 Dr. Sophia Nymphius. Sophia is an internationally recognized researcher and practitioner for her contributions to improving applied practice in sport. The professor at Edith Cohen University with a collaborative role as high performance manager for Softball Western Australia. Thankfully in 2021 women's softball is back on the Olympic program. Really excited. She's worked as a sports scientist and strength and conditioning coach in the US and Australia with national Olympic and professional teams and athletes. Welcome Dr. Nymphius to the show. Thanks for that introduction. We're going to jump straight into this because we don't have a lot of time with 15 minutes and I know you've been watching a lot of presentations today so just to wake us up let's do a little bit of a live poll. So many of you may be familiar with watching movement so I'd just like you to identify which one of the individuals on the screen A or B is the person you believe is the female athlete squatting and if you're unsure you can do see. I'm not going to give you much time I want to see you have your first intuition and place that in. We'll talk about that a little bit later maybe in the question and answer session. But as we go through we need to get some definitions down and the definition for this talk particularly because I said this is a talk about female athletes is the gender or sex talk. Now gender is related to the terms woman women girls and it's one gender identity the IOC uses the identification for sport participation. On the other hand in the research we're often talking about sex and the reason for that are the biological underpinnings we use to explain the conclusions. So we use the term female athlete or female player but by definition female biologically is associated with those that can produce eggs or young. So we essentially boil people down to eggs so that's why I say female athlete as an adjective and not just that your eggs I mean females. So I'm using female athletes in this talk because there are other purported sex differences that we're interested in research but I'd like to highlight that even in the neurosciences we're starting to go away from that idea that you can exclusively research sex or gender separately because we live in a world where those interactions occur and we will talk about that. So they're using the term gender slash sex together so that we stop identifying that it is merely a biological underpinning when it may not be. So beyond that what I'd like to talk about are the three primary areas really quickly that people usually mention around kind of that dreaded biology of the female athlete which is how it comes out when you read the research. The first area that even comes up in common language is this idea of well they're just built differently. So the anthropometry of the athlete and they state things such as intercontrary or notch width, the cue angle and of course your pelvic width. But interestingly if you read the research a little bit more critically there's very little to none that's actually measured injured athletes and non-injured athletes and female athletes showing that they have significantly higher values of any of those anthropometries. And when we look at the research further we actually identify that men and women have very similar cue angles and particularly when they're of the same height. The next area is hormones or joint laxity which I usually go do male athletes tear their ACLs yes they do and I'm talking about injury and ACL because we do mostly research female athletes when they get injured and not so much in the other aspects. But some interesting research from Mikayla Bruton has identified that there's a lot of other factors that explain the differences in their movement than those things and they just don't hold up. And this is going to come into this idea about the whole system and the perception of the last area that people often conclude that the female athletes just move different they have biomechanical differences in movement. But what Mikayla identified was that actually once you equate the amount of practice time and therefore the subsequent skill attained that those differences wash out and in sports like downhill skiing and in sports especially like dance where female athletes start at younger ages those gender differences that we identify in the rate of injury actually decline. So it makes us question is it the system creating the female athlete or is it as we've been concluding that it's the female athlete and it is them that has caused this increased risk of injury and that's a big difference in your conclusion it's a massive difference in fact because one you can't change or it's inherent to the person the other we have to ask the system to change and that often costs money and time and a lot of explanation as to why we haven't been doing it thus far. So it's not what you say it's how you say it well kind of sometimes it's exactly how you say it and if you read the conclusions of a lot of the research we literally frame the female athlete into believing that they are doomed to said outcomes we make broad conclusions about female athletes as a whole in series and time after time of research articles even to this day I look them up and I read them and it's not changing as rapidly as it should we're not acknowledging that we actually can't group an entire group into a movement pattern there's as much within group difference as there is between group and when I'm talking about between groups I mean between group difference between female athletes and male athletes to within group difference of the female athletes and the male athletes and if you don't believe me then we'll have a look at a couple things so actually when we look at this male and female athlete difference I mean it's a popular topic no doubt and that has perpetuated us being able to state these things unequivocally without criticism but a couple of key articles have come out this article by Anne Benjamin in 2011 and then the article I mentioned before by Michaela Brune really questioning if there is a difference in movement from Anne is it large enough to matter is it bigger than even the error that we have in the biomechanics research equipment we use it's pretty questionable and is the difference a function of this training age or her motor the motor experience that Michaela talks about throughout the article and they're really really strong suggestions but again it's a much more complicated story to tell than simply female athletes are X and even in the psychology research that has much more data than in the exercise and sport science research they're reframing that idea that there's more gender similarities and differences but I'm not saying there's none I'm just saying should they have the preponderance of discussion and focus that they do or is that just a scapegoat for the reality of what we should be focusing on and just in case you're wondering that meta synthesis which is multiple meta analyses concluded that the things that actually had large effect differences were that masculine feminine traits kind of inherent the importance of beauty and mates which like in Australia we were curious about that men care about their friends beauty no that's the person you mate with an aggression versus what women have but I want you to look at those I'm not just bringing them up for a bit of a laugh but you notice these effect sizes being point seven at the highest for the most kind of that's that's obvious kind of factor of a point seven well what that actually looks like and if you would make these broad sweeping conclusions for the way we conclude about male athletes versus female athletes you think that the effect difference was a five this is what it looks like there's almost no overlap but in reality most of the time the largest the difference is around point two that's the smallest detectable change we care about and when we have effect differences that happen to be significant but on our only point two 92% of the people are overlapping would you call that a significant difference noting that would you go back to the research and have a look at it and even in the obvious masculine versus feminine traits in the psychology research this is what point seven in effect difference looks like that's still 72% of us overlapping that's not exactly the sweeping broad generalizations that we end up concluding in the research so I guess this quote really means a lot differences that may appear at a cursory level to be due to essential differences between the sexes may in fact be due in part or completely to some additional confounding variables now confounding variables is something I can deal with because you can control those things you can measure them and at least you should be reporting them in the research and things are changing women in sport over the years has vastly changed from what we had in 1967 having to sneak our way into the boston marathon to title nine and this vast increase in participation at the high school level over 900 almost a thousand percent increase and at the intercollegiate level vastly amazing and then more recently equal pay pursuits but here's something that probably explains a lot more of these quote unquote confounding variables I'm going to go into in a 2012 survey of high school strength conditioning coaches we notice the curious trend strengthen conditioning coaches for all these female athletes that have to be included based on title nine those coaches were more commonly uncertified and less experienced so they may be having the opportunities but they're not afforded the coaches that can teach them the motor school motor skill and give them the knowledge in order to feel comfortable doing all the things in order to be effective movers so it puts a different spin in it and it starts to bring out these ideas from two major theories of new elves models with constraints that the individual is intertwined with the environment and their task and if that task is too difficult rather to the constraints of the individual they're going to have to change the way they move and the way they move and the individual constraints are probably a function of how all the sociocultural factors from albert bandura's theory that have contributed to that individual but now it's not inherent that's a function of a system and that's a totally different discussion to the way that we're mostly concluding things and so i'm going to draw our attention to a couple of articles one we went ahead and we went you know one of the confounding variables that i think is happening here is that we're not even measuring or controlling for strength and we're not doing research to compare male and female athletes to find out the effect of strength we really want to find out if there are these differences between the sexes so we can target those things effectively but people don't report and measure strength so we strength matched individuals and then looked at some of the common ratios of muscle activity and we found no significant differences between the group but within group a whole lot a lot of variability so men the male athletes and the female athletes had a great range of variability but when you compared between there was no real difference well that's different to a lot of the research that has concluded there is one but then curiously a lot of that research didn't even control for or even oftentimes discuss that it just made being the strength and we know that strength is fully modifiable and the rate of adaptation between resistance training programs for male and female athletes is similar they may adapt in a different way but the magnitude is indeed similar and so we have to question are all our conclusions a function of capacity well that's way too simplistic then we look at another article here looking at dexterity how you control your strength essentially and they found that when you look at recreational male and female athletes they were found to have a big difference but when you looked at proper elite Olympic level athletes there was no difference so our sampling method and whether skilled athletes or recreational athletes are equivocal skill between male and female athletes is questionable just based on what I talked about about the reduction in the experience and the certification of coaches that are given to female athletes in high school that eventually remain as recreational athletes probably indicating they don't get the same motor experience but once you get to elite your elite and your skill is equated and then things such as dexterity seem to not be so different between the male and female athletes so we have to start considering whether it is the capacity and skill or multitudes of these confounding variables years of experience or like I was saying their motor experience or resistance training experience before we conclude things in this article that we had previously we had male and female athletes jumping and concluded that there was a difference in the eccentric phase impulse in the concentric phase but when we resampled that data and we looked at it between stronger and weaker individuals the results got stronger broader there were bigger differences in those impulse places and so what that indicated to us was beyond just the sex in the of the individual actually the strength of the individual contributed more to that conclusion and we could have changed the entire paper instead of making it a difference between male and female athletes to a difference in stronger and weaker athletes if we're going to dichotomize we might as well dichotomize so it brings that question is strategy a function of capacity and in some interesting research by Norden and Duvak Janet Duvak leading some of these things is really fascinating work they found that when individuals were placed under a task that was more and more difficult by adding load or adding height in a drop jump that they constrain the number of motor solutions they had they had less principle components the analogy I often give is if you have to pick up a pebble or an atlas stone there's very few ways you can innovate to pick up the atlas stone but plenty of ways in order to pick up the pebble and this has been brought about in schmitz and schultz early research they started trying to tease out this idea of strength influencing it didn't quite get there but they did highlight that the strength influenced it but it couldn't explain all of the variants and the amount of absorption at the knee and it's probably because it's not perfectly linear so we went on to look at a couple of other things and identified that movement strategy really does affect the athlete as well and differently when you look at this here you'll notice that this athlete up here is vastly influenced by an unanticipated sidestep in this scenario increasing amount of knee to hip absorption ratio but some athletes much more affected than others so not only do we need to look at the sex or the gender of the athlete we have to consider the within variation the individual movement strategy as being critical and we have to realize that we have to get athletes even if we do improve their capacity through strength to be able to adapt their control after we've changed their muscle properties these things aren't coming through clear in the literature and so we saw and we repeated some of the ideas around looking at higher moderate and lower strength individuals instead of by gender and again that same idea the conclusions are stronger when we look at it by strength than they are by gender and what happened is as we increased the height of the drop jump there was a shift to the amount of work done at the knee that might be explanatory for why our female athletes are injuring their knees but it's not because of their inherent properties it's because they haven't been trained to move given the coaches to move and or they don't have the strength but not because they're incapable and not because it's inherent because those things are trained in everybody so transfer of training will vary by individual and one must consider that dance between improvements in physical capacity and the ability to learn to utilize this capacity during a skilled movement and this seems really logical so i guess the thing i just wanted everyone to have a think about is to be more critical of the research is it really even beneficial for these sex differences and gender differences to be purported well yes but the why behind it needs to come through the conclusion isn't females are different female athletes are different no the question is why and if they haven't controlled for a series of confounding variables then actually we haven't learned much at all in fact we maybe have just learned about what happens when you don't have the motor experience the expertise of coaching a system that provides adequate support throughout the length of the career and improved strength space that is a function of all of the things that are provided to athletes in theory so the take home message is when you're reading research and you're trying to conclude what do we know about female athletes have they even considered measured and corrected for strength have they described controlled or even explained about their motor skill or familiarity with the skill being being measured and have they considered the individual differences that occur even within the group instead of just grouping a conclusion holistically thank you so much i know i've gone a little bit over time but i'd like to thank all of my scholars that are here that have been a big part of all of the work that we've done and continuing to do and then of course all the people that have influenced me through my career my mentors starting from when i was an athlete thank you very much all the way through to completing my phd i couldn't have done it without all of you and i hope you've learned something here today so thank you for attending and if you have any questions