"I've always wondered why in sports like lacrosse, guys are in full combat gear while girls have mouth guards and short skirts -- maybe articles like this one will help change that."

Uh, actually that would be because they are playing two different sports: lacrosse, and field hockey. Field hockey does not involve swinging your stick over your head, just for starters. And women's lacrosse players most certainly do armor up.

The concussion rates may also have to do with having thinner skulls, skull shape and build is affected in males at puberty. Thickheads, that's us.

1. Women often have longer necks too, thus working like a lever.

2. Since roughhousing is often discouraged for young girls, when they're older, they might not know how to fall well and safely.

3. Cats often survive collision by relaxing. One tends to relax when one is familiar with something, including collision. If a teenage girl weren't acclimated to colliding, she might tense at the point of impact, thus losing the shock-absorbing affect of relaxing.

4. As Bob suggested, there might be a thinner skull or less fluid or some other corporeal factor, possibly due to evolution, which didn't oversee the development of a sturdier brain for females because the fellas were out chasing the wooly mammoths and thus were the ones who needed more cerebral padding.

Until that day:

http://apps.carleton.edu/global_stock/photostock/80155.jpg

The only women's lacrosse I had seen before was a pickup league here with both men and women playing the full-contact men's game. I did not know that there was a totally different version of the game for women. Seems a good deal less violent though.

all of the concussions they receive. I knew many guy athletes who didn't report all of them when I was in high school. Male athletes do usually one of two extremes when it comes to injuries, act like a baby and blow it out of proportion or hide how bad it really is.

There are significant rules differences between men's and women's lacrosse. The women's game is designed to not involve a lot of contact, so less protective gear is required. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women%27s_lacrosse)

Of course, there are plenty of examples of 'non-contact' sports that involve pretty serious contact (i.e. basketball). I haven't watched much lacrosse (men's or women's) so I can't say more.

I know this is Broadsheet, but it's no gender conspiracy.

For the most part, women play contact sports not collision sports, to borrow an old distinction. When women play ice hockey they wear the same pads as the men. Soccer players of both genders are identically unarmored, and softball and baseball players wear helmets only when batting (or when being John Olerud). Basketball players wear facemasks when forced to by injuries (a la Rip Hamilton). Professional boxers of both genders wear zero headgear, and the men hit harder and more often than the women.

Male atheletes are bigger, stronger and faster across the board than their female counterparts, and there are a few particularly violent sports for which there is no major professional equivalent for females (football, rugby, etc.), thus no highly-capitalized level of competition that incentivizes measures taking the body beyond its natural limits. So it's very reasonable to assume that male athletes would have an increased risk for all injuries, including concussions, when operating under the assumption that neither gender is biologically more suited to these type of activities.

If there are biological (or even cultural) reasons that women are more susceptible to concussions, even at lower levels of impact, this would have implications for other dialogues (i.e. the fitness of women for combat).

but part of the reason that this is not as widely known as it should be is that over the years lots of advocates have resisted any information which might imply that women are "delicate". It's a lot like the situation with heart attacks: after asserting for years that women are superior in that they, for whatever reason, are more resistant to them everyone else is blamed when, after they accept this, it turns out not to be true.

I didn't even play sports! One was from, well, being clumsy (I walked into the monkey bars), and the other two were from dodgeball. (After the second one, I refused to play dodgeball. And the coach gave me worse grades because of it. Fuck you, Mr. M.)

Anyway, not once did the school do more than send me to the nurse's office for ice or painkillers, even the third and last time, where the coach was completely freaked out about me. Was it because I was a girl? Or were the school administrators just morons? Maybe both.

Make the women wear helmets for everything. If women are actually getting 3x the concussions as men playing hoops then something is seriously awry. Either they don't know how to take a hit as it were or their coaches are telling them to lead with their heads or there's something different with their heads. Either way - just slap some caps on those domes and leave it at that.

In Junior High School I was very athletic and totally into all the team sports. The girls season went like this: Volleyball, Basketball, Cross-country, Track. The boys was the same only replaced Volleyball with Football. Now I can't speak for any of my teammates, but after spending 3 months playing volleyball, a sport where you can barely even touch ANYTHING except the ball, basketball felt like a free for all on the aggression I'd been bottling up. They should look at foul-out rates among girls and boys during basketball season!

Likewise, girls see less opportunity at both early and later ages to play out physical aggression as the need builds. Generally we don't get in as many physical fights, play-wrestling matches and general horsing-around events as boys. We save it all for when it is 'appropriate' - like in sports.

And, I think equipment and rules do matter. Many slowpitch softball leagues used to not have catcher helmet rules. In fastpitch softball we are throwing a bigger, heavier ball toward a batter from a shorter distance with a sometimes less accurate underhand method. Anyone who has played third base in FP softball knows that at times you are only about 30 feet from a batter who could throw a slap-bunt right up your nose. Baseball has no slap-bunting. Contrary to popular belief girls do play football (mostly flag with no protective gear) and rugby. These teams can have less money, less support and sub-standard coaching. In college I was on a women's rugby team that was 'self-coached' because nobody would do it without pay. Female soccer players are also sometimes relegated to inferior fields (that can cause injury due to tripping and falling on an uneven surface) as well as lack of coaching. Many times coaches feel that women aren't strong enough to really do any damage to each other, so aggression and unsafe play are encouraged.

Now, these things aren't always true and may actually be rare in some areas (especially wealthy areas) but they could be factors that were not looked at.