Sarah Beth Hill threw a football into an oversized Dr. Pepper can and won a $123,000 scholarship. Image from the Huntsville Times.
Turns out there is some element of truth to the schoolyard taunt “you throw like a girl!” Girls throwing velocities are quite a bit lower than boys. From Popular Science:
Literature on this put forward by Janet Hyde, professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, for example, has shown the disparity. Her Gender Similarities Hypothesis states, in short, that the two genders are more alike than they are different, and there’s a lot of data to support the idea. (You can, and should, read about how similar we are here.)
Counting standard deviations–the measurement of difference between sets of data–she shows how even the widest psychological differences, like physical aggression (0.60 standard deviations, leaning toward men) aren’t as much as you might expect. Less than 0.10 standard deviations or between 0.11 and 0.35 standard deviations was common, and those are both defined as small differences. She also measured motor behaviors in boys and girls ages 3 to 20 to get a sense of the difference. Some of those, like grip strength (0.66, toward the gentlemen again), were large compared to the rest of the data, but still small to moderate overall. Throwing velocity and throwing distance? Both blowouts, at 2.18 and 1.98 standard deviations, respectively. Well above anything else, psychological or physical.
Check the source link for more.
