Female athletes: tougher than you might think
Neate came across a very interesting book excerpt in this weekend's New York Times magazine. It's by Michael Sokolove, and called Warrior Girls: Protecting Our Daughters Against the Injury Epidemic in Women’s Sports : well worth a read. Sokolove makes some very interesting points, and presents a balanced picture overall, but the centre of the piece focuses on research suggesting that girls who play sports like basketball, volleyball and soccer suffer significantly more concussions and knee injuries than boys playing the same sports: by a factor of five in certain cases. According to the NCAA, women's soccer players suffer concussions at the same rate as men's football players. I actually came across some of this data while doing my piece on concussions, but it didn't seem to fit with the larger angle of the story, so I didn't include it there. The problem is what to do with this data. Those who oppose the opportunities offered to women's sports by Title ...