Girl power: Oriental ladies outperform their men
The clue is in the overall Global Cup standings by gender. After the month of October, there are three Asian countries – China, Japan and South Korea - among the Women’s top 10 sporting nations in the world, as opposed to only one, China in 10th place, among the Men. This got us curious: how balanced are the performances of male and female athletes for the world’s top 20 sporting nations? Do men tend to perform as well as women across countries? We took a close look at our statistics and calculated the ratio of Global Cup points won by women vs those won by men for the top 20 countries in the ranking after October.
Sure enough, the ratio was higher than 1.0 for the three Asian tigers: e.g. South Korean ladies have scored 664 Global Cup points this year, vs 381 earned by their men. There is a big gap between Japan (1.51) and the first non-Asian country in this special table (Italy, 0.98), while Argentina recorded the lowest ratio (0.13), meaning their men have been overwhelmingly more successful than their ladies.
The most balanced countries? Italy, Australia, USA and Canada have all ratios that are very close to zero. The table below shows the top 20 countries in ranking order by women/men points ratio.
|
WOMEN/MEN
|
|
|
points ratio
|
|
|
South Korea
|
1.74
|
|
China
|
1.62
|
|
Japan
|
1.51
|
|
Italy
|
0.98
|
|
Australia
|
0.96
|
|
USA
|
0.95
|
|
Canada
|
0.90
|
|
Austria
|
0.85
|
|
Switzerland
|
0.83
|
|
Great Britain
|
0.68
|
|
Sweden
|
0.63
|
|
Spain
|
0.61
|
|
Norway
|
0.57
|
|
Poland
|
0.52
|
|
Russia
|
0.52
|
|
Netherlands
|
0.48
|
|
Brazil
|
0.39
|
|
Germany
|
0.37
|
|
France
|
0.27
|
|
Argentina
|
0.13
|
NB) Serbia and the Czech Republic were in the Men’s top 20 and not in the Women’s, while the opposite holds for New Zealand. As none of these three countries is in the overall top 20, their ratios weren’t calculated.
