Originally Posted by
gsteinb
I don't get it. Why are competitive athletics necessary for all people and both genders? My wife is in better shape than the vast majority of over weight hyper competitive middle age cyclists I know. She also doesn't have a competitive bone in her body.
It's not about what's necessary. Why are competitive athletics necessary for people of all races? Of all heights? If there's unequal participation by people of different ethnicities, do we shrug it off as them just being uninterested? In the history of sports, unequal representation hasn't come from innate differences, it's come from social factors, both deliberate and implicit. If there is unequal participation, there's a reason for it. "Men and women are just different," doesn't cut it. We're all human. We're not wired up that differently. The counterexamples are too numerous to list, but rowing, soccer, lacrosse are just a small handful of sports I can name where participation by both genders is much closer to representative of the actual population ratio. Is racing a boat less competitive than bike racing? (Spoiler: no).
I think that you are going to have more women who aren't interested in competition than you will have men. I don't believe for a second that it's for biological reasons, and I don't think it's particularly relevant either way - there are still lots of women out there who COULD become interested in racing, but never try. There's a market to be reached - by the way, marketing to 50% of the population is a pretty good reason to want to improve the situation.
As for suggestions, well, if it were an easy problem, it would be solved, wouldn't it? Just because it's hard doesn't mean that the right thing to do is just decide women don't want to race bikes, throw our hands up in the air and give up. It's a hard slog. Rowing had the benefit of Title IX. We don't have that. But we do have real generational changes that are happening. I think the best things going right now are the various high school racing leagues and junior development that is focused as much on girls as boys. And not just in cycling, either, but across all kinds of sports. As girls and women get taken more seriously as athletes, they will keep responding to that, and over time there will be a larger base of women who are interested in competing. In the meantime, I'll say one more time, we need to keep offering everything we can afford to, because it's the right thing to do.