I was watching pro golf coverage on the news and it seems so odd that men and women compete separately - same goes with pro bowling. Just seems weird to me that a game of skill is gendered when you can’t even raise an argument that someone might have an advantage because of what’s between their legs.
There is more to genedered events than meets the eye. On the surface, it can seem like trying to separate based on ability or potential ability that may seem unnecessary. I don’t follow golf so I can’t compare the best men’s and women’s golfers myself. However Chess is also has men’s and women’s leagues, and doesn’t need to separate on any physical differences between men and women. When it comes to events like Chess, US Chess started a Girl’s league to help draw and maintain girls playing the game to great success.
Having a separate women’s league can make sure that women see there is an oppotuntiy to play and lower that bar to joining, potentially reduce toxicity from a still otherwise male dominated event (this analysis has a gender breakdown for the India Chess Federation), and make sure that women win some of the prize money available incentivising players to play. However there are some like International Master Sam Shankland that believe that it would be better if there was just one league for everyone to compete in, incentivising everyone to improve to the highest level. There are some concerns about a skill gap between men and women, however there are statistical analysis showing that can be explained by having two vastly different sizes of groups being represented and ranked.
Chess is an interesting case study. For this whose don’t know, it’s not separated by gender, rather there are some competitions open only to women. At the same time, everyone knows Women’s GMs aren’t “real” GMs (they may even have killed off the Women’s GM title by now for this reason, I can’t remember), so it’s not clear that women’s chess isn’t at this point suggesting women are second class chess players. I’d expect women’s chess to disappear at some point (or for a few tournaments to stick around for historical reasons)–I’m pretty sure it’s less of a thing now than when I was a kid.
The value of women’s competitions is that it increases participation in sports where women were historically excluded (women were literally banned from FA football grounds in Britain) or where women’s participation was under-resourced (see… Little League softball, probably, which came into existence after a Supreme Court ruling saying Little League couldn’t bar girls from participating, so they made a separate competition to steer girls to). In some utopian future, that becomes unnecessary. However, over time, the women’s game sometimes develops a distinct flavor (men’s and women’s lacrosse require decidedly different skills, even if the difference in rules presumably originated in sexism) and then we have the problem of merging them back together without defaulting to losing the women’s game. There are sports where it wouldn’t be too hard–the ones where there’s little/no drift (shooting sports, maybe cricket) and the ones where everyone thinks the games are distinct (see baseball and fast pitch softball)–but others that are much harder. On the other hand, we manage with the fact there are two totally unrelated sports called “handball”, two lacrosse variants can’t be harder.