Gender equity and sports will never stop being a controversial issue. There's no doubt that men are superior to women in the vast majority of sports. Preferring women's sports aesthetically is a different issue. Commercially, sports are an entertainment product and women's sports exist as a variant on that product. In the overall market place, the big money is in male team sports. Will society ever change enough that female sports are more commercially successful? Will women become objectively better than men at more sports (in part because the the popular sports change)? Perhaps.
Clearly women's sports should have the rules that are best for the competitors, i.e. the women. It's stilly to suggest otherwise, and obviously this is normal in cases where is matters: hurdles, shot-put and outside tract eh size of basketballs and heights of hoops.
The real controversy is equal pay. It's clear in most cases that the male only version of a sport is more lucrative than the female version (e.g.: men's vs. women's pro tennis tours, NBA vs. WNBA, etc. etc.), So is it fair that women track athletes or tennis players get the same prize money at co-ed events? I say yes. If men want more money than the women, then organize and hold separate events. (Obviously this is the status of team leagues.) Once an event is mixed, men and women are in it together and events at the same level (i.e the best women and the best men) should be rewarded equally.
In tennis there's the extra question of 3 vs. 5 sets in grand slams, but this isn't a tennis board...
Gender equity!? Barriers for women's steeple set at men's height!!!
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My balls hang down 3 inches and I'm not much taller than most women. Where does that factor into the height of the hurdles?
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Women want equality yet won't race men? Makes no sense. True equality would mean men racing women in one combined category. The men who openly brag about promoting same race distance are just self promoting and trying to enhance their self image. They probably could care less about what actually happens.
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Rosett A. Stone wrote:
In plain English wrote:
great wrote:
This is fascinating. Only Coburn noticed it and gestured to the officials but after 2 laps it's still at wrong height.
Translation: only the American was such a wuss they had to complain, the rest just got on with it.
Translation: Only the american is concerned enough about the rules to Literally level the playing field when she would have a clear advantage letting it go.
Alternate translation: Only the american in "Women's 3k Steeplechase" interested in running Women's 3k Steeplechase as defined by the rules for the "Women's 3k Steeplechase"
Unless the track started tilting to one side, you meant figuratively. -
Just sayinngggg wrote:
Why should the women move up to the men’s height instead of lowering the meb’s Height to the women’s?
Keflezighi doesn't even run the steeple, but why should he get an advantage like that? Especially if you mean he should run against the women. Not fair.
If you have ran over women-height hurdles, you'd know they're not challenging at all. Like stepping over a curb in a parking lot. -
All about anatomy wrote:
My balls hang down 3 inches and I'm not much taller than most women. Where does that factor into the height of the hurdles?
I recommend you wear clothes to prevent this being an issue.
Also
https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjyvvOWrsbbAhVJSsAKHU2EDksQFghHMAQ&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.iaaf.org%2Fdownload%2Fdownloadnsa%3Ffilename%3Db246e5ed-97cf-4670-9000-eb39843eb76d.pdf%26urlslug%3Dreflections-on-a-change-in-the-height-of-the&usg=AOvVaw2BK_mlhJP3wnyvSPYAQ-2k
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=5202065 -
I forgot multi-events. Women should definitely do the decathlon instead of heptathlon.
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In the early days of women's steepling, 20+ years ago, the only barriers available were the men's. The heights were not adjustable.
My team had a woman who was a middling (at best) distance runner. She fooled around with the 400 hurdles some, but never raced it IIRC--she always cleared the hurdle by the better part of a foot and just spent too much time in the air.
Eventually we figured out that if she was going to clear by that much, then she could clear the men's steeple barriers too. We threw her in the event and she won conference twice. -
Time's Up. wrote:
Start paying women the same, holding the same amount of female events with the same prize money AND giving our sport equal coverage. THEN you can raise the barriers with ACTUAL NOTICE to train for that height.
Total BS extreme sexist proposals. The gender divisons in T and F need to be absolutely scrapped and people will run the same race/event competing on a level playing field for once. Give the prize money based on where people finish in the race/event not based on their gender. It is like this in most other serious professions in civilized western societies today; people are paid based on their performance and not based on their gender. T and F needs to get with the program and ditch its offensive sexual prejudice or make itself amateur again (which would probably be better to fight against PED use). -
ex-runner wrote:
Obviously the women would be jumping much closer to their maximal jump than the men, should the barriers be the same height. And therefore it would be much more tiring. This is obvious.
What? The women's high jump world record in 2m 09 cm. How high is a steeple chase barrier ??? -
What you at the clip for wrote:
Women want equality yet won't race men? Makes no sense. True equality would mean men racing women in one combined category.
Exactly, and this is the where T and F should evolve towards in the future in order to become less prejudiced. This would also eliminate the animosity directed against athletes such as Semenya which is pretty awful to see. -
Always nice to reminded of the insecurities of little men every so often on the boards. Most of you are probably just jealous because Coburn can run a 3000 steeple faster than you can run a flat 3000. It's truly pathetic. If you want to know why the barriers are at the height they are, you simply need to look at the average height for a male (about 5'9") and the average height for a female (about 5'3"). Coburn makes the barriers look small, just as Jager makes the barriers look small because they are both freaks of nature. Most tall people can't run as fast or have the type of endurance that both of these athletes possess. If you can't see the entertainment value in women's athletics, I pity you. Quite honestly US women are far more entertaining and competitive on the world level than the US men in most of the Olympic sports. Show them the respect they deserve.
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joedirt wrote:
Show them the respect they deserve.
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It's casual bigotry for someone to suggest, probably jokingly, that the women's steeple barrier height should be higher? We're not exactly talking Jim Crow south here. In other news--
Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: THAT'S NOT FUNNY.
Not An Expert wrote:
NERunner053 wrote:
Les wrote:
How is this gender equity when the average American woman is 6" shorter than the average American male? (Same difference as the difference in steeple barrier heights.)
Because this is Letsrun dot com where it's been normalized to make jokes about inequality when men have obvious advantages over women. This website finds it funny or would say that it's just a small joke when in reality it's problematic to start a thread with this title in the first place.
+1. Too many LetsRun posters are entirely comfortable with casual bigotry of all kinds. This isn’t me calling all people who make (or tolerate) these posts awful people, but rather just pointing out that the climate on these boards pretty tough for people from many non-dominant groups. -
barrier heights wrote:
ex-runner wrote:
Obviously the women would be jumping much closer to their maximal jump than the men, should the barriers be the same height. And therefore it would be much more tiring. This is obvious.
What? The women's high jump world record in 2m 09 cm. How high is a steeple chase barrier ???
You think that A. steeple chase women can jump anywhere close to 2m in the high jump and B. they can do so running at the bar head on and hurdling it?
Crazy.
Women hurdling maybe can clear a 1m barrier hurdling, at best. Higher than that and they would absolutely struggle to get over it. I daresay some steeple women wouldn't be able to clear 1m (100m hurdle height is 85cm or so, steeple is 76cm). Some didn't make it over the men's height steeple.
Men's steeple is 91cm. It would be, as it was shown, exhausting for women to clear that height, and far more so than it is for men because it is much closer to the maximum height that a woman could feasibly hurdle than it is to what a man could.
Anyway if you want to play it your way, the men's high jump WR is 2.45m. So their steeple should also be taller.
