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How to account for the gender performance gap?

- Dr Josephine Perry

The biggest single difference in sporting performance separating one cyclist from another is gender. Since 1983, when the gender gap stabilised in Olympic sports, there has been a consistent average difference across all sports of around 10 per cent. In track cycling, Dutch researchers found an average speed discrepancy of 12.6 per cent; the figure from similar German research was 11 per cent. On the roads, world and US masters’ records show the difference in the 25-mile TT is around 10 per cent.

The most obvious place to search for an explanation of this difference is in our physiology. However, very little sports science research is undertaken on women. This is partly because hormonal fluctuations mean you need a greater number of female subjects to obtain reliable results. We have a large gap in our collective understanding of how sex-related characteristics affect performance.

Drawing comparisons is also difficult; among women athletes, rarely are we comparing like with like. Body size is just one important difference with huge variation, and other physiological variables must be scaled accordingly. This presents challenges to science.

Jamie Pringle, a physiologist who has coached many world and Olympic champions, says: “The most consistent about the difference is that women have lower total mass of haemoglobin in their blood, compared to men, and less blood in total. This means less capacity to transport oxygen in the blood, which, when combined with the heart’s ability to pump that blood, and the muscle’s capacity to extract the oxygen from it, is a key determinant of aerobic fitness and endurance.”