I heard recently that in a lot of sports, it's not a mens division and a womens division, the division people think of as a mens division, is actually an unrestricted open division, women can technically play there but they just aren't at the level to do so. And apparently that's the case with american pool. I was wondering which sports the mens division is an open division and which one it really is strictly a mens division. Was wondering what the situation is re badminton? Is it technically an open division, or strictly a mens division?
In BWF events, only men can compete in Men's disciplines, as is clearly defined in §5.1.2.1: This only applies to BWF tournaments. At lower levels, the federations and clubs organizing the events are free to make their own rules. Especially when the tournaments are small or there is significant variation in skills/age/disabilities (e.g. U17 girls and U13 boys in one group), then an open section, or allowing players to play in other disciplines, makes sense. I myself have played in and organized tournaments where we set this up for a variety of reasons: One tournament was really just a doubles tournament, with everybody competing in one discipline. These were mostly beginners; even a lower-league woman can easily win against a man who has not mastered basic shots. In one instance, we did not have enough entries in WD A (with an A/B/C/D ranking system where the number of players in a given level is roughly 4 times the previous one, i.e. grouping two leagues of a pyramid-shaped league system). We let the entries play in MD B, and it worked out fine (from what I remember). In a youth tournament, we had large entries in some disciplines and barely any at all in others. We threw everybody in one large everybody else discipline, and ranked everybody according to the results in that group (for example, if one WDU19 entry placed third and the other WDU 19 entry placed sixth, the first would be awarded the gold medal). For kids it's somewhat harder to accept that they're playing against people of different ages, but we had matches where we otherwise wouldn't have had any.
in local tournaments we regular see female players play in male events. some are so strong they don't get enough competition in the female divisions.
I was surprised to see a woman competing at the World Darts Championship this year, as I had assumed it was just for men. She did quite well too.
I think, that it depends a lot on the physical demands in a certain sport. The body composition and muscle mass in relation to bodyweight differs a lot in females/males and therefor a male player will have a major advantage in sports where you need your muslces to generate power/explosiveness. In sports like darts/formula one, where this is not so much of a requirement, you will see open devision, in other sports like weightlifting or boxing even male/female devisions are subdivided into weight dependend sub-divisions, because of the strong correlation of bodyweight and muscle mass.
Yes everybody here knows the differences between men and women at least as well as you do. But my point is I heard that for many sports, what people think is a men's division is actually an open division, but people don't realise because there are no women able to compete at that level against men So I wanted to see what the situation was for badminton , and phihag covered it.
