Comment by ImaCake
4 hours ago
I went and read it and it doesn't seem to matter to me that it's about ultra-endurance events? Of course differences in stride length and endurance physiology will matter for run performance.
The full paragraph:
>Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves.
To me both cultural and physiological differences are likely in play. I am not even sure how you could effectively seperate culture from physiology here (hard to do a randomised controlled trial on stride length - I guess Mendelian Randomisation regression might work?). Anyone confidently asserting only one or neither of these is at play is probably not stating that from a position of logic.
The claim that is being made in the article is that only cultural differences are relevant. Saying the relative effects of cultural and biological differences are hard to know would not be a very controversial statement.
Yes, which is why I am happy to state it having not read that deeply into the evidence either way. I would argue that stating "Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences" is a very strong statement that the scientific consensus has many counter-factuals available to disprove.
They even cite physiological differences themselves extensively (namely the role estrogen).