The article's headline isn't well backed up by the article. The article more claims that advantages that men have in other sports are erased in ultra-endurance sport, leveling the playing field.

The headline question is only really addressed by the combination of two things in the article (the second being brought up much later, and you kind of have to connect the dots yourself a bit): 1/ women have begun setting records in endurance sports 2/ women constitute a minority of participants in such events.

The first point, beginning to win some records, doesn't by itself address the question of the headline. But taken together with the relative rarity of women they say participate could point to there being some evidence for "better than" vs "equal to." Or it could be that for the records won, the winners are truly exceptional.

Whatever that rule about headlines ending with a question mark notwithstanding, I always cringe a little at headlines like these that seem to wish for a conclusion that's not really the direction of the article.

I read a prediction maybe 30 years ago that women would eventually start to beat men in endurance events, so its really interesting to see it actually happen. It seems that one slightly overlooked aspect of the research is to look at the way that athletes are actually living: women often have greater responsibility for stuff outside of their sport whereas male athletes often have the option of focusing their lives 100% on their chosen competition- I suspect that female performance might actually be slightly underreported when you control for a lack of caregiving responsibilities.

In general, no. But, there are huge difference between individuals.

If this is ever to be so, they will need to overcome the q angle to get there-

https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC11675324/

One of my favorite delusions is that men are only better at sports than women because they are socialized to be so from a young age - that if women & girls were encouraged to be strong, fast and competitive; and if boys were scolded or perhaps asked nicely to play... board games or roleplay or whatever, then there'd be an inverse. Oh, and this delusion is comorbid with the idea that the reason sports are segregated by sex is so that men aren't embarrassed when they are beaten by women.

What's fun about both of these delusions is that they are easily disproven by even mild contact with reality. Any level of sports training with a member of the opposite sex disproves this with incredible speed. You can read social media comments from women about the first time they wrestled or playfought their mostly inactive boyfriend for the first time, and asked them not to hold back. And this doesn't even need them to engage in any kind of sport.

To hold this, you have to wilfully, intentionally dodge all physical activities with the opposite sex from schooling to your adult life. And yet, it does exist! I've met people who believe this, in the face of all reality. And then these sports-dodgers will have consequently wrong opinions on e.g. transwomen in sports, whether transmen should be allowed to take steroids and compete, equal pay in sports...

That said though, I could believe there's some crossover point in ultra-ultra endurance sports where performance equals out between the sexes.

Is this new? I thought it was well established the performance gap converges as the race distance increases. The convergance point seems to be between 100 and 200 miles.

I always see this type of articles as sexist, implying that if a sex is better than the other in some sport than that is a sign of superiority.

No, but I've seen top men and women records and the women aren't far behind

so women's abilities may be underestimated while men generally still have a little more edge to them

Depends on the definition of "better".

"At the moment we are speculating".. nothing more to see here.

In this thread:

-zero ultrarunners, hell, probably zero runners

-tons, tons of misogyny.