No, I'm forgetting none of this (although some is not exactly true,) despite so many replies from people that did not grasp the thread. This was the GP I was defending;
"This is simply not true. Margeret Murdock [wikipedia.org] won a silver medal at the 1976 Olympics (she lost the battle for gold under very controversial circumstances) and set four individual world records. In the eighties, most shooting sports became gender-segregated, the only exceptions being skeet and trap, which became gender-segregated right after a woman (Zhang Shan [wikipedia.org]) had won the gold medal in the skeet competition in 1992. There are other examples as well.
So, if today's women are no longer competitive with men, then that's certainly a consequence of gender segregation and not an argument for it."
To recap, in previous times, while women may have faced some discouragement from competing, they DID compete in open competition right along with the men, and in many cases performed very well. This did not sit right with some men and so we got segregated events where women have, if we believe another poster, not produced the same sorts of scores their predecessors did shooting against men.
I am not swearing that last part is true - I dont now - but accepting it for the sake of argument, the lesson would appear to be that humans perform better when they are allowed to compete at their level as determined by skill, not gender.
