Women aren’t just smaller men

The sub-heading of an article in the Economist this week which poses the question “Should women’s football have different rules from men’s?”

The article cites a report by Arve Vorland Pedersen, a neuroscientist and sports scientist at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, which that "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). Those differences persist even among the most athletic members of each sex.”

“The researchers then try to scale the size of a football pitch to account for those anthropometric differences. A pitch that was the same relative size for women as it is for men would, they say, be 93 metres long and 61 metres wide, down from the current recommended dimensions of 105 metres x 68 metres (see table).

Nor is it just the pitch. Shorter female keepers can cover a smaller part of the goal than a man can. To achieve parity between the sexes, the women’s goal, say the researchers, should be shrunk from 7.32 metres wide and 2.44 metres high to 6.76 metres across and 2.25 metres high. Even the ball would change: taking account of women’s lower leg strength would require a ball weighing 287 grams, rather than the 430-grams of a standard male ball (though that would alter how the ball behaves in flight). Put another way, say the researchers, expecting women to play with a men’s ball is a bit like asking men to kick a 623-gram basketball-sized sphere around.”

“In athletics, women put lighter shots, throw lighter discuses and leap over lower hurdles than men do. The WNBA, a women’s professional basketball league in America, uses a lighter ball. Volleyball uses a lower net. Indeed, women’s football used lighter balls until the 1990s.”

But football seems remarkably resistant to such accommodations. Why is that one wonders?