Should professional sports have gender balance?

Is there a reason they should not? Or at least have representation?

With such a small subset of the population, statistically there wouldn't be an even mix. But IMO there should be at least some representation of every "protected" attribute. There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example. Not every player needs to be able to be a linebacker, after all.

> There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example.

Please provide three examples. I played college football at a tiny division 2 school and have never met a woman (I live in the gym these days) for which this is close to true.

Even if you're referring to a low/no contact position like kicker/punter you're still under threat of a 220 lb linebacker destroying you [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqjGBqDwhUU

We live in a society where it's impossible for any woman to ever even do college football in any serious capacity. Of course there are zero NFL capable women in that system, do you think people just magically and spontaneously arise from the aether fully developed to such capacity?

It requires a physical and genetic predisposition to even start to qualify for the NFL and most college teams - which was my point.

How is it impossible? There are no rules barring women from playing college football. They can try out for the team like any other student, and if they're good enough then they'll get playing time.

> There's plenty of women with the physique and skills to fill roles in the NFL, for example. Not every player needs to be able to be a linebacker, after all.

Doubt it, outside of possibly kicker. Otherwise, you wouldn't see the biological differences in track and field performances between males and females, given how much football relies on physical attributes like size, strength and explosiveness.

There could be a professional female league of course, like the WNBA for basketball. But if even tennis has to keep men and women separate to be fair, then there's little chance a physical sport like the NFL would be competitive for women alongside men.

> Otherwise, you wouldn't see the biological differences in track and field performances between males and females, given how much football relies on physical attributes like size, strength and explosiveness.

I will grant you this. A top-level woman can not out-physical a top-level man.

But, there's more to professional sports than just physicality. You brought up Tennis - but as proven in the various exhibition matches, women have not been cleanly swept as one might expect, and many have won over the years.

This leads me to say that there's room even in the physically intensive sports for both genders, not to mention in the less physically intensive sports.

Are you sure about that? I don't think there has ever been a tennis match played under normal rules where a top pro woman has beaten a similarly ranked pro man. In the most recent such major exhibition, Karsten Braasch easily defeated both Williams sisters even though he was only ranked #203. The difference in speed and power is enormous, to the extend that at elite levels women and men are playing totally different games.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_the_Sexes_%28tennis%...

This is absolutely delusional. The best women's (non-gridiron) football teams are regularly obliterated by random 14 year old boys teams, and that's a sport that's much less reliant on physical strength.

Kind of a complicated question, but not necessarily, gender (or sex I guess) does impact ability in many sports.

I say complicated because it's not just about the number of people employed, but also how much they're paid, whether or not there are separate leagues, what about the coaching staff, etc.

It's fine to think of pro sports as one of the very few professions where you're performing so close to the human limit that biology actually becomes a factor. It's not just gender, for example short people won't be equally represented in many sports, which does not need to be true for almost any other job.

So you believe that in every industry where men have less than 50% representation (also college admissions), they are being discriminated against, because our goal should be 50/50?

Direct discrimination is not always the primary cause, sometimes there is a self-selection issue caused by broader societal or cultural issues. But yes, in nursing for example, there is no inherent reason for the 90/10 women/men gender split in the US, and we should aim to equalize that. I don't know what causes it, probably some combination of discrimination by employers and patients, and cultural norms that discourage men from pursuing nursing.

Also, given that the split of actual humans in the workforce is quite close to 50/50, if we successfully equalize male-dominated industries, we would expect female-dominated industries to also equalize just because of the available employees. As in, we shouldn't just consider each industry in isolation, they're all part of one big society, and they all impact each other.

You don't see any possibility that the 90/10 split is in some part due to each genders' preferences, in general? You don't think that, in general, women prefer more social careers and less staring at a screen for 8 hours?

For example, men are well established to be physically stronger in general, so fields requiring heavy manual labor like parts of construction requiring a certain level of strength, will naturally favor men. All else equal, this pulls men from other fields so that the other fields would be like 52/48 women/men. Of course things aren't equal and we see an amalgamation of different factors, some preferential, some physical, some discriminatory, leading to imbalanced outcomes. But remove the discriminatory and that doesn't mean you get 50/50.

If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.

> You don't think that, in general, women prefer more social careers and less staring at a screen for 8 hours?

I don't think there's any biological reason for that, and if it's true I think it's due to mostly contrived cultural factors that are themselves caused by historical discrimination.

> If not, then by a purely discriminatory worldview, men are severely discriminated against in higher education by their low college attendance rates.

Yes, I'm not fighting you on this, I don't know who you're arguing with. There used to be a male bias in college admissions, now there is a female bias. There is clearly no biological explanation, so it must be due to the discrimination and cultural factors I described.