Sounds like snowboarding
Whenever the topic of bad behavior by the part of snowboarders comes up, you may hear someone point out that it’s an activity populated by young boys and teenaged boys, two groups not often thought of as models of politeness. In other words, the bad attitudes that some people see in snowboarding isn’t unique to snowboarding, but instead lies in its largest demographic.
Over the last few days I’ve been looking at some surveys conducted by the National Sporting Goods Association, and I thought of ways to test this theory. One of the NSGA surveys offers a gender breakdown for various sports, and for each sex, the median age of participants.
Of the 46 activities in the report, only nine are numerically dominated by women. They are: aerobic exercising, exercise walking, exercising with equipment, in-line roller skating, lacrosse, swimming, volleyball, working out at a club, and yoga.
Another nine favor men, though only slightly. They are: bicycle riding, camping, hiking, kayaking, running/jogging, scooter riding [what’s that?], cross-country skiing, softball, and tennis.
In the rest of the activities, men outnumber women, sometimes by very large numbers. Over 70 percent of the participants in the following activities are males 7 and up: archery, baseball, tackle football, golf, ice hockey, hunting (both firearms and bow and arrow), muzzleloading, paintball, skateboarding, target shooting, wrestling, and yes, snowboarding. Downhill skiing, for what it’s worth, is moderately though not overwhelmingly male, at about 60 percent.
It should also be no surprise that some activities have younger participants than others. The median age of the male golfer, for example, is 41.5 years. The median skateboarder is 16.3 years old. For snowboarding, the number is 21.6. (All numbers are from the 2007 survey.)
Are there any sports that resemble snowboarding in being both primarily male and beyond that, primarily young male? Perhaps one that has the same “bad boy” rap that snowboarding sometimes carries. So I looked for sports in which males made up 73.5 percent of participants, for whom the median age was 21.6 years, plus or minus 5 percent for both numbers.
Only one met both criteria: baseball. Does that tell us anything? I’m not sure. Baseball is a team activity, and the demands of being on a team may promote certain kinds of behavior that an individual activity doesn’t.
Three other activities came close on the percentage of male participants: golf, skateboarding, and target shooting. I don’t very little about target shooting, but when you consider golf and skateboarding, it would seem that age does play a significant role in setting the reputation of the activity and those who practice it.
Lacrosse players and inline skaters were on average the same age as snowboarders, but women were much more represented, with each activity nearly split down the middle on the gender line. To pose what may be the closest analogy in this whole comparison, do inline skaters carry the same rap among casual cyclists as snowboarders do among some segments of the skiing public? In both cases, enthusiasts use different technology in the same space.
Finally, the median age of participants in wrestling and paintball (individual activities) was similar to that of snowboarding, though much more male-dominated.
Rather than engage in further sociological speculation, I’ll leave it here for now. If you have any thoughts on this, please leave a comment.