Throwing Like a Girl

I have a new paper out, published in a journal called The Biology of Sex Research. It is a bit technical for a substack, but I am reprinting the “Plain English Summary”, my “final provocation” and a link to the full paper. The paper is open access, so anyone can read it.

Link to Throwing Like a Girl

“The belief that boys and girls throw differently is widespread. The scientific findings supporting this belief, while numerous, vary greatly in terms of method and the age of the children studied. Furthermore, research projects are usually based on a two-fold binary paradigm: first that the important contrasts are between boys and girls; second that studies of variation in throwing form illuminate the degree to which nature compared to nurture contribute to reported differences. Here, I present an alternate paradigm—the analysis of motor skills as they first develop during infancy. This paradigm embraces nurture/nature and gender/sex as entangled and best understood as a dynamic whole; it also allows us to understand throwing form and skill as a continuum or spectrum rather than a binary construct. To offer a concrete instance, I describe the ball-playing activities of 10 infants aged 6–15 months and their mothers. The five boys all began to play active ball games with their mothers at the average age of 9.7 months. This early playing happened before they could walk, and they mastered stable two-handed overhead throwing from a sitting position. The girls and their mothers did not play ball until the babies averaged 12.1 months. Four out of five of the girls were learning to walk and throw at the same time, a condition of instability that made it difficult for them to fully raise the ball above their head without falling. We hypothesize that differences in timing and frequency of play events lead to continuous variability in the embodiment of throwing skills.”

“Here is my final provocation. If someone does NOT throw like a girl, does that mean they throw like a boy? Are throwing style and throwing force binary? I sincerely doubt it. If, as I urge in this paper, we follow development using longitudinal, naturalistic, qualitative observations, I suspect we will uncover a great deal of individual variation. Children will vary in the timing and method by which they acquire increasingly complex motor skills. Households and dyads will vary in the frequency with which ball play is an important feature of early development. And we will encounter training and feedback offered by peers and older siblings. If what truly exists is—dare I say it—a spectrum of throwing styles--we can, certainly, continue to use standard statistics to create binary gender/sex bins [78]. In doing so, however, we will lose insight into how motor skills develop in babies and how they are promoted and refined as children grow to adulthood. Instead, I urge using qualitative longitudinal, naturalistic observations to help frame specific questions aimed at investigating individual variation rather than aggregate group differences.”

Questions? I am happy to respond to genuine inquiry. I feel free to ignore trolling.