kny wrote:
End of argument.
Well, no, start of the argument, really. :)
Quote:
I've organized a cycling road race. The women P/1/2 field raced 40 miles (2 laps), while the male P/1/2 field raced 56 miles (3 laps). The women earned less prize money. The women's field was smaller and less competitive. No one called me sexist, although the argument for this claim is much stronger.
I think I did point that sexism is far more ingrained in cycling than triathlon. There's no reason for women not to race just as far, other than possibly running into time issues from taking a bit longer from going a few MPH slower. Women run marathons (though that was quite a battle in its day). There are various rationale given for smaller prize purses in cycling, most of which have to do with treating each race as its own market. The more people who show up, the more prize money there is for the category. However that rationale usually fails when considering the outsized men's P12 purse vs. a men's Cat 4 purse - when those fields can be about the same size.
Quote:
The valid argument I see for equal numbers is that it is a World Championship. For that argument to be valid, the field needs to be limited to the true creme de la creme.It doesn't "need" to be. It'd just be consistent with most World Championship events in other sports where qualifications are highly regulated.
But back to the proportionality argument. This was the same argument given to fight Title IX quality rules in NCAA sports. "There just aren't that many women in athletics. We don't need to build them their own locker rooms. Don't need to allocate them as much money because there are fewer." Then Title IX came along. And guess what, women's sports in the NCAA exploded, and now ~43$% of student-athletes are women.
The question comes down to whether the policy should be accommodation or leadership. I see it as leadership. You construct policy largely around a vision of what you want the sport to be. Not to accommodate existing inequities in numbers.