![]() There doesn’t appear to be a muscular or structural reason for the difference. “It keeps women from creating speed at the hand.” Even when women learn to rotate hips and shoulders separately, they don’t do it as fast as men. “The one-piece rotation is the biggest difference,” says Thomas. Women tend to rotate their hips and shoulders together, and even expert women throwers don’t get the differential that men get. The hips rotate forward and the body opens, and then the shoulders snap around. The power in an overhand throw - and in a golf swing, a tennis serve or a baseball swing - comes from the separate turning of hips and shoulders. Girls don’t do any of those three steps as successfully as boys, but Thomas zeroes in on one aspect in particular: the rotation. The gap widens at puberty, when the advantages of size and strength kick in. Size and strength undoubtedly also play a role, but girls and boys are about the same size as children, when there is a significant gap in overhand throwing skill. ![]() ![]() Aboriginal girls threw tennis balls at 78.3 percent of the velocity of boys - closer to boys than in most other cultures, but still significantly slower. “Our hypothesis was that girls would be better throwers and not as different from the boys as in European, Chinese, Australian and all the U.S. To try to distinguish nature from nurture, Thomas studied aboriginal Australian children, who grow up in a culture where both men and women hunt, and both sexes throw from childhood. “The gap is much larger than it should be, and it would be smaller if girls got more practice,” he says. Since boys generally learn to throw young and do more throwing than girls do, it would make sense that they’re better at it, and Thomas acknowledges the nurture component. study found that girls age 14 to 18 threw only 39 percent as far as boys (an average of about 75 feet vs. As they get older, the differences increase one U.S. Studies of overhand ball throwing across different cultures have found that pre-pubescent girls throw 51 to 69 percent of the distance that boys do, at 51 to 78 percent of the velocity. By 18, there’s hardly any overlap in the distribution: Nearly every boy by age 15 throws better than the best girl.”Īround the world, at all ages, boys throw better - a lot better - than girls. According to Jerry Thomas, dean of the College of Education at the University of North Texas in Denton, who did the throwing research Hyde cites in her paper, “The overhand throwing gap, beginning at 4 years of age, is three times the difference of any other motor task, and it just gets bigger across age. The throwing gap has been researched for more than half a century, and the results have been consistent. Photo shows Harvard softball coach Jenny Allard demonstrating proper technique for throwing overhand. After looking at 46 meta-analyses, Hyde found what she defined as a “very large” difference in only two skills: throwing velocity and throwing distance. She believes that men and women aren’t as different as they are often portrayed, and she has mined data on social, psychological, communication and physical traits, skills and behaviors to quantify the gap. Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has studied the gender gap across a broad spectrum of skills. ![]() As much as the expression grates, girls do, in general, throw like girls. I know I’m not the only woman with that kind of story. The best I can say about this incident is that nobody got hurt. The squeal of brakes was my first indication that the ball had ended up behind me, in the middle of Columbus Avenue. I had so little faith in my overarm throwing that I had to go underhand. There was no one I could hand it off to, and a gaggle of fifth-graders was waiting for me to toss it back. Except that one time.Ī decade or so ago, in New York, a ball came flying over an 18-foot schoolyard fence just as I was passing by. Luckily, it’s not difficult to avoid situations in which throwing is required, and I’ve managed to do it successfully my entire adult life.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |