Steve Sailer has provided the best and most interesting insight of the Olympic games. Besides a diverse knowledge base and an understanding of economics and sport, Sailer also begins from the simple premise that groups (men versus women, blacks versus whites) are genetically different. So the reason that his insight has been most interesting is the same reason that he’s not writing for the prestige press on the subject. Compare Sailer’s starting point to Robinson Meyer at The Atlantic who, in a post titled “We thought female athletes were catching up to men, but they’re not” wrote:
Earlier this week, we set out to test our perception that women were catching up to men. We know, after all, that there are and were structural factors that prevented women from engaging in and training for athletics. Our perception was that these impediments had been getting slowly eroded. Therefore, we expected to see, at least in some sports, a path to equality that showed women’s times catching up with men’s in 2031 or some other date in the future.
Personally, I can’t understand why someone would, despite the myriad of ways in which it has been disproven (are we living to be 180 years old? are there 50 billion people on the Earth?), extrapolate linearly. If this convergence was merely just a null hypothesis, I can understand the thinking. But something tells me that Meyer and others of the blank slate mentality actually did hold out hope that men and women would converge athletically.
Meyer has two answers to the self-posed question: will women ever catch up to men? He provides the correct and simple answer – no. But his nuanced answer is this:
The second answer is that women have already caught up to men. Women today, for example, swim as fast as men did forty years ago. The women’s world record for butterfly ties Mark Spitz’s 1967 record.
Setting aside the use of performance enhancing drugs, Mark Spitz et al did not have teams of trainers and scientists working to maximize athletic performance. Today, both male and female athletes do, and the 90% performance gap which Meyer’s cites holds true. To say that the women of today caught up to the men of yesterday, and to hold that up as some sort of achievement for equality is mere pandering.
This type of research, a search for a golden ratio between men and women, also applies to strength competitions. Meyer establishes the 90% ratio for speed competitions but ignores weightlifting. My quick analysis finds a consistent 75 – 80% ratio across equal weight classes between women and men in the snatch and clean and jerk world weight lifting records. For example, the men’s world record holder at the 62 kg weight class lifted 327 kg while the 63 kg women’s world record holder recorded 245 kg.
One wonders in what ways these strength and speed gaps can apply to the gender pay gap we hear so much about. In a manufacturing economy, when speed and strength were more valuable, the gap was larger than it is today in the service/IQ economy.
Like this:
Like Loading...
Setting aside the use of performance enhancing drugs, Mark Spitz et al did not have teams of trainers and scientists working to maximize athletic performance.
It’s not only the drugs that have got better, but also the pools and the swimwear. Without those advantages, today’s female swimmers would stand no chance against Spitz’s times.
One wonders in what ways these strength and speed gaps can apply to the gender pay gap we hear so much about. In a manufacturing economy, when speed and strength were more valuable, the gap was larger than it is today in the service/IQ economy.
Another way to say this: In a free market, when companies could base their wages on productivity, the gap was larger than it is today in the highly-regulated, ultra-litigious economy in which paying men more than women is all-but-illegal.
The meme that, ok, yes, we have to admit that men are physically superior to women (faster/stronger/more endurance) but that the sexes are mentally equal, and, after all, that’s what matters today, is pretty annoying. There’s a few thousand years of history that say that’s not the case. (Compare, e.g., the achievements of monks and nuns.) That meme underlies a lot of the end-of-men bullshit.
I am a certified United States Olympic Lifting Coach through the USAW(USA Weightlifting). There is a ton of technique in Oly lifting a very technical woman can easily beat a man less technical and less experienced. Now if you look at Power Lifting which has less technique and more a demonstration of raw strength the numbers are much much larger. A very good natural female Power Lifter can not compete with a high school male.
Just a little insight into the strength sports.
“that there are and were structural factors that prevented women from engaging in and training for athletics. ”
the cavemen should’ve come up with ladies’ gyms instead of chasing the woolly mammoth, nasty oppressors.
“Women today, for example, swim as fast as men did forty years ago.”
someone mentioned the 4-minute mile at Sailer’s.
“In a free market, when companies could base their wages on productivity, ”
the elite athletes counterparts being CEOs, rather elite CEOs, and women earn more there:
http://au.pfinance.yahoo.com/photos/photo/-/14491672/10-female-ceos-who-earn-more-than-male-ceos/14492723/
posted over at Roissy’s blog:
http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2012/08/09/realtalker-of-the-month/#comment-358477
“It is not surprising that it seems to be these very masculine women, these mistakes of nature, aided and abetted by their counterparts, the feminine men, who are largely responsible for the feminist movement. Nor is it surprising that ‘they recognize’ as W. L. George puts it, ‘no masculine or feminine “spheres,” and that they propose to identify absolutely the conditions of the sexes.’”
http://fullofgraceseasonedwithsalt.blogspot.in/2010/03/feminists-as-mistakes-of-nature.html
“As a social movement and ideology, feminism can’t be understood if seen as a product of the 1960′s and not in the larger historical perspective. It began to emerge as a serious cultural influence in the late 1800′s. The fact that women in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries lived what appear to us traditional lives does not contradict this. The ideas and assumptions of an influential few were undergoing profound changes.
This is why a woman in her thirties today may find herself at odds with her grandmother or her deceased great-grandmother. The idea that feminism is new or avant-garde is laughable. Feminists don’t represent the cutting-edge. They represent the long-existing establishment.”
http://www.thinkinghousewife.com/wp/2012/08/why-a-90-year-old-misanthrope-loves-the-olympics/
PS – “structural factors that prevented women from engaging in and training for athletics. ”
and now we can get them to change their body structure to an astonishing degree! What is this brainwashing that you speak of?
Well, we’ve seen the same thing regarding the wage gap. At one point the wage gap was narrowing at a decent clip, as structural barriers were removed. I think it was around 60 cents in the mid 60′s compared to today’s 75-80 cents. But now it’s stayed flat for a decade.
Women’s sports are already pretty competitive. I’m fairly athletic and was never a stand out at any sport I played. Most female athletes already get enough competition from other women.
Mark Spitz also had a mustache slowing him down:
https://www.google.com/search?q=mark+spitz&hl=en&prmd=imvnso&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ei=b3QkUMqwHoyu8AT61YBI&ved=0CEsQ_AUoAQ&biw=1366&bih=667
the elite athletes counterparts being CEOs, rather elite CEOs, and women earn more there:
The link looks at the Fortune 500, and compares the average of the 481 male CEO salaries to those of the 19 female CEOs. I’d also say that elite athlete/elite CEO is a bad analogy, inasmuch as the evaluation of CEOs is both subjective and political.
At the risk of making a dumb observation, who would want to be physically equal/same as the opposite sex?
I don’t know any guys who want to hookup with some
Thick necked rough skinned woman with calloused hands. I assume not many if any women want a guy with curvaceous hips and manboobs. To perform equally in all physical activity the sexes would have to morph into gross parodies of the opposite sex. Sounds like a recipe for a some crazy distopian future.