They will have to weigh female boxers at minimum. Weight is what seperates the divisions.

Not everyone knows that muscle takes up less space on the body, but weighs more. So Serena Williams at 165lbs is strong, fit and looks like it; while an inactive couch potato at 165lb might look like a tubbo.

Thank you, Title IX, for making it more than OK for women to be strong and athletic. Real bodies on real people!

There's nothing like dating a woman who will go to the park and play catch or who isn't afraid to body up in the low post. That's the best kind of equality.

but if she has a healthy amount of fat she may be at a competetive disadvantage. This is fine when women are competing against each other (they can all be required to maintain approriate amounts of fat) but because it may comrpromise the quest for the holy grail of women beating men this fact causes lots of consternation, unlike the case with thin models where there is no feminine reluctance to invoke health as an argument against excessive lack of body fat.

I guess it might help a woman in some sports to have a lower than is healthy body fat level, but I doubt that would be universal. One would imagine this is also true of male athletes having a lower than healthy body fat level.

The concern is simply that women will be encouraged by societal beliefs about what an appropriate weight for a woman is, to diet below that weight. Ordinarily, people think of a woman who weighs over 200 lbs as being "fat"-- consider songs like "101 pounds of fun"-- but that is a song about a 5 foot tall, petite woman. Not an athletic woman over six feet tall.

Furthermore, I hardly think that the point of women participating in sports is "beating men." On average, there are certain abilities that men tend to be better at and certain abilities that women tend to be better at. It is simple physics.

But you don't see many co-ed competitions in sports that traditionally are considered "female"-- you don't see men on the uneven bars in gymnastics-- even the shortest guys are generally too big to compete with the agility of tiny teenage girls.

Additionally, it is now believed that in extreme ultra-endurance sports, women on average have an advantage because of the difference in the way that their bodies process stored fat.

The only reason you really see women competeing against men is that competing in men's competitions pays more.

but the prevalence of the belief in male physical superiority to women keeps the truth suppressed.

I am a former college athlete - fast pitch soft ball. We were weighed regularly and our weight published in the profile of players. It's laughable to think that any of those girls might become disordered eaters because of their weight being published. Quite a few of my teammates were quite heavy - if they wanted to drop pounds it was not usually a burning tihng, just a 'hey I could run faster and fit into my jeans better if I stopped eating so many Krispy Kremes."

What Lopiano fails to consider is that most athletes have pretty high self esteem that is independent of their looks and body image. When you're college education is being paid for because you're very good at something, and you've beaten out a lot of other people who are also very good to get that coveted spot - well, when the State finals are coming up you just don't spend a lot of time bemoaning your thighs.

My softball team travelled a lot. The first thing we'd do when checking into a hotel is head for the pool, and, if there was one, a sauna or steam room. I wasn't nearly as big as the other players, and they actually teased me about it and called me "annie" (as in, short for 'anorexic', and not in a good way). Mostly what I remember about those days is the catcher grabbing a chunk of her ass and saying 'gues sI shouldn't have had those extra fries" and then we all laughed and went on to the next thing.

It seems that this sort of 'controversy' forces women who are probably fine with their weight to consider body dysmorphia as an option. Why plant ideas in their head? Unless things have changed dramatically, I don't see why any woman would give a crap about her weight being publicized within the sports arena. No one really cares, or focus on that - they're focused on performance, and winning. My hitting stats were infinitely more interesting than my weight - both to me and everyone else. I had non-athlete roommates always on the Cambridge Diet or some other nonsense - I simply didn't pay attention to them and their spindly legs. Not my deal, end of story. My guess is most female athletes think this way.

so obviously they don't care whether they are conventionally attractive or not.

Interestingly, ethnicity seems to be a moderating factor when it comes to the self-esteem of female NCAA athletes. A 2004 article by Johnson, C., Crosby, R., Mitchell, J., Powers, P., Wittrock, D., and Wonderlich, S. (Eating Behaviors, vol. 5) showed that African-American NCAA female athletes have self-esteem similar to white and African-American male athletes, but Caucasian female athletes have significantly lower self-esteem, and higher levels of drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction, and disordered eating behaviors than AA females and both groups of male athletes. This is not to say that participation in sports causes these factors in Caucasian females, but it doesn't seem to be the protective factor that everyone seems to think that it is. How this relates to the article? I think eating disorders in female athletes need to be considered, and regular weigh-ins should probably occur, if for no other purpose than to note any precipitous drops in weight. Not sure if it should be published, though.

Weighing female athletes to monitor their health is one thing; publicizing their weights is quite another. I don't think group weigh-ins are a good idea for young women (or anyone, for that matter), but there’s no need for weight monitoring to involve public humiliation. During my three years as a varsity swimmer, we women swimmers were weighed at our annual doctor's check-up (which was required for all athletes before the competitive season started), and again each time we sought medical care from the team doctor. It wasn't a public thing; our weights were treated with the same confidentiality as any other aspect of our medical records. If one of us experienced a sudden weight change (as I did once due to a bout of food poisoning), the team doctor used that information to advise us about how to modify our training and eating habits to maintain our health and athletic performance.