Myth of The Glass Ceiling: Not Simply Bernie's Bigotry Keeping Women Out Of F1

In the spirit of pushing the envelope, which has often been the story of my life, I wish to put forth a relatively mundane explanation for why women are so poorly represented in F1.

Everyone talks about how women have made so many inroads into science/medicine, and how as pilots women can handle more g-forces (and not until 1993 were women even allowed to fly in combat MISSIONS, much less be at the helm of an F-16, but that's another article altogether).

So what is my rationale for this phenomenon?  It is this: Men are more prone to genetic mutation than women.

What does this mean?  Well, men are significantly more likely to be mentally retarded, have autism, hemophilia (which ONLY men can get, correct?) and are even far more likely to have relatively mundane problems like color-blindness than women.  On the other side of the bell curve, men, it certainly appears, are more likely to be gifted than women, whether mentally or physically. 

I wish I could draw it for everyone, but if you are familiar with a bell curve, for women it looks like a normal bell curve, but for men the curve is wider and lower.  There is talk of women just not showing their intelligence in classrooms and so forth, which is something I will agree with, but just at the fundamental genetic level, those mutations come up more in men.  So while there are thousands and thousands of gifted women, there are thousands and thousands more gifted men. 

When you look at F1, there are call it 25 people going out there and racing come Sunday.  Out of six billion!  I personally cannot believe that men are twenty-five times more likely to be gifted than women, so it still does not answer the question of why women are not in the sport.  Please stay with me and don't hit the comment button yet.

Continuing, if one is going to bring up Maria Sharapova vs Danica Patrick, as another article has on this site, saying that Sharapova gets large amounts of sponsorhip whereas Patrick does not, the response to that is that Sharapova competes in women's tennis, in a sanctioned class in which only women compete.  Danica Patrick competes against women and men in a sport which does not distinguish sex when its drivers compete.  And just as Sharapova might not do well against someone like Federer or Nadal, Danica Patrick it has been argued is not in the same league as Lewis Hamilton, Kimi Raikkonen, or Fernando Alonso.

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