The USA Women’s hockey team is world’s best in its category. No matter how skilled they are, how diligently they work, or how cohesive a team they might be, they can’t compete on the same level as men. The other day, a high school boys’ hockey team from Warroad, Minnesota beat the U.S. Olympic Women’s team. I don’t know if this is particularly surprising to anyone. Still, I flashed back to a course I took on “Women in Sport” in college. In that class, a female student said that my view seemed Nazi-like (students who were ignorant enough to invoke such a loathsome comparison were mercifully few and far between) because I insisted that it was unrealistic to expect elite women to compete with elite men in sports that were largely dependent on strength, power, and speed. Specifically, I disagreed with her contention that there should be a multi-gender 100M dash in the Olympics. I’m a supporter of women’s sports as well as equal opportunity. But to insist that men and women are the same is not only ridiculous, but undermines the special qualities that each gender possesses.
