During my eight and half years of service I been to plenty of ranges and seen plenty of great marksmen both male and female. So I'm not saying that one gender has the advantage over the other. Yet it did get me thinking. Is there any advantage that one gender has over the other? Personally, I would say no, it comes down to your ability to follow the fundamentals. So now I figured it would be a fun discussion to have here on RallyPoint. So, to the RP Community, do you feel that gender plays a role in marksmanship?
The USAMU rifle TC didn't agree with him, but I was just a private and was smart enough to know I didn't know that.
My wife makes an argument that the good females marksmen are such because of self selection. Basically because there are so few professional female marksmen, the ones that exist strive to be the best overall, not just the best females, and therefore comparatively are excellent.
"Are there physiological advantages that apply to marksmanship, that one gender possesses over the other, and if so, what are they?"
http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s1 [login to see] -y#page-2
"The current study aimed to compare shooting performance between male and female athletes during the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Rifle Championship from the 2007 to 2013 seasons. This sport is distinct from most competitive sports as it requires little physical exertion, so physiological/ biomechanical differences between the genders that generally bring about superior performance by males relative to females may have only minimal effect on shooting performance. NCAA competitions, unlike Olympic shooting events today, allow male and female shooters to compete against each other. Using archival data covering a period of 7 years from both the team and individual tournaments, 555 scores of the best 149 shooters among mostly U.S. collegiate athletes (the best of whom went on to compete in the Olympics) were analyzed using a generalized estimating equation (GEE) model. We found no differences in performance between the genders both during team and individual competitions. The results suggest that Olympic shooting is exercising a “separate and (un)equal” policy which should be reconsidered."
In general, women are smaller, and shaped differently, however our weaponry is NOT adjusted to their dimensions. Add in differences to cardio-respiratory, and it's plausible that one gender might have an advantage when using a specific platform.
That's why I grabbed an actual Study. Their findings were "Null" when it came to marksmanship performance at the collegiate level, whereas most other sports have distinct physiological advantages (running, golf, basketball, etc).
My daughter also turn 9 but in August. My son who is 7 years younger already feels as though he is stronger and can kick her a**. She is of course much more mature than her peer males as well LOL. I am willing to bet that when the time comes, she will probably shoot better than him.
I did a short stint as a security forces augmentee, and the combat arms guys said almost the exact same thing about initially training guys and girls on mounted M240s and whatnot. The girls usually made better students.
Physically females have shorter arms and smaller hands than males, That sometimes comes into play with manipulating the weapon. The M-9 Barretta tended to be troublesome to people with small hands.
Extremely tall shooters (Mostly Males fall into this category) can have issues. Flexible shooters with a lower center of gravity ( Mostly females) can be great shooters
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Here's an article on women being better than men at shooting. I'm going to see if I can find some statistics.
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