races?

I'm not sure whether giving women smaller prizes would necessarily be 'sexist' (whatever that even means) but I do think it's a bad idea. If the reasoning is that there isn't enough depth in women's running, then surely lower prize money will only exacerbate this problem, not improve it.

To me, the real scandal when it comes to undeserved awards is all the age-group awards at small races, especially when it's top 3. Sometimes there are only like two people in a group, and some profoundly non-serious runners end up with awards. This leads to bloated and boring award ceremonies. This concern could be addressed with some sort of cutoff - for example, maybe in order to get a prize you have to either beat some minimum number of people in your group or perform at some minimum age-graded level.

This type of cutoff could also be applied to overall male and female winners, although in my experience the top three men and women are usually serious enough competitors that I doubt this would come into play very often. This cutoff would also have the advantage of being gender-neutral and not making female competitors feel like they are less valued since they are competing for a smaller prize.

What's wrong with being sexy?

sexy = acquiescence to the oppressive strictures of femininity

Femininity-compliance products: Toxic glop marketed in the form moisturizers, caked on/baked on femininitiy in the form of unnatural cosmetics(untested on animals but readily marketed to women), cadavar meat-stuffed lips, plastic funbags stapled to one's chest, deforming wire contraptions for the breasts, a solvents and perfumes intended for one's vulva, and the list goes on.

If any doubts linger as to the sinister essence of the feminine directive marketed by the patriarchy, I urge you to consider the painful case of poor Anna Nicole Smith, dead of femininity at age 39.

Blonde bombshells are disturbingly disposable.

Gender Blind wrote:

...there are far stronger fields in men's races at almost every race...

...I think gender battles are gimmicky and aren't a solution. They usually only affect the top male and female and go based on race history rather than who has a better performance. Plus they take away from the spirit of racing since rather than competing against just those you toe the line with you also have to beat someone who starts who started ahead or behind you by a certain amount...

I don't know if anyone has any creative solutions to this issue but I think given the demographics of elite runners moving more money to the men's side would be reasonable.

Sorry if my last comment didn't engage with your points very well, let me try again.

First, in my area it's not true that the top three men are better than the top three women at almost every race. The top women is better than the top man at about half of races, and while the 2nd and 3rd place men are usually better, I'd say that maybe 1 time in 3 or 4 the third place woman is better.

Second, I agree with your reasoning about gender battles, they are gimmicky and take away the spirit of racing (so even when based on performance like they are sometimes, I still don't like them much).

Third, I don't like the idea of smaller awards for women. One reason for this is that it treats the genders differently and makes female competitors feel less valued. A second reason I don't like it is that it isn't even that much of an improvement when it comes to making prizes more meritocratic.

Let me expand on that last point, and transition to some ideas that hopefully do better. I see three problems related to how meritocratic awards are, i.e. how well the size of the award corresponds to the impressiveness of the performance: (1) differences in performance between the genders for the overall winners; which is a subset of (2) differences in performance between the age groups; and (3) year-to-year performance differences between races in each category. In my experience the difference from age group to age group is typically much larger than the difference between male and female overall top three, so (2) is a bigger problem than (1). Also in my experience (3) is bigger than (1): races are a lot harder to win some years than others, yet prizes stay the same.

So it seems to me like if we want to start coming up with ideas to make prizes more meritocratic, we should go after age groups and year-to-year variability first. I like the idea of a cutoff like I talked about in my last post because it addresses all three of these situations. But it is limited because it just excludes things below a minimum. Surely we can do better.

Another idea is to directly link prize money to how good your performance is. Top three in each gender get prizes, but the winner gets $1.00 x (some performance metric), 2nd gets $0.75 x (some performance metric), etc. This is nice because it could be the same across both genders, while still linking prizes to how good your performances are. It also addresses the fact that races are harder to win some years than others, while still rewarding those who actually beat their competitors who toed the line that day.

The performance metric could be something like "percent of world record performance". But if it's felt that this gets away from the spirit of competition too much, it could be something like "number of competitors beaten who are above some threshold (like who run faster than some minimum time)". This is also cool because it means that there's an incentive to be happy when other fast people show up, which makes for a good culture.

Another idea about age groups is instead of using a cutoff, just get rid of them. Instead you could do something like awards for the top three for each gender, then recognize the top ten age-graded performances after that.

I don't think it's sexist. More men competing = more money. Less women = less money. If anything, it's the only fair way. If the women's side becomes more competitive in the future, I'd have no problem with it being the other way around either.

C'mon, nobody pays to watch a road race. In fact the competitors pay to enter the race -- the same for both sexes. It's a participation event. And most road races are not businesses. How long do you think any legitimate business would last if it treated 50% of its customers worse than the other 50%? THAT would not be good business.

Why is there a huge difference between male and female WRs? It's a mystery really....

Let me expand. I get this crap from men at every race. The fact is there will always be physiological differences between male and female athletes and I really don't understand why people think it's ok to ignore this difference. Punishing us for not having enough testosterone or needing more body fat is just silly! I will never participate in a race where there's a difference in price money between male and female winners. As if it's not enough that women get paid less for the same job...

After reading some post, I guess a race director could implement all sorts of clever ways and formulas that will end up distrubting more prize money to males than females, or they could just implement no trickery and simply state it because thats the way the want it to be.

Nigel Tufnel wrote:

What's wrong with being sexy?

Sexist

girly wrote:

Let me expand. I get this crap from men at every race. The fact is there will always be physiological differences between male and female athletes and I really don't understand why people think it's ok to ignore this difference. Punishing us for not having enough testosterone or needing more body fat is just silly! I will never participate in a race where there's a difference in price money between male and female winners. As if it's not enough that women get paid less for the same job...

It's not about physiological differences. I'm not claiming to hold accurate figures but it seems to me, as it does to many other people, that there are more men training competitively than women.

Forget that this is a distinction between men and women and instead consider two sets of people. Set A contains 300 people and Set B contains 150 people.. with both sets competing for three top spots. An individual from Set A has a 1% chance of a medal, while an individual from Set B has a 2% chance of a medal. If we moreover assume that every individual irrespective of set trains as hard as another, isn't it only logical that an individual from Set A receives more recognition (in terms of prize money or kind) than an individual from Set B?

Gender Blind wrote:

Yes It Would Be wrote:

Yes it would be sexist

Thank you for your intelligent post and use of arguments to back up your opinion.

I agree that putting more prize money in one gender would be perceived as sexist. But is it really? If the guys are just flat out better shouldn't it be ok to put more money out for them. No one cares that professional mens athletes make way more than female counterparts in almost every other sport.

I think the obvious solution to make "Yes It Would Be" happy is to avoid anything sexist in your races. Obviously having male & female categories is completely sexist, so do away with those, and just pay the prize money to the overall top finishers of the race.

Ultimate solution wrote:

Gender Blind wrote:

Thank you for your intelligent post and use of arguments to back up your opinion.

I agree that putting more prize money in one gender would be perceived as sexist. But is it really? If the guys are just flat out better shouldn't it be ok to put more money out for them. No one cares that professional mens athletes make way more than female counterparts in almost every other sport.

I think the obvious solution to make "Yes It Would Be" happy is to avoid anything sexist in your races. Obviously having male & female categories is completely sexist, so do away with those, and just pay the prize money to the overall top finishers of the race.

Another solution now that I've read the entire thread - in the future to avoid repeating posts, I will try to read the rest of the thread before responding to an annoying post on page 1.

The problem is that the idea that "there are more men training competitively than women" is completely false, at least after college. In my area there are way more women than men training in the top clubs at least, and lone wolf men rarely place highly in races, so I doubt many of them are training very seriously

Fair enough. Where I come from, it's the complete opposite, and I am using that as the basis for my argument.

Sorry if this has been mentioned earlier but I wasn't sifting through three pages to avoid redundancy.

Here is the definition of sexism.

"prejudice or discrimination based on sex.

So giving women prize money when not giving men who ran faster prize money is sexist. Any prize money at all earmarked exclusively for women is sexist by definition.