Scientific American Is Unscientific on Sex Differences and Athletic Performance

L ast year, the once-esteemed publication Scientific American argued that, before the late 18th century, “Western science recognized only one sex — the male — and considered the female body an inferior version of it.” It added that the subsequent shift to “the ‘two-sex model’ served mainly to reinforce gender and racial divisions by tying social status to the body.”

In “The Theory That Men Evolved to Hunt and Women Evolved to Gather Is Wrong,” an article for the new November issue, Cara Ocobock and Sarah Lacy do not go that far. Their treatment of the history of human development and the differences between sexes contains one argument that is worth considering and another that is interesting but not as potent as they seem to think. Yet these two claims serve largely as dubious predicates for a third that defies all evidence: that men and women are, or at least could be, functionally equivalent in physical performance if not for a kind of conspiracy that is holding women back.

The baseless argument Ocobock and Lacy advance depends on two more-plausible claims. One is that the study of sex differences has been harmed by a lack of participation by female test subjects. There is some truth to this. Other studies, such as “The Biological Basis of Sex Differences in Athletic Performance: Consensus Statement for the American College of Sports Medicine,” have come to a similar conclusion. The other is that there is historical evidence in hunter-gatherer societies that women did hunt. Ocobock and Lacy do present credible evidence of this, but not enough to establish this pattern as more than an exception.

But these two plausible or at least debatable arguments become more suspect in light of their main contention. We are to believe that, if women did hunt, then they were once equal to men, not just in status but in physical capacity. And if they once were, then it must be the case that men — upon “the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality” — secured the means not only to oppress women but to alter science itself in their own favor, and they must be doing so to this day.

While Ocobock and Lacy admit that “there are undeniable differences between females and males,” they hold that the reality of female physical capacity approaches parity with that of males. “Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities,” they write. To this there is an obvious rejoinder: It is not true. Consult the most up-to-date list of world records in running events at various distances, and you will find men ahead in all of them. Some samples from the aforementioned paper:

• 100 meters (seconds): 9.58 (male), 10.49 (female)
• 800 meters (minutes: seconds): 1:40.91 (male), 1:53.28 (female)
• 5,000 meters (minutes: seconds): 12:35.26 (male), 14:06.62 (female)
• Marathon (hours: minutes: seconds): 2:01:09 (male), 2:14:04 (female)

The authors, seemingly anticipating this rejoinder, offer instances of high-performing female endurance athletes in ultramarathon-type events. But like the female-hunter examples, they are insufficiently comprehensive to be credible as more than exceptions.

Here arises the most absurd portion of the argument Ocobock and Lacy make. Unable, despite their best efforts, to overcome the reality of performance differentials between men and women, they hatch a conspiracy:

The 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.

Got that? Men and women are secretly the same, but the dark designs of Big Athletics keep women down.

What makes this even more ridiculous is that there was a time when women were being kept from proving their true physical prowess: i.e., when they weren’t allowed to compete at all. The authors cite the pathbreaking participation of Kathrine Switzer in the 1967 Boston Marathon, during which one race official infamously tried to force her off the course. Boston was not alone in such prohibitions, whose lifting has been a boon to athletics and to society as a whole. And during this period of general female admission into sports, women made considerable physical progress. While various factors have led to an improvement in athletic performance for both sexes over the past 100 years, women have improved at a faster rate than men. But that faster rate has been a product of dramatic increases in participation. As the previously cited paper notes, “the sex difference in performance for many events leveled off after 20–30 [years] of ‘catch up’ for women.” Biological reality ultimately intrudes.

And that reality is inescapable. Sexual differences in physical capability emerge with puberty and arise from the disparity in levels of key hormones, such as testosterone, between men and women. The resulting asymmetries in bone and muscle mass, lung capacity, height, and more cannot be wished away. As they are averages, one of course finds exceptions in either direction, among either sex. But the trends are undeniable, and the performance differential is inescapable. It can be a minimal factor in technical arenas such as archery and shooting, whose primitive antecedents could have had a role in hunting. But that is not what Ocobock and Lacy assert. It is their view that women and men are secretly the same, but that a conspiracy orchestrated by the latter is keeping the former from realizing it.

The truth is that the real conspiracy today is being conducted in plain view: to erase the difference between men and women. It is amply funded and has adherents across the commanding heights of our culture and politics. Ocobock and Lacy out themselves as part of it in their article not merely with its thesis but with their tortured explanation of how the word sets “male/female” and “man/woman” both “assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially,” as “sex and gender both exist as a spectrum.” Practically every day brings more evidence of the harm that this attempted erasure is inflicting on our social order, and not just in the athletic pursuits where obvious men who pose as women regularly deprive women of honors. Sexual differentiation is real and does not in any way detract from the equality of and equal dignity owed to the two sexes. Denying it is many things. But scientific isn’t one of them.