Yes, men run faster than women, but over shorter distances – not by much

It has long been known that men outperform women by relatively large margins in middle and longer distance events. But speed over short distances is determined by several factors – most notably the magnitude of the ground forces athletes can exert in relation to their body weight. Women tend to be smaller than men and, all things being equal, the ratio of muscle strength to body weight is greater in smaller individuals.

Ph.D. candidate Emily McClelland, working with Peter Weyand, the director of SMU’s Locomotor Performance Lab, quantified differences in sex performance using data from sanctioned international athletic competitions such as the Olympic Games and World Championships. They hypothesized that this data would reveal smaller performance differences between men and women over shorter distances.

An accomplished athlete and former associate director of strength and conditioning at Bowling Green State University, McClelland has always had a natural interest in the scientific basis of human performance.

More generally, understanding the relative strength, speed and endurance capabilities of male and female athletes is a very challenging issue for modern sport. Yet prior to the new SMU research, the quantitative understanding of gender performance differences in short sprint events had received little attention. McClelland’s background, gender differences in strength/mass capabilities, and existing data trends led her to hypothesize that gender differences in sprint performance might be relatively small and increase with distance.

Her analysis of race data from sanctioned international competitions between 2003 and 2018 supported her initial hypothesis. This data showed that the difference between men’s and women’s performance times increased with the distance between events, from 8.6 percent to 11 percent, from the shortest to longest sprint events (60 to 400 meters). Furthermore, within-race analysis of each 10-meter segment of the 100-meter event revealed a more pronounced pattern over the distance: gender differences increased from a low of 5.6 percent for the first segment to a high of 14.2 percent in the last segment .

Why then are women potentially less disadvantaged compared to men over shorter sprint distances?

Unlike other running species such as horses and dogs, there is significant variation in body size between human males and females. All other factors being held equal, differences in body size result in a muscle strength to body weight ratio that is greater in relatively smaller individuals. Because sprint speeds are directly dependent on the mass-specific forces that runners can exert during the foot-ground contact phase of the stride, greater force-to-mass ratios of smaller individuals provide a theoretical relative advantage. Additionally, a female runner’s shorter legs can provide the advantage of more steps and push cycles per unit time during the acceleration phase of a race. These factors offset the advantages of men (longer legs and greater muscularity) gaining more leverage over longer distances.

Take the example of Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce, a Jamaican track star who stands 6 feet tall, weighs 115 pounds and has won two gold medals at the Olympics and five at the World Championships in her signature event, the 100 meters. The 40 yards of a 100-yard race is estimated at just 4.51 seconds – a time faster than nearly half of all wide receivers and running backs who tested in the National Football League’s Scouting Combine in 2022. According to Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce, most of these aspiring NFL football players are over 6 feet tall and 200 pounds.

The study ‘Sex differences in human running performance: smaller gaps over shorter distances?’ was conducted by McClelland and Weyand and has been published in the journal Journal of Applied Physiology.