Sex differences in sport participation across 34 countries
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There are competing theories as to why sex differences in sport participation exist. We tested the theory that this disparity is a result of both sociocultural conditions and evolved psychological sex differences. This theory predicts that, on average, participation in sport, especially team sports, should be universally male biased and that men should more strongly agree that a reason for sport participation is to compete, while women should more strongly agree that a reason for sport participation is to improve physical appearance. To test these hypotheses we analyzed the International Social Survey, which interviewed 49,729 individuals (aged 15 years and older) across 34 countries regarding their leisure activities. Controlling for several individual characteristics, males were more likely to report participation in sporting groups (OR=2.03), attendance at sporting events (OR=2.46), that their most frequent participation occurs in team sport (OR=6.30), and that their most frequently observed sport on television is a team sport (OR=2.63). Males were also more likely to agree that a reason for sport participation is to compete (OR=1.752), while females were more likely to agree that a reason for sport participation is to look good (OR=1.44). In conclusion, there is a need to understand how evolved psychological sex differences influence sport participation.Acknowledgments: The first author is supported by a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Doctoral Scholarship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC 767-2012-1381) and by the Heart and Stroke Foundation of Canada and the CIHR Training Grant in Population Intervention for Chronic Disease Prevention: A Pan-Canadian Program (Grant #: 53893).
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".