Track & battlefield: a new study shows that the gender gap in running is not behaving the way it was expected to,

National Review, Dec 31, 1997 by Steve Sailer, Stephen Seiler

EVERYBODY knows that the gap in physical performance between male and female athletes is rapidly narrowing. In fact, in an opinion poll just before the 1996 Olympics, 66 per cent agreed that "the day is coming when top female athletes will beat top males at the highest competitive levels." The most highly publicized scientific study supporting this belief appeared in Nature in 1992: "Will Women Soon Outrun Men?" Physiologists Susan Ward and Brian Whipp pointed out that since the Twenties women's world records in running had been falling faster than men's. Assuming these trends continued, men's and women's records would equalize by 1998 for marathons, and during the early twenty-first century for all other distances.

This is not sports trivia. Whether the gender gap in athletic performance stems from biological differences between men and women or is simply a social construct imposed by the Male Power Structure is highly relevant both to fundamental debates about the malleability of human nature and to current political controversies such as the role of women in the military.

When everybody is so sure of something, it's time to update the numbers. So, we began an in-depth study.

Our conclusion: Although the 1998 outdoor running season has not yet started, we can already discard Ward and Whipp's forecast: women will not catch up to men in the marathon next year. The gender gap between the best marathon times remains the equivalent of the woman record holder's losing by more than 2.6 miles. In fact, we can now be certain that the fastest women will never equal the fastest men in any standard-length race. Contrary to all expectations, the overall gender gap has been widening throughout the Nineties. While men's times have continued to get faster, world-class women are running noticeably slower than in the Eighties. Why? It's a fascinating tale of sex discrimination, ethnic superiority, hormones, and the fall of the Berlin Wall that reconfirms the unpopular fact that biological differences between the sexes and the races will continue to play a large, perhaps even a growing, role in human affairs.

First, though, why is running the best sport for carefully measuring changes in the gender gap? For one thing, men and women currently compete under identical conditions in ten Olympic running events. In general, track is ideal for statistical study because it's such a simple sport: all that matters is the times. It's also probably the most universal sport. Track medalists in the 1996 Olympics included an Australian aborigine as well as runners from Burundi, Trinidad and Tobago, South Korea, Mozambique, Norway, and Namibia. Running is so fundamental to life and so cheap that most children on earth compete at it enough to reveal whether they possess any talent for it.

As Ward and Whipp noted, the gender gap did narrow sharply up through the Eighties. Let's focus on those ten directly comparable races. Back in 1970, women's world-record times averaged 21.3 per cent higher (worse) than men's. But in the Seventies women broke or equaled world records 79 times, compared to only 18 times for men, lowering the average gender gap in world records to 13.3 per cent. In the Eighties, women set 47 records compared to only 23 by men, and the gender gap shrank to just 10.2 per cent. Further narrowing seemed inevitable in the Nineties.

Yet male runners are now pulling away from female runners. Women's performances have collapsed, with only 5 record-setting efforts so far in this decade, compared to 30 by men. (The growth of the gender gap has even been accelerating. Men broke or tied records 7 times in 1997, the most in any year since 1968.) The average gender gap for world records has increased from 10.2 per cent to 11.0. And since four of the five women's "records" set in the Nineties occurred at extremely questionable Chinese meets (as we shall see later), it's probably more accurate to say that for relatively respectable records, men are ahead of women 30 to 1, and the average gender gap has grown from 10.2 per cent to 11.5 per cent.

Despite all the hype about 1996 being the "Women's Olympics," in the Atlanta Games' central events -- the footraces -- female medalists performed worse relative to male medalists than in any Olympics since 1972. In the 1988 Games the gender gap for medalists was 10.9 per cent, but it grew to 12.2 per cent in 1996. Even stranger is the trend in absolute times. Track fans expect slow but steady progress; thus, nobody is surprised that male medalists became 0.5 per cent faster from the 1988 to the 1996 Olympics. Remarkably, though, women medalists became 0.6 per cent slower over the same period.

Why is the gender gap growing? In the longer races -- from 800m to the marathon, but especially in the 5,000m and 10,000m races -- the main reason is discrimination, society forcing women to stay home and have six babies. Of course, we're not talking about the industrialized world, but about a few polygamous, high-birth-rate African nations. All 17 male distance record-settings in the Nineties belong to Africans -- Kenyans (9), Ethiopians (5), Algerians (2), Moroccans (1). A culture can encourage women to pursue glory in athletics or to have a half-dozen kids, but not both. Thus, Kenya's high birth rate (not long ago it was more than five times West Germany's) has contributed to a swelling torrent of brilliant male runners, but has kept any Kenyan woman from winning Olympic gold.