https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-still-debate-whether-women-can-play-in-mens-leagues-when-womens-sports-are-more-visible-and-successful-than-ever
You’ve unknowingly answered your own question.
This is Paige Bueckers.
She was the top pick in the 2025 WNBA draft. She won pretty much every basketball award there was in college. She has all the makings of the next star in the league. Players such as she, Caitlin Clark, and Angel Reese are helping to make the WNBA more popular than ever, as you allude to in the question.
OK, now imagine that she never got to set foot on a basketball court in either college or the pros. Because that is what would have happened without dedicated women’s sports teams and leagues. Because although Paige might already be the best player on the court in any women’s basketball game, she would not have even made the men’s team at anything other than a Division III college and maybe not even that, and certainly could not play in a men’s pro league. Bueckers is a transcendent female basketball player, but there is not a high level men’s team in the US where she would be one of the top 11 players.
Need more? OK, team sports can be very subjective, and we don't have an actual situation where Bueckers has tried to make a men’s team. Let’s look at swimming. Simple sport. Jump into the pool and see how fast you go. Men and women compete in the same events so it is pretty easy to compare how they do.
This is Katie Ledecky
She might be the best female swimmer of all time. She has won 14 Olympic medals, 9 of them gold. In the 2024 Olympics, she won her signature event, the 1500m freestyle, by 10 seconds (an eternity in a sport where the margin of victory is often fractions of a second). In the 1500m, she owns the 20 fastest times ever swum by a woman. She is unquestionably the best ever at the 1500m freestyle.
But this amazing swimmer would never have been heard of if she swam against men. Because the top men swim the 1500m freestyle almost a full minute faster than she does. Even her world record time of 15:20 would have only been good for 12th place in the preliminary heats at the 2024 men’s US Olympic trials, when swimmers are not even going full out. Again, the world record time for a woman would not have been enough to even qualify for the finals at those trials. Not only would Ledecky have no Olympic medals if she had to compete against men, the only way she could have even gone to the Olympics would have been to buy a ticket.
We could go on. A team composed of current and former members of the US women’s national soccer team (best in the world) got obliterated 12–0 by what was essentially a minor league men’s team in a match. The top women’s college basketball teams sometimes practice (and lose) against male students from their schools (not the actual men’s team). Roger Bannister famously ran the mile in under 4 minutes in 1954, and the record is now 3:43. Seventy years after Bannister, no woman has ever run it in under 4:07. Serena Williams won a total of 23 Grand Slam singles titles in her career. She herself said that against a top male player she would lose “6‑0, 6‑0 in five to six minutes, maybe 10 minutes… I only want to play girls, because I don’t want to be embarrassed.”
And that’s why dedicated women’s sports exist. If the sport depends on strength, speed, coordination, or endurance (i.e. almost all of them), top women can’t compete with mediocre men, much less the top men. It turns out that there are, shockingly enough, actual biological differences between men and women that affect how good they are at sports. The NFL, MLB, NBA, NHL, and other sports leagues don't keep women out because they are sexist. They keep them out because they aren’t good enough to play there. If you put Paige Bueckers on an NBA roster tomorrow, she’d be the shortest, slowest, weakest player on the team. She would get all of her shots blocked and would be unable to defend anyone. She wouldn’t belong on the court at all. And that would be a shame, because there is a court she does belong on. Because conversely, women’s leagues keep men out because in most sports they have a competitive advantage.
So if you like watching women’s sports or are a current or aspiring female athlete yourself, celebrate things like the WNBA rather than lament that women don't play in the NBA against men.
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