When it comes to sport, boys ’play like a girl’
New research from the Faculty of Health Sciences finds that girls in primary school are just as physically capable as their male classmates. Girls in primary school are just as physically capable as their male classmates, according to our research , taking the sting out of the insult "you play like a girl". When we compared primary school children's physical capabilities, differences between girls and boys were not as important as people think. So, they should be happily playing with and competing against each other in the backyard, playground and sporting fields. As part of wider research to assess people's physical capabilities across the lifespan, we tested 300 children and adolescents between the ages of 3 and 19. We tested each child for over two hours, taking more than 100 measurements. These included measuring the strength of 14 muscle groups, the flexibility of 13 joints and 10 different types of balance.
