Competitive sports are bad for girls
Physically, psychologically, socially - the evidence is clear
My daughter is approaching school age, and I’m thinking carefully about which activities will make her happiest and healthiest. I’m sure many of you are in the same position!
Few civilizations have emphasized competitive women’s sports. The notable exception is Sparta, which developed a crippling birth rate crisis shortly thereafter.
In America, it took a heavyweight piece of progressive legislation to popularize women’s participation in organized sports (Title IX). This normalization is a historically recent development.
There’s a ‘soft conspiracy’ to refuse to recognize how unhealthy college and professional women’s sports have turned out to be; to admit this crisis would set the grander female equality project back.
Nevertheless, more elite female athletes, doctors, and psychologists are starting to address this issue openly. An example is the recent book “The Price She Pays: Confronting the Hidden Mental Health Crisis in Women’s Sports” by Katie Steele and Dr. Tiffany Brown.
Some key evidence and findings from recent studies:
The prevalence of clinical eating disorders among female elite athletes approaches 50%.1
In women who compete in sports that emphasize leanness (like running) the prevalence of secondary amenorrhea (loss of menstruation) can be as high as 69%, compared with 2% to 5% in the general population.2
The prevalence of osteopenia (loss of bone density) ranges from 22% to 50% in female athletes.3
Together, these factors are known as the ‘The Female Athlete Triad’ and are a well-established medical phenomenon.
24.2% of Division I female athletes and 30.7 % of Division III female athletes are either very dissatisfied or mostly dissatisfied with their overall appearance.4
This might be associated with broader mental health issues: female athletes are twice as likely as male athletes to experience depressive symptoms, and have higher rates of anxiety (including generalised anxiety disorder).5
More than 20% of professional female athletes report having been sexually abused (more than double the percentage of male athletes that report the same, and far higher than the general female population).6
An basic observation: sports are inherently anti-women, in that the more like a man a woman is, the better she (generally) does in sports. Sport centres masculine attributes (hyper-focus on a single domain, size, aggression, dominance, competitiveness).
Around half the WNBA are lesbians, likely due to the association between lesbianism, heightened testosterone levels, and associated aggression and physical advantages.
It has reached the point where WNBA veterans like Candice Wiggins are claiming that straight women are explicitly bullied by teammates. The abusive treatment of Caitlin Clark might be associated with this.
I’m generally pretty sceptical of fathers who push competitive sports hard on their daughters; it often appears as a kind of displacement activity, particularly when they don’t have sons. This has been described as a kind of ‘transing’ of girls, which sometimes seems uncomfortably accurate.
By attempting to initiate girls into a masculine world, they’ve set their girls up for a lifetime of unfortunate comparisons: Why aren’t I as good as the boys? Why do people care more about the boys? Why do they get more opportunities? Why do they get better kit, status, and pay?
For women, elite sport trades off directly with fertility. In addition to the hormonal challenges of an intense exercise regime, if achieved, pregnancy and maternity interrupt training and competition.
In Steele and Brown’s book, at least one athlete interviewed describes getting an abortion specifically to preserve her ability to compete, and there is evidence that elite athletes stop breastfeeding significantly earlier than non-athletes.
This is not to say that girls should not be doing any activities! In fact, pushing girls into competitive sports has massive opportunity costs. During their teenage years, girls start dropping out of competitive sports at twice the rate boys do,7 and a significant majority have given up by the time they’re 16-17.
In other words, many girls end up with no hobbies, activities, or mastery because they’ve invested their younger years in training something they will overwhelmingly quit before they reach excellence.
But a replacement must be found; we can’t just have girls at home doing nothing. And sport does (in theory) come with real benefits: physical activity, a sense of purpose and identity, inter-generational bonding, social collaboration, and female-only spaces in an era when they are disappearing.
Historically, these needs have been fulfilled by other important activities, many of which are now in decline. These include social practices like dancing, lifestyle activities like riding and swimming, artistic practices like music and singing, and recreational activities like lawn games, tennis, and social walks.
All of these are life skills as well as cultural foundations, and should absolutely be re-emphasized. More to come on this front, as I actually start helping my daughter engage in these herself. I will research and experiment.
But please do think carefully before pushing your girls too hard!
If you enjoyed this piece, you might also enjoy this previous essay:
If you find my work valuable, please upgrade to become a paid subscriber. All revenue supports my family and goes a long way in helping me to continue to write.
You will unlock the full archive of over one hundred similar essays and podcasts, and a guide on where to start. All support is hugely appreciated.
Sic transit imperium,
Johann
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3435916/
Ibid.
Ibid.
https://thesportjournal.org/article/body-image-disturbances-in-ncaa-division-i-and-iii-female-athletes/-
https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/56/23/1381
https://www.ohchr.org/en/calls-for-input/2024/call-input-report-special-rapporteur-violence-against-women-and-girls-un
https://www.womenssportsfoundation.org/do-you-know-the-factors-influencing-girls-participation-in-sports/
I have first hand experience of the deleterious impact of competitive female sports. My sister played a sport for a top college in the US and I dated several other competitor female athletes at the top collegiate level in the US (D1). All faced pressure to develop an eating disorder and a few succumbed. Many of those women had issues with their menstrual cycle and later issues with conceiving. Another aspect that you don’t cover here (perhaps it’s stronger in the US), is the pressure to skip church/mass. My parents and sister routinely skipped church during her high school years because they were off at travel tournaments. This sets a bad precedent for the child (and the other children in the family) as it implicitly places organized sports at the top of the family value hierarchy or at least places it above religion.
I want my daughter to be healthy and fit, but at a level commensurate with her sex and design.
When my youngest daughter was in grade school (early 1980s) the gym teacher who had a side business training gymnasts, saw potential in her and approached me about letting her join his team. But I knew the grueling devotion that required because my oldest daughter's best friend had been doing gymnastic competition for her entire youth. She was at the gym at 5 am working out before school and gone every weekend to meets. To what end?
I told him that I knew she was limber but she was already big for her age and that all the work she would put in would get her nowhere because female gymnasts are usually of small stature. He didn't like my rejection but I signed her up in Camp Fire Girls where she learned all kinds of skills and once she was in middle school she tried out for cheerleading and her agility was put to good use. I never regretted that decision.