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Chapter 3

Throwing Like a Girl

Are Men Really Better Athletes Than Women?

Like many boys in the United States, actor John Goodman grew up playing football and baseball. He’s right-handed, so when he was cast to play Babe Ruth in a film about the famous lefty baseball player, Goodman had to learn how to throw with his left hand. It wasn’t easy, and Goodman practiced in private to hide his mechanics, which were embarrassing at first. Though Goodman could throw just fine with his right hand, as a lefty he “threw like a girl” until he mastered the motion with his nondominant hand. Goodman’s story demonstrates what it means to say someone “throws like a girl,” and it has nothing to do with underlying anatomical differences. When someone “throws like a girl, “they simply haven’t learned a certain type of throwing motion. The phrase, along with others such as “run like a girl,” reinforces ideas about inherent biological differences between the athletic abilities of women and men.

As discussed in previous chapters, the world of sports has long been defined as a masculine domain. For much of the history of sports, women weren’t allowed to participate. Since the passage and implementation of Title IX in the United States, women have marched onto the playing field in impressive numbers. Still, it’s a widely accepted assumption that in most (if not all) sports, men perform better than women. If that’s true, how might we explain it? And could it be that the truth about the athletic abilities of women and men is more complicated than the simple statement that men are better athletes than women?

Striking Out the Babe, and Throwing Like a Girl

There’s one event that didn’t get portrayed in the movie about Babe Ruth in which John Goodman starred—the time the Babe got struck out by a woman. Seventeen-year-old pitcher Virne “Jackie” Mitchell became the second woman in history to sign a professional baseball contract in 1931. She was recruited to play for the men’s AA Chattanooga Lookouts, and on April 12, 1931, the Lookouts played an exhibition game against the New York Yankees. In front of a crowd of 4000, Mitchell struck out both Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig. Then she was pulled from the game. Just a few days later, the commissioner of baseball, Kennesaw Mountain Landis, voided Mitchell’s contract. Baseball, Landis said, was “too strenuous for a woman.”^[1]

Maybe Landis really thought baseball was too strenuous for women, but it’s likely he was also a little disturbed by the idea that a 17-year-old woman could strike out two future Hall of Famers. Virne Mitchell certainly didn’t throw like a girl, or if she did, it didn’t keep her from being a great pitcher. What does it mean to throw like a girl, anyway? Is there something in the chromosomal makeup of girls that dictates their throwing motion? There are no structural differences in the makeup of women and men’s shoulders or arms. The case of Virne Mitchell and many other women demonstrate that not all women “throw like a girl.”

As with many of the differences in men and women’s athletic abilities, the likely explanation for what people mean by the expression “to throw like a girl” has to do with social factors as much as biology. In this case, throwing like a girl is due to the way girls are socialized, or how they’re taught to be in their bodies. As Iris Marion Young notes,

Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl. They have in common first that the whole body is not put into fluid and directed motion, but rather . . . the motion is concentrated in one body part; and . . . tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and follow through in the direction of her intention.^[2]

In other words, Young is saying that girls and boys are taught to move differently. Girls are taught to be less intentional, and to take up less space with their movement.

Can You Run and Jump in a Dress?

Young’s observations are backed up by research on young children in a preschool setting, which revealed observable gender differences in body movement. Girls are first restricted in their movement by what they wear—namely, dresses. It’s not impossible to do things like run and throw and jump in a dress. In some sense, you could argue that dresses and skirts are less restrictive of body movement. The problem is that dresses come with their own set of rules about what should and shouldn’t be done when wearing them. Observations of preschool-age girls as young as five years old show that the girls are already patrolling themselves and each other about how to behave in a dress. Girls pull each other’s dresses down when they ride up as they crawl into and out of playground tunnels. Girls wearing overalls understand that they can put their feet up on a table, but that girls wearing dresses cannot. Dresses are often capable of being lifted up and, even at five, girls understand how embarrassing this exposure is. All of these realities of dress-wearing mean that girls spend a great deal of time and effort either managing their own clothing or having their own clothing managed and patrolled for them.^[3]

Girls learn to restrict their bodies partly as a result of what they’re wearing. But their movements are also patrolled by adults in ways that are much different from boys. One study found that teachers give bodily instructions to preschool boys at much higher rates than they do girls (65 percent to 26 percent). But boys obeyed the instructions of their teachers less than half the time, while girls obeyed 80 percent of the time. So even though the bodily behavior of boys was being patrolled, that patrolling wasn’t as successful as it was with girls. In addition, teachers were more likely to give girls very specific instructions about how to change a bodily behavior, as opposed to more general directions for boys. Boys might be told: stop throwing, stop jumping, stop clapping, stop splashing, and so on. But girls were likely to be told: talk to her, don’t yell, sit here, pick that up, be careful, be gentle, give it to me, put it down there. This difference means that boys are given a larger range of what they might do with their bodies than are girls.^[4] In other words, while boys are being told in broad strokes what not to do, girls are being given very specific directions about what they should do in their bodies.

Given these findings, it’s not surprising that there are big differences in the bodily movements of three-year-old girls compared to five-year-old girls. Three-year-old girls in one study were much more similar to boys of the same age in the way they played physically with other children. Girls of this age engaged in more rough-and-tumble play, more physical fighting, and more arguing. But by the time they were five, these types of rough play decreased dramatically, as girls are taught not to be “too rough” with each other. From a very early age, then, girls get less practice engaging in many of the behaviors—running, jumping, wrestling—that are crucial to many sports. A girl may be at a disadvantage long before she steps onto the field for the first time.

Learning Not to Be Strong:
Moving and Playing Less

These early differences in how girls and boys move around matter for their sporting futures. On average, girls start playing organized sports a half year later than boys do.^[5] A recent study in the United Kingdom found that boys spent 40 minutes on average on sports activities each day, compared to 25 minutes for girls.^[6] In Australia, adolescent girls are 20 percent less active than their male peers.^[7] In one survey of youth sports participation, 69 percent of girls reported playing organized sports compared to 75 percent of boys.^[8] These differences between boys’ and girls’ sports participation widen with age. Many girls living in urban areas drop out of organized sports entirely. While in sixth through eighth grades, 78 percent of girls in urban areas play sports, that number drops to only 59 percent by ninth through twelfth grades.^[9] Girls drop out of sports at twice the rate of boys by age 14, and this is especially true in underserved communities.^[10] The opportunities for girls and women to play sports have certainly increased since the passage of Title IX in the United States in 1972, but girls still have an estimated 1.3 million fewer opportunities to play high school sports than boys do.^[11] For example, in one young woman’s community, the boys all-star soccer league had twice as many spots available than the girl’s league.^[12] That girls start playing sports later, do so at lower rates than boys, and have fewer opportunities to play high school sports are all social factors that inevitably contribute to differences in women’s competitive performances.

Girls have lower rates of sports participation partly because of fewer opportunities. But other barriers are more subtle, like the social stigma that’s still associated with girls in sports. Girls playing sports are still vulnerable to bullying, social isolation, or negative performance evaluations.^[13] As teenagers, girls may fear being labeled a “lesbian” because of their participation in sports. Norms about what an ideal woman’s body should look like make it difficult for girls to develop the muscular bodies that might be needed to play many sports. In all these ways, girls receive subtle and not-so-subtle messages that sports participation is not for them.

Society, then, makes it more difficult for girls to gain the same amount of experience as boys in sports and physical activity. These social factors interact with biology in complicated ways that make it difficult to say exactly where the social ends and the biological begins. For example, studies tell us that women have less upper-body strength compared to men, while women’s lower-body strength is comparable to men’s. But as discussed above, we also know that from a very young age, girls are less active than boys. They play fewer sports. Girls and women are definitely discouraged from engaging in activities that might build strength and muscular bodies. In physical education classes, teachers themselves hold stereotypical notions about girls and strength training. If women are discouraged from engaging in activities that build strength, surely these social factors have some role to play in these physical differences.

Could a Woman Outswim a Man?
Average Differences and the Performance Gap

There are, of course, also some biological differences between women and men that may impact their athletic ability. But the first thing to understand about all gender differences that have been documented between men and women is that they’re average differences, which is an important distinction to make. Let’s look at height to understand what an average difference means. The average height for men in the United States is 5 feet, 9 inches tall while the average for women is 5 feet, 4 inches.^[14] The very tallest man alive, at 8 feet, 2 inches, is taller than the tallest woman, at 7 feet, 8 inches.^[15] But below those extremes, there’s a great deal of overlap. That is, there are quite a few women who are taller than many men and quite a few men who are shorter than many women. The same is true for any gender difference related to athletic performance. The fastest man in the world can still beat the fastest woman. But that doesn’t mean that many women cannot outrun many men. When we talk about average differences in athletic performance, then, we have to understand this context.

In many athletic events, there is an average performance gap, but that gap has narrowed over time. One analysis of world records set at the Olympics suggests that in running events specifically, women have closed the performance gap from 30 percent in 1922 to 10.7 percent in 1984, when women’s performances stabilized. That means that while in 1922, men’s world records were on average 30 percent faster than women’s, by 1984, men’s world records were only 10 percent faster.^[16]