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Comment by toolslive | Hacker News Reader

Other obvious differences are:

  - no beam for men
  - Uneven bars versus parallel bars
  - no pommel horse for women
  - no rings for women
  - vault: height of apparatus

There are others (fe code of difficulty is completely different)

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So in essence, they are different sports with the same name. One is mens-only, the other, womens-only.

A bit like decathlon/heptathlon.

If there is an interest, they could split the two "gymnastics", give them different names, and have both genders compete in both disciplines. In the same way that there is a women's decathlon (but not in the Olympics).

In what contest of physical prowess, strength, or endurance can women fairly compete with men?

Mental games are wide open, but there's a reason physical games are segregated. Evolution built us to be good at different things.

You could use gendered world records and averages to weight individual scores in competitions, allowing desegregated competition, essentially giving women a handicap. There's a chance that the psychology of competition could elicit better performance and even things out, or that competing with men directly could negatively impact performance.

Politics du'jour isn't very compatible with reality in some areas. Historically speaking, the strongest and fastest or most endurant person on the planet is going to be male. I don't think it's fair to women to have to compete against the realities of biology without fundamentally changing the way things are being measured. And it's not fair to men to limit the measurement of performance on a direct and literal scale.

I don't think parent's comment meant men and women competing against each other. Just that the current sport could be split into two - say, strength gymnastics (following the current rules of men's gymnastics) and choreograph gymnastics (following the current rules of women's) - both with men's and women's categories.

There are sports/games (don't know the exact difference here) where there's no advantage for a certain sex. Think chess, darts, biljarts, curling, ... However even there, there's typically a separate competition for women. The only relevant argument is: Is there a market for category X ?

I thought that when it came to chess men do dominate as well. So it would make sense to also have a women’s category. Do any of your examples have women in general as competitive as men and still having their own category.

Chess is a nice example: the strong women will compete in the 'open' category, as will the strong blind players. 99.99% of chess players will get their asses kicked by a 2600+ player (and there are several women at that level)

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