Gender Inequality (?)

[Bavafongoul]

I had an interesting discussion with some of my pals today at the pool hall. The subject was are men truly better pool players than women?

Needless to say, the conversations became lively and seemed pretty skewed towards men being better at sports than women in general and especially in pool.

I had one slight disagreement with my buddies because of one little girl who turned out to be an acclaimed woman player......probably the best......Jean Balukas. That woman could pretty much beat just about anyone on any given night. The men players avoided playing her like she was the plague. Aside from Jean, none of us could accredit any other women player as being on a par with the top 20 male players.....so we debated what was the reasons.

I won't go into the various points that were brought up and I'll let that evolve on this thread with everyone's posts. I came up with the most equitable way of gauging the difference, if any, in playing skills, not the power aspect of the game that men have a natural advantage over women.

I think that straight pool would be the best test to see how well women players compare with their male counterparts....Heck, I'd like to see a team of the top 5 women players match up against 5 male players.....8 ball, 9 ball. 10 ball. rotation and straight pool.......I suspect the men would win but I do not think it would be along the lines of the ass kicking my buddies thought it would be.

Matt B.

p.s. From Wikki.....Jean Balukas (born June 28, 1959) is an American pool player from Brooklyn, New York, and ranks among the stellar players in the history of the sport. At least through the 1990s, when Allison Fisher began her ascendancy, Balukas was widely acknowledged as the sole candidate for greatest female player ever. At just 9 years old she placed 5th in the 1969 U.S. Open straight pool championship, and placed 4th and 3rd respectively in the following two U.S. Opens. During the 1970s & '80s.Balukas won the U.S. Open seven years in a row from 1972 through 1978, accumulating six world championship titles, had well over 100 professional competition first-place finishes with 38 majors to her name, had a streak of 16 first-place finishes in women's professional tournaments, and was the only woman to compete on equal footing with men in professional play in her era. She quit the sport amidst controversy in 1988 while at the height of her ability, due to a dispute over her conduct in a match at the World Open Nine-ball Championship of that year.

 

[trinacria]

i think some women are excellent pool players, we know who they are by name. as far as sports, well, softball you're hitting a melon, basketball is ok but wnba is boring, I need some stupid dunks, hockey-no, football-no, soccer-well, soccer girls are hot to me, but they are the best in the worlds most popular sport, gossiping. also, some are really good at sport fukin:thumbup:. the only thing I don't like is women broadcasters in sports they never even attempted to play such as football, no disrespect, but football is a mans game, no women, no girly men, in the words of the great ex-goc of calicali.:thumbup: as far as pool, the two that could comepete are fisher and belukas, maybe Korr in her prime. The rest are good but not in a mans level. maybe if they had the "zone", but I don't believe they do, being in the zone is a dudes thing, they are to intellectual in their thinking, they don't have the feel that men do. if im wrong, so be it, but its my view. sry if I offended anyone, please don't get me banned, im tired of being banned for speaking my mind.

 

[ideologist]

Ms. Balukas had an incredibly disciplined, competitive nature when it came to pool.

Most players, and seemingly most of the female players of the game, do not.

 

[david(tx)]

I had an interesting discussion with some of my pals today at the pool hall. The subject was are men truly better pool players than women?

Needless to say, the conversations became lively and seemed pretty skewed towards men being better at sports than women in general and especially in pool.

I had one slight disagreement with my buddies because of one little girl who turned out to be an acclaimed woman player......probably the best......Jean Balukis. That woman could pretty much beat just about anyone on any given night. The men players avoided playing her like she was the plague. Aside from Jean, none of us could accredit any other women player as being on a par with the top 20 male players.....so we debated what was the reasons.

I won't go into the various points that were brought up and I'll let that evolve on this thread with everyone's posts. I came up with the most equitable way of gauging the difference, if any, in playing skills, not the power aspect of the game that men have a natural advantage over women.

I think that straight pool would be the best test to see how well women players compare with their male counterparts....Heck, I'd like to see a team of the top 5 women players match up against 5 male players.....8 ball, 9 ball. 10 ball. rotation and straight pool.......I suspect the men would win but I do not think it would be along the lines of the ass kicking my buddies thought it would be.

Matt B.

Men are usually better players until they get into a long race with a woman , then they find out who the better players are . Stick to the short races fellas.

 

[peteypooldude]

I think it's more in the "mental make up" of women more so than power.
They usually take the safer side of a given shot and that in itself can and will affect their games. I do however admire them for their work ethic but I think to excel they are going to have to rethink their mental approach in any sport

Fwiw ladies..... This is in no way a knock just an observation

 

[victorl]

Males (of nearly all species) have a natural disposition towards competitiveness due to the fact that social standing and success are seen as attractive. It generally holds true for any competitive endeavor, even non-athletic ones, where you would expect men and women to be on equal footing.

I've seen a number of amazing young female players who played at a very high level in their teens and be as strong or even stronger than their male counterparts, and I'll start thinking that she might be the one to close the gap between the men's and women's games. But it seems somewhere along their development, they always come up short when it comes to breaking into the elite men's professional level.

There will always be exceptions, though, and the potential is certainly there for a female player to dominant our sport one day. I just don't see it happening anytime soon.

 

[victorl]

Just browsing some snooker articles and found an article closely related to this thread:

Steve Davis comments about women in snooker draw condemnation

 

[macguy]

I had an interesting discussion with some of my pals today at the pool hall. The subject was are men truly better pool players than women?

Needless to say, the conversations became lively and seemed pretty skewed towards men being better at sports than women in general and especially in pool.

I had one slight disagreement with my buddies because of one little girl who turned out to be an acclaimed woman player......probably the best......Jean Balukas. That woman could pretty much beat just about anyone on any given night. The men players avoided playing her like she was the plague. Aside from Jean, none of us could accredit any other women player as being on a par with the top 20 male players.....so we debated what was the reasons.

I won't go into the various points that were brought up and I'll let that evolve on this thread with everyone's posts. I came up with the most equitable way of gauging the difference, if any, in playing skills, not the power aspect of the game that men have a natural advantage over women.

I think that straight pool would be the best test to see how well women players compare with their male counterparts....Heck, I'd like to see a team of the top 5 women players match up against 5 male players.....8 ball, 9 ball. 10 ball. rotation and straight pool.......I suspect the men would win but I do not think it would be along the lines of the ass kicking my buddies thought it would be.

Matt B.

p.s. From Wikki.....Jean Balukas (born June 28, 1959) is an American pool player from Brooklyn, New York, and ranks among the stellar players in the history of the sport. At least through the 1990s, when Allison Fisher began her ascendancy, Balukas was widely acknowledged as the sole candidate for greatest female player ever. At just 9 years old she placed 5th in the 1969 U.S. Open straight pool championship, and placed 4th and 3rd respectively in the following two U.S. Opens. During the 1970s & '80s.Balukas won the U.S. Open seven years in a row from 1972 through 1978, accumulating six world championship titles, had well over 100 professional competition first-place finishes with 38 majors to her name, had a streak of 16 first-place finishes in women's professional tournaments, and was the only woman to compete on equal footing with men in professional play in her era. She quit the sport amidst controversy in 1988 while at the height of her ability, due to a dispute over her conduct in a match at the World Open Nine-ball Championship of that year.

The women are very good players today, just a shade under the men but not there yet. When you read about Balukas she had no competition period. She played so far from the rest of the women of her time it was a joke.

Partly because she did play very good but more due to the really weak play of the pro women back then. Dorothy Wise was a dominant woman player before Balukas came along. But to be honest, she had absolutely no chance to beat a man player.

I saw Mrs. Wise play a number of times and would have had no problem playing her 150 to 75 maybe even 65 and I was far from a top player. The improvements the women have made is amazing. I see them playing as good as the men at some point in the future.

 

[Mr. Bond]

View attachment 158135
In 1901 she was the shiznit

 

[Mr. Bond]

1901 - The ambidextrous May Kaarlus, 16, performs a series of amazing billard shots in New York City. Male experts try and fail to duplicate her shots.

1903 - A women's curling team from Quebec City defeats a men's curling team from the Royal Caledonia in Scotland.

1909 - Annie Smith Peck, 57, becomes the first person to climb 21,000 foot Mount Huascaran, the highest peak in Peru on Sept. 2. Her last climb was Mount Madison, NH at age 82.

1912 - Dora Keen successfully reaches the peak of Alaska's 13,690 foot Mount Blackburn, in the first expedition to go up the southeast face, to feature a prolonged night ascent, and the first to succeed without a Swiss guide.

1914 - Miss Georgia "Tiny" Broadwick, demonstrating air-jumping techniques to the US Army in San Diego, CA, pulled her release manually, becoming the first person to make an intentional free-fall parachute jump from an airplane on June 21.

1916 - Ruth Law flies non-stop from Chicago to Hornell, NY, setting the American nonstop cross-country record for both men and women, flying 590 miles in just 6 hours. She had installed axillary gas tanks, upping her fuel capacity from 8 to 53 gallons and added a rubber gas line to her open "pusher" type Curtiss plane.

1918 - Eleanora Sears (a great-great-granddaughter of Thomas Jefferson born in 1881) takes up squash, after excelling at polo (which she rode astride, shocking conventions of the day), baseball, golf, field hockey, auto racing, swimming, tennis, yachting and speedboat racing. She accumulated 240 trophies during her athletic career. She demonstrated that women could play men's games and was a prime liberator of women in sports.

1918 - Lillian Leitzel, 36, a 90-pound acrobat and aeriast with Ringling Brothers & Barnumn &and Baily beat the 1878 world's record (12) for one-armed chin-ups - she performed 27 one-armed chin-ups hith her right arm; swiching hands, she did 19 more.

1920 - The Dick-Kerr's Ladies Professional Soccer Team tours the US, outscoring their male opponents 35-34 with a 3-3-2 record.

1924 - Sybil Bauer becomes the first woman to break an existing men's world swimming record when she won the 100-meter backstroke in 1:23.2 at the Olympic Games.

1924 - Aileen Riggin becomes the first athlete to win Olympic medals in both swimming and diving. At the 1920 Antwerp Games, the 14-year-old from Brooklyn Heights, NY, won the first women's Olympic springboard diving competition. Four years later, in Paris, she won a silver in the springboard and a bronze in the 100-meter backstroke, making her the first athlete, male or female, to medal in both the Olympic swimming and diving competitions. She will go on to become one of America's first female sportswriters.

1925 - For the first time since 1665, a woman jockey wins the Newmarket Town four-mile race. Eileen Joel, 18, raced against four other women and three men to ride Hogier home by three lengths in the oldest racing event in history.

1926 - Just three weks after Ederlie's successful Channel crossing, American Mrs. Clemington Corson of New York made the swim in 15.5 hours. Her record time also beat all the men swimmers to date.

1931 - Baseball Commissioner Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis bans women from professional baseball (the bans lasts until 1992), after 17-year-old pitcher Virne Beatrice "Jackie" Mitchell strikes out Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig in an exhibition game for the Chattanooga Lookouts. Landis voids Mitchell's contract, saying baseball is "too strenuous" for women.

1932 - Jacqueline Cochran gets her pilot's license after two and a half weeks of flight lessons. At her death in 1980 she held more speed, altitude, and distance records than any pilot, male or female, in the world.

1936 - Ruth Hughes Aarons (1910-80) wins the world singles table tennis championship, the first American to do so.

1936 - Formation of the All American Red Heads Basketball Team, who use men's rules and compete against men's teams. The team toured for more than fifty years, playing only men's teams and winning 85-90% of all their games.

1937 - Conchita Cintron (born Chile 1922) begins fighting bulls in Mexico at age 15. During her 13-year career she slew 800 bulls. She retired in 1951. She is recognized as the first woman to compete at a high professional level as a bullfighter.

1947 - Ann Shaw Carter is the first licensed helicopter pilot.

1948 - Amy Johnson sets the record for the decade for speed by flying 671 mph (1,073 kph).

1954 - Canadian Marilyn Bell, 16, becomes the first person to swim across Lake Ontario.

1964 - Willye White, the only American woman to compete on five Olympic track and field teams, wins her second silver at the Tokyo Games in the 4x100-meter relay. White held the American record in the long jump for 16 years.

1970 - Cathy Rigby wins a silver medal in balance beam at the world championships, becoming the first American man or woman to win a medal in international competition.

1973 - >Billie Jean King wins the "battle-of-the-sexes" tennis match against Bobby Riggs on Sept. 20 in Houston in front of more than 30,000 people and a world-wide TV audience of more than 50 million.

1973 - Linda Myers becomes the first US world champion in archery.

1976 - Margaret Murdock's silver three-position rifle victory at the Olympic Games makes her the first markswoman in history to win an Olympic medal. The event was open, with men and women competing against each other.

1978 - Shirley Muldowney becomes the first woman to win the National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) points title.

1978 - Norwegian Grete Waitz wins the New York City Marathon in 2:32:30, two minutes faster than the existing world record.

1979 - Dr. Sylvia Earle becomes the first person in the world to dive to a depth of 1,250 feet.

1980 - Shirley Muldowney becomes the first driver to win two National Hot Rod Association (NHRA) points titles.

 

[cleary]

It's not that women aren't able to be top level, it's just statistically speaking it hasn't happened yet. The ratio of humans playing pool to top level pros is like 1000000:1. And of that 1000000 pool players, maybe 10% are female... The odds of someone with Orcullo talent are extremely rare and the balance of male to female players is so skewed.

There is nothing physical or mental that should separate the men from the women, so it's gotta be the numbers.

 

[RiverCity]

There is nothing physical or mental that should separate the men from the women, so it's gotta be the numbers.

Agreed, there is no physical reason that a woman cant play as well as a man. I think along with the numbers, just the simple cause of some of the number difference; Pool is considered a male activity for the most part, going all the way back to when pool halls were considered dirty dives of gambling and sin etc. It just wasnt a socially acceptable activity for girls to get into. Most of the women players of yesteryear usually had some ties to a pool hall ie a family owned room etc.
If pool ever gets big again and can be sold as an "everybody" type of activity, the numbers of good women players will probably go up IMO.

 

[Solomon]

I've posted on this topic before as I've done extensive research on similar topics when it comes to differences in genders. I honestly find the topic quite fascinating. It really isn't a pool thing. Statistically males are better at competing than females are. I know that it sounds chauvinistic and/or misogynist, but there are statistics and studies that break it down way more than I'm wiling to on a pool forum.

In most head to head competition (checkers, rock/paper/scissors, jacks, connect 4, pool, etc.) males statistically perform better than their female counterparts.

Disclaimer: In no way am I saying that males are BETTER than females at anything. The sexes just have different attributes and our brains work differently.

 

[deanoc]

the women can play in the mens events
if they were to try these it could answer this question
better than politically correct dancing around the obvious fact that
men play better

 

[2strong4u]

I had an interesting discussion with some of my pals today at the pool hall. The subject was are men truly better pool players than women?

Needless to say, the conversations became lively and seemed pretty skewed towards men being better at sports than women in general and especially in pool.

I had one slight disagreement with my buddies because of one little girl who turned out to be an acclaimed woman player......probably the best......Jean Balukas. That woman could pretty much beat just about anyone on any given night. The men players avoided playing her like she was the plague. Aside from Jean, none of us could accredit any other women player as being on a par with the top 20 male players.....so we debated what was the reasons.

I won't go into the various points that were brought up and I'll let that evolve on this thread with everyone's posts. I came up with the most equitable way of gauging the difference, if any, in playing skills, not the power aspect of the game that men have a natural advantage over women.

I think that straight pool would be the best test to see how well women players compare with their male counterparts....Heck, I'd like to see a team of the top 5 women players match up against 5 male players.....8 ball, 9 ball. 10 ball. rotation and straight pool.......I suspect the men would win but I do not think it would be along the lines of the ass kicking my buddies thought it would be.

Matt B.

p.s. From Wikki.....Jean Balukas (born June 28, 1959) is an American pool player from Brooklyn, New York, and ranks among the stellar players in the history of the sport. At least through the 1990s, when Allison Fisher began her ascendancy, Balukas was widely acknowledged as the sole candidate for greatest female player ever. At just 9 years old she placed 5th in the 1969 U.S. Open straight pool championship, and placed 4th and 3rd respectively in the following two U.S. Opens. During the 1970s & '80s.Balukas won the U.S. Open seven years in a row from 1972 through 1978, accumulating six world championship titles, had well over 100 professional competition first-place finishes with 38 majors to her name, had a streak of 16 first-place finishes in women's professional tournaments, and was the only woman to compete on equal footing with men in professional play in her era. She quit the sport amidst controversy in 1988 while at the height of her ability, due to a dispute over her conduct in a match at the World Open Nine-ball Championship of that year.

Jean Balukas???? We have Emily Duddy haven't you heard? She just ran a two pack in 9 ball last week. Look out world.

 

[(((Satori)))]

I've posted on this topic before as I've done extensive research on similar topics when it comes to differences in genders. I honestly find the topic quite fascinating. It really isn't a pool thing. Statistically males are better at competing than females are. I know that it sounds chauvinistic and/or misogynist, but there are statistics and studies that break it down way more than I'm wiling to on a pool forum.

In most head to head competition (checkers, rock/paper/scissors, jacks, connect 4, pool, etc.) males statistically perform better than their female counterparts.

Disclaimer: In no way am I saying that males are BETTER than females at anything. The sexes just have different attributes and our brains work differently.

This!

Women and men are biologically programmed differently. Women are nurturers while men are achievers. Women have a feminine drive to take care of the family in a nurturing way and men have a more masculine drive to take care of the family in a more bread winning, competitive type way. These drives carry over into the way they live also including how they relate to others in a social and or competetive setting.

Men are also more logical in their thinking while women are more emotional and in general women seek to have a positive emotional outcome for all involved even on the battlefield when the more logically minded male could care less about his opponent.

These factors hold women back in competitive settings.

 

[hang-the-9]

So here is the thing with top women players in almost any sport that I have noticed.

If you look at them, they are half-way to being men, they probably have a higher testosterone and other manly chemicals being produced. There are not many "girly" women that are good enough to compete with men even at a lower pro level.

Jean

Bill Jean King

Just about every WNBA player.

That soccer player that has been in the news, don't remember her name to find a pic though.

I had an interesting discussion with some of my pals today at the pool hall. The subject was are men truly better pool players than women?

Needless to say, the conversations became lively and seemed pretty skewed towards men being better at sports than women in general and especially in pool.

I had one slight disagreement with my buddies because of one little girl who turned out to be an acclaimed woman player......probably the best......Jean Balukas. That woman could pretty much beat just about anyone on any given night. The men players avoided playing her like she was the plague. Aside from Jean, none of us could accredit any other women player as being on a par with the top 20 male players.....so we debated what was the reasons.

I won't go into the various points that were brought up and I'll let that evolve on this thread with everyone's posts. I came up with the most equitable way of gauging the difference, if any, in playing skills, not the power aspect of the game that men have a natural advantage over women.

I think that straight pool would be the best test to see how well women players compare with their male counterparts....Heck, I'd like to see a team of the top 5 women players match up against 5 male players.....8 ball, 9 ball. 10 ball. rotation and straight pool.......I suspect the men would win but I do not think it would be along the lines of the ass kicking my buddies thought it would be.

Matt B.

p.s. From Wikki.....Jean Balukas (born June 28, 1959) is an American pool player from Brooklyn, New York, and ranks among the stellar players in the history of the sport. At least through the 1990s, when Allison Fisher began her ascendancy, Balukas was widely acknowledged as the sole candidate for greatest female player ever. At just 9 years old she placed 5th in the 1969 U.S. Open straight pool championship, and placed 4th and 3rd respectively in the following two U.S. Opens. During the 1970s & '80s.Balukas won the U.S. Open seven years in a row from 1972 through 1978, accumulating six world championship titles, had well over 100 professional competition first-place finishes with 38 majors to her name, had a streak of 16 first-place finishes in women's professional tournaments, and was the only woman to compete on equal footing with men in professional play in her era. She quit the sport amidst controversy in 1988 while at the height of her ability, due to a dispute over her conduct in a match at the World Open Nine-ball Championship of that year.

 

[peteypooldude]

So here is the thing with top women players in almost any sport that I have noticed.

If you look at them, they are half-way to being men, they probably have a higher testosterone and other manly chemicals being produced. There are not many "girly" women that are good enough to compete with men even at a lower pro level.

Jean

Bill Jean King

Just about every WNBA player.

That soccer player that has been in the news, don't remember her name to find a pic though.

This makes sense to me.

 

[Spimp13]

There is nothing physical or mental that should separate the men from the women, so it's gotta be the numbers.

For physical I sort of disagree.

Power of the break
Long distance draw (power stroke shots)

I think the gap has closed, but in pool this still seems to be at least two items off the top of my head that separate the genders from a physical point of view.

Of course more powerful shots is not necessarily a good thing unless they are done correctly.

 

[cleary]

For physical I sort of disagree.

Power of the break
Long distance draw (power stroke shots)

I think the gap has closed, but in pool this still seems to be at least two items off the top of my head that separate the genders from a physical point of view.

Of course more powerful shots is not necessarily a good thing unless they are done correctly.

9ball doesn't require a power break and power stroke shots are rarely used and honestly don't require a great deal of strength. Even 10ball, shane isn't exactly smashing the rack.


I'm telling you, the only thing that separates top women from the top men is the same thing that separates mid/low level men from top men. Being born with the gift. If pool was 50% male and 50% female, across the board, the results would be different.