Sports Science Doesn't Care About Women

The New York Times has an article about women in sports science that is in turn both infuriating and interesting. See, once upon a time Dr. David Rowlands (a senior lecturer with Massey University's Institute of Food, Nutrition, and Human Health among other impressive things) wanted to know if consuming protein during or directly after a workout would improve the body's recovery. The thing is that Dr. Rowlands was apparently only interested in studying how this would effect male athletes, since he used exclusively male athletes for his study. He discovered that men who ingested protein directly after a difficult cycling session performed much better on difficult cycling sessions the next day. He published his study (which was in line with conventional wisdom according to the NYT article) and went on skipping about his merry scientist life.

Now, here is where this article gets exciting. Apparently, female cyclists approached Dr. Rowlands and asked to be included in any further research on endurance athletics. Because he was bored or something (really the article says "almost as an afterthought") he replicated the experiment using female athletes. It turns out that ingesting protein does bupkiss for female endurance athletes' performance, and in fact participants complained that their muscles were more sore than average after the workout. "DEAR SCIENCE, ARE YOU AWARE THAT WOMEN AND MEN ARE NOT THE SAME?" you might find yourself screaming at the device on which you are reading this article. Fear not, gentle reader, the Grey Lady knows what you are thinking. Here is the next sentence in the article:

"Scientists know, of course, that women are not men. But they often rely on male subjects exclusively, particularly in the exercise-science realm, where, numerically, fewer female athletes exist to be studied. But when sports scientists recreate classic men-only experiments with distaff subjects, the women often react quite differently." (emphasis mine)

Here is where I began to be annoyed. Didn't female athletes approach Dr. Rowlands and offer to be studied? In fact this article implies that he had SO MANY new female subjects that they repeated the experiment AS AN AFTERTHOUGHT. I believe that there are currently numerically fewer athletes to study but it appears that even though there are fewer female athletes in general there are enough available to perform studies on. In fact, there were enough IN THIS VERY SITUATION TO RUN THIS VERY EXPERIMENT WITH WOMEN. Throwing in the fact that there are numerically fewer female athletes does not excuse only running tests on men. The real question is whether there are enough female athletes to run studies like this with, and the answer to that question is yes there fucking are.

The article goes on to conclude that this study is inconclusive. More studies would have to be run to determine whether or not the findings were accurate, and further studies still to find out if/why women reacted differently, and if they shouldn't be consuming protein directly following a workout what should they be consuming? The take away point is this: most studies in sports science are done on men. Men are not women, and women should not take exercise science advice when the studies are done on men, or maybe they should, but no one really knows for sure because sports science doesn't care about women.

This is extremely troubling. Not only do female athletes have to put up with constant social pressures not to excel, not to compete, and not to beat the boys, but then scientists are giving men every possible scientifically verified edge, and giving women advice that is at best NOT harmful, and at worst, could hurt athletic performance and lead to injury.

It isn't just research that boosts performance that leaves women out either, studies done on the prevention and treatment of sports injury are largely male-only studies. Goodie, I guess I had better hope that I don't incur injury by following the advice of male only performance studies, and then take longer to recover because I am treating my injury in the manner prescribed by my doctor based on male only sports injury studies.

Society values male participation in sports over women's to the extent that we have made it more dangerous/difficult for women to participate at all. Is it any wonder that there are "numerically fewer" female athletes to study?

It makes me wonder what the world of sports would look like if equal attention were paid towards female athletes. What if little girls were shoved into athletics with the same reckless abandon as little boys are into pop warner football? What if the science of sports were equally focused on optimizing female distance running performance? Even feminists tend to view the achievement gap in sports as a physical reality: women are slower/smaller/weaker/easier to injure than men by nature. Maybe some of that is true, but maybe some of it isn't. We won't know for sure what the female body is capable of until we start taking female athletics at least as seriously as their male counterparts.