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Notes -
I have seen plenty of instances of this happening with badminton and to a lesser degree frisbee, and that's probably not a modern aberration.
The most obvious explanation is that, due to widely discussed gender differences in attitudes to open competition, sports that are essentially about putting a number on your relative skill level - counting goals etc. - are the ones that are less popular with women. Badminton certainly stands apart from sports like football in that play without explicit scoring is quite normalised (and implicit scoring like subtle social censure for those who disproportionately interrupt the flow of play is more in lines with covert competition preferences).
In that sense, I think "sports" is a misleading descriptor for what it is that there is a gendered difference in preferences for; and at least some of the cognitive dissonance surrounding this problem domain must be attributed to the core demographic of male sports players. Reality looks something like men play certain sports because they have a biological need to quantify their exact rank relative to other men, and women don't because that's not how they organise their status hierarchy and have nothing to gain from trying to insert themselves directly into the men's ranking. The social fiction instead says that men play those sports because something to do with sportsmanship, camraderie and cultivating the beauty and strength the human body is capable of, while women are turned away because men gatekeep these universally good things from them. If you rewrite the last fragment to say something that amounts to "out of their own lack of interest in these things, because there is actually no sexist gatekeeping", you have to conclude that women are moral mutants who do not care for sportsmanship, camraderie, cultivation and beauty, but this is only because you left the other half of the lie unchallenged.
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