The topic of sports injuries is unavoidable these days– the sports radio shows I listen to in the car probably spend an hour a week bemoaning the toll playing football takes on kids. Never a publication to shy away from topics that bring easy clicks, Vox weighs in with The Most Dangerous High School Sports in One Chart. You can go over there to look at their specific chart, which is drawn from a medical study of cheerleading; I don’t find the general ordering of things all that surprising.
There was, however, one aspect of this that I found sort of surprising, namely the difference between rates for girls’ and boys’ versions of the same sports. The chart Vox shows has girls’ soccer as the second-most dangerous high school sport in America, but boys’ soccer is all the way down in ninth place. And this pattern is consistent. So I copied their data and used it to make a bar graph of my own to highlight that:
The bars here are comparing injury rates for sports that are equivalent, or at least analogous– I tacked softball and baseball on at the end as approximately the same game, though each is played only by a single sex. The only sport for which the injury rate is higher for boys is lacrosse, and my extremely limited understanding is that the rules are rather different between the two, with much less contact allowed in the girls’ game.
Excluding lacrosse, softball, and baseball, the average ratio of girls’ injury rate to boys’ injury rate is 1.4+/-0.1. So female high-school athletes playing a given game are roughly 40% more likely to suffer an injury (“defined as anything that required the attention of a physician or athletic trainer, or kept the athlete off the field for at least one day” from Vox) than their male classmates playing the exact same game.
It’s a striking correlation, but what’s the causation? Well, this is the “I’m glad I’m not a social scientist” part, because as with any system involving more than about two atoms, it’s a hopeless muddle. Are girls more fragile than boys? More likely to report injury or less likely to try to play through pain? More likely to have their injuries treated as serious enough to count toward this statistic by coaches, athletic trainers, and sports-injury researchers? Probably all of those, to some degree.
I considered trying to bend this into a “Football Physics” post over at Forbes. But while it would be nearly as good clickbait there as at Vox, I would feel some obligation to try and draw a sensible conclusion or connect this to some sort of policy recommendation. And, you know, I’m on vacation in Florida (though currently taking a vacation from vacation-with-kids to do a bit of Internet writing).
So instead I’ll throw the graph up here, say “Huh. That’s odd,” and return to thinking about the simple interactions of small numbers of frictionless spheres.
