Isn’t ‘throwing like a girl’ using your shoulder to throw from rather than a slinging action – wasn’t huckleberry finn found out like this, or was that catching something by bringing his knees together.
Throwing like a girl
“Janet Hyde, a professor of psychology and women’s studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, has studied the gender gap across a variety of skills, analyzing the vast quantity of data collected over the years in studies of social, psychological, communication and physical traits, skills and behaviors. She’s found only two skills in which there is a “very large” difference between boys and girls: throwing velocity and throwing distance.
Jerry Thomas, dean of the College of Education at the University of North Texas in Denton, who has researched the “throwing gap,” told Haspel, “The overhand throwing gap, beginning at four years of age, is three times the difference of any other motor task, and it just gets bigger across age. By 18, there’s hardly any overlap in the distribution: nearly every boy by age 15 throws better than the best girl.”
It’s cross-cultural: around the world, pre-pubescent girls throw only 51 to 69 percent of the distance that boys do, at only 51 to 79 percent of the velocity. The difference increases with age: one U.S. study found that girls age 14 to 18 threw only 39 percent as far as boys.
There is a “nurture” factor: in most cultures boys start throwing earlier and throw more often than girls. But a study Thomas carried out with Australian aboriginals, in whose culture both men and women hunt and both sexes throw from childhood, found that, although aboriginal girls threw significantly better than girls from other cultures, they still threw at only 78.3 percent of the velocity of boys.