Should women’s football have different rules from men’s?
women’s football World Cup, held this year in Australia and New Zealand, is setting records. England eventually beat Colombia, and then Australia, to set up a final against Spain on August 20th. Attendance at the tournament is over 1.8m, up from 2015’s record of 1.4m.
TV viewership across all matches is set to pass 2bn, double the previous high point. Much of the coverage has compared the women’s game with the men’s. One striking advert tries to dispel the idea that the women’s game is less skilful.
It shows a series of impressive highlights, ostensibly featuring members of the French men’s squad. Later, the digital trickery is revealed: viewers have actually been watching the women’s team. A paper published last month in Sport Management Review, a journal, had participants watch videos of men and women playing football.
Viewers rated the men’s videos more favourably than women’s—but the difference vanished when the players were blurred to hide their sex. Yet another study, published in 2019 by Arve Vorland Pedersen, a neuroscientist and sports scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, and his colleagues, concludes that the women are indeed playing a game that is subtly different—and considerably harder—than the one being played by the men. The researchers start from the observation that women are physically different from men in many ways.
Women are shorter than men (168cm v 182cm in a Norwegian sample). Female footballers are lighter (65kg v 76kg). Women are slower (4.84 seconds to run 30 metres, v 4.25), and cannot jump as high (36cm v 57cm).
Read more on livemint.com
