Advantages and disadvantages of female body in practical shooting

[Duane Thomas]

This is true. However she never brought up the topic of how engineering psychology affects men and women driving, either. I'm just saying that if the facts you put forth are to have any meaning, the people doing the testing and reaching certain conclusions from the observed results need to have first factored out any other causes that could explain their observations. (That's why being an honest-to-God statistician is a much more complex job than a lot of people give it credit for.) And, at least from what I'm hearing, you're not sure that was done. Yes, I'm introducing a third variable. If that completely wrecks the thesis because it never accounted for that, then it wasn't a very sound thesis to start with.

One of the great logic errors is called quid pro quo, Latin for (or so I've been told), "If this, then this." IOW the idea that because two things are happening simultaneously, one of them must be causing the other. The classic example of this is, "I don't think we should take Suzie with us to the picnic. Every time we take Suzie with us, it rains." While it may well be true that every time they take Suzie with them on a picnic it rains, that is far and away from proving that it's the fact Suzie is with them causing it to rain. And while it may be true that in this test more women used a particular form of tracking than men, that is far and away from proving that the fact they are female is causing them to use that form of tracking.

[Jake Di Vita]

FWIW, science is not about cause and effect.

It is about having measurable, observable, and repeatable results. No one of these is less significant than the others.

[Chills1994]

Duane...come on now...you are really muddying the waters here and you are most likely confusing this poor girl, for whom English is probably not her first language.

Can we give it a rest for a little while, please?

For whatever it is worth to her, or yes, even you Duane, I finally figured out what the two types of tracking tasks are: compensatory (whatever that means??) and pursuit.

[Chills1994]

You two mods are really having fun with this, aren't you?

I think I have steered our OP onto the correct track with a few various avenues on where to research gender differences.

There is no need to bog this thread down with pedantically pedagogical discussions.

Say that fast three times.

[Chills1994]

Whoops... sorry.

I didn't tie it all together in my initial post back on the first page. Driving a car is a tracking task. So, consequently, "driving" your gun to the targets in an IPSC match is also a tracking task.

Sorry I didn't make that clear in that first post.

So, if I can remember correctly, a pursuit tracking task would be like pointing your shotgun at a clay bird once it leaves the trap house. So my next logical leap would be that if you have a moving target or a swinger type of target in an IPSC match, then you are using pursuit tracking in your efforts to get your bullets to hit that target.

[Duane Thomas]

Duane...come on now...you are really muddying the waters here and you are most likely confusing this poor girl, for whom English is probably not her first language.

I'm not really seeing how pointing out that something that's been presented to the OP as a fact she should use in her paper is not necessarily so counts as muddying the waters. Would letting that stand keep the waters clear? And from reading Brankica's posts, whether English is her second language or not, the "poor girl" is highly intelligent, well-educated, and speaks, or at least writes, English better than most people for whom it's a first language. Pretty sure she can keep up.

But yes, I can give it a rest. Can you?

[twodownzero]

This is a very interesting topic. I have long wondered why even those most amazing women shooters still aren't as good as the best men. I figured that within a few years, we'd see a woman who could compete at a the level of the best men in the sport. That hasn't happened yet, but I think it's only a matter of time.

I would like to point out something that I see as an error about this thread, however. What we are talking about when it comes to anatomy are SEX differences, not GENDER.

Is your paper seeking to focus on anatomical differences? I think this is a really interesting topic. It'd be great for someone with good understanding of anatomy to watch some of the top women shooters and ask them why they do things a certain way. I've noticed just from instructing women that they tend to have a totally different stance, etc. than men.

Going through life as a man, I never knew that women have only half of the grip strength of a man.

[BritinUSA]

I thought I would do some experiments using the results from the 2009 USPSA Nationals to see what the differences were between men and women with regard to the Hit Factors for each of the stages. The Nationals offered up a good mix of large, medium and small stages and the results I found are in the graph that you can see below.

Women seemed to be closer to the men's Hit Factors in Production Division (a difference in Hit Factor of 1.4), Limited had a difference of 1.6 and Open was a huge 2.2

I would have suspected that the larger courses of fire would have had the greater difference in Hit Factors between the two groups but there does not appear to be any correlation.

Why the difference between Production should be so slim and Open so wide is open to interpretation. Perhaps when Brankica has completed her paper the answer may become apparent.

I suspect (based solely on these numbers) that the possibility of a woman winning an overall match would be higher in Production division than it would in Open.

[twodownzero]

Is the average hit factor much higher in limited and open compared to production? Do these correlations follow the above "curves"?

I have long suspected that it takes more physical ability to be competitive in limited and open than in production or single stack. The hit factors are higher because the guns cycle faster. I am a mid-C level shooter in Production and even I find myself waiting for the gun to cycle. In other words, even at a low skill level for the sport, my eyes are still faster than the gun. When I shoot limited, I'm definitely not waiting for the gun. With a lightweight slide, it's way faster than I am! So the upper body strength advantage that men have can definitely be exploited in limited and open, whereas in production, the limit is more due to the equipment than physical strength, it seems.

These are just my hypotheses, and I'd be interested to hear if the data confirm them.

I'd also be interested to see the proportional differences between women and men as well. Are men consistently 20% better than women, or is the proportional difference greater in limited/open than production? Perhaps the overall difference doesn't tell the whole story?

I know these are all just random thoughts, but they'd be worthy of study if you have the data. Women see just as fast as we do--their "cameras" aren't any slower. I suspect that at the peak of performance, they control recoil slower and potentially move a little slower, and that'd imply that their performance disadvantage would be especially large in open, less so in limited, and still smaller yet in production.

There are also problems with the smaller sample of female shooters. Looking at Julie Golob's (dated) numbers, she appears to actually be more competitive in open than in other divisions. Perhaps the compensators remove so much of the recoil from the equation that it makes it harder to compete in limited than open with reduced upper body strength? Obviously n=1 is too small of a sample, but I can't fine Jessie Abbate's USPSA number to take a look at her numbers (not that n=2 is so much better, but the two of them are, as far as I know, the best in the business).

This is definitely something worthy of study, and there exists quite a bit of quantitative data that'd support some sort of repeatable conclusions if the samples are large enough. The only problem I'm finding is actually compiling enough of it to make any sort of generalizations.

Edited December 25, 2009 by twodownzero

[BritinUSA]

Here's the data:

Difference.pdf

The hit factors are higher as you move from Production to Limited to Open. The differences between the open division and the two iron-sighted divisions are pronounced.

The Hit factors between men and women track very closely with Production/Limited but there are wide variances in Open division. I am not sure why this should be the case, as I mentioned earlier I hope some analysis of the physiological differences between men and women may account for them. I would have though that Open would be closer, with the reduced recoil offered by those guns.

Edited December 26, 2009 by BritinUSA

[Duane Thomas]

Women seemed to be closer to the men's Hit Factors in Production Division (a difference in Hit Factor of 1.4), Limited had a difference of 1.6 and Open was a huge 2.2

The hit factors are higher as you move from Production to Limited to Open. The differences between the open division and the two iron-sighted divisions are pronounced.

The Hit factors between men and women track very closely with Production/Limited but there are wide variances in Open division. I am not sure why this should be the case, as I mentioned earlier I hope some analysis of the physiological differences between men and women may account for them. I would have though that Open would be closer, with the reduced recoil offered by those guns.

One of the great misunderstandings about USPSA/IPSC shooting is the idea that compensated Open division auto pistols recoil less than non-comped auto pistols. This is the exact opposite of what actually happens. Open guns have more recoil than Production pieces, obviously, because at Major power factor there is much more recoil than at Minor. But even at Major power factor in Open/Limited/Limited-10, Open guns have more recoil than in Limited/Limited-10. To understand why, it's important to differentiate between muzzle flip and recoil. Muzzle flip is the amount the front of the gun flips up, recoil is the amount of energy you have coming to the rear. Compensated Major pf auto pistols have little muzzle flip but really heavy recoil.

In the first place, with a Major .38 Super (or equivalent power cartridge) auto pistol, you are running, basically, a full-power .357 Magnum so you have a lot of recoil to start with, but also the compensator, while a lot of people think it reduces recoil, actually increases recoil. When an auto pistol with a tilt barrel operating system fires, during cycling the front of the barrel tilts up, the rear of the barrel must tilt down. When the compgun fires, the compensator, pushing down on the front of the barrel, delays unlocking of the action. This is why, all else being equal, a compgun runs a much lighter recoil spring than a non-compgun firing the same cartridge. Because the action is locked together into a unit much longer than normal, the slide does not begin to cycle until after a significant amount of the recoil impulse has dissipated, thus a lighter recoil spring is needed to allow the gun to cycle. Where does that recoil energy go? It gets passed on to the shooter. It's like the difference between firing a pump shotgun where the action is locked together into a unit as the shell fires versus running a semi-auto shotgun where the action "gives" under recoil. All else being equal, the pump shotgun will have much heavier recoil than the semi-auto shotgun. For much the same reason, compguns are, actually, very nasty guns to fire.

Competitors who fire a lot of .38 Super through a compgun have a tendency to develop "Super elbow", the shooting equivalent of tennis elbow, because with the front of the gun being held down, recoil energy can't dissipate through muzzle flip; combine this with the locked together action and the power of the cartridge being fired, you get a LOT of recoil energy coming straight to the rear, and after awhile it beats the living hell out of the elbow joint. With a well-designed comp you can actually have the force of the powder gases slamming into the front/interior of the comp pulling the comp forward, thus compensating (no pun intended) for recoil to a minor extent, but not enough to prevent still winding up with a very heavily recoiling gun. What comps do really well is hold the front of the gun down during rapid fire. Open shooters are willing to pay the price of really heavy recoil in exchange for a gun with less muzzle flip that allows them to fire with a higher level of speed with accuracy.

Compguns don't actually cycle faster than non-compguns. Because the action is delayed from unlocking, on an empirical level they actually cycle slower than if you were running the same gun without a comp. Stand to the side and watch an Open gunner shoot sometime; you'll see the gun cycles so slowly it doesn't even require particularly fast eyesight to watch the slide move back-and-forth. Of course, in both cases, with or without a comp, the gun is going to cycle faster than anyone but a person with freakishly fast reflexes could possibly fire the gun anyway, so it's a bit of a non-issue. Compguns can, however, seem like they cycle faster because, since they have less muzzle flip, the time period the gun is down out of recoil, ready to fire again, before our reflex level can actually make the gun fire again, is longer. The sense that we are waiting on the gun is, at least in my experience, the hallmark of really good shooting. It means we're doing everything else faster and more efficiently than we can actually make the gun fire. Eventually, with good technique, we can get to the point we're waiting on the gun with a non-comped auto pistol, but we can get that effect at a much lower skill level with an Open gun.

If I had to explain the disparity in scores between women and men being higher in Open, I would say that a woman's more lightly muscled upper body, and the fact that what muscles are there tend to be not nearly as strong, means she can't handle the more heavily recoiling Open gun as well as the generally more heavily muscled, stronger men. With something like a more lightly recoiling non-comped Major caliber Limited gun, or especially a non-comped Minor pf Production piece, however, the disparity in upper body strength does not come into play nearly as much. This correlates well with the observed reality of the least difference in scores being posted in Production (light recoil, no comp), then a greater disparity in Limited (heavier recoil, no comp) then the greatest difference in Open (heavier recoil plus recoil increasing comp).

[Brankica]

I have been reading your posts and really appreciating what you are doing here...this is so much help, I never hoped I would get...fortunately we got more time to write our finals so I will be able to work on it in even more details.... and all thanks to you and your ideas.

Just want to say I am happy I started something this interesting ;-)

[AlamoShooter]

Ya know I have kept from saying this for weeks now.

The Title line

As a match director I can think of lots of ....Advantages....to having a Female at the match

But seriously its good for some of the Gun-Ho guys to get beat by a Girl at a shooting match

[twodownzero]

Duane,

I do not shoot open but if you read past articles in frontsight magazine written by Bob @ Brazos Custom, he disagrees with you.

Specifically, I'm borrowing from this article, where he says:

The gases hitting the baffles of the comp actually push the gun forward and reduce the recoil transferred to your hand. This action is more important than the upward push of the gases that reduce muzzle flip but it does not reduce the recoil of the gun. Reduced muzzle flip is important to improved scores but it is a trade off. With less muzzle flip the recoil has to go somewhere so it comes straight back at the shooter and is felt in the hand, elbow, and shoulder. This is why an open gun pushes so hard in your hand. Lighter bullets with slower powders will work the comp best and usually produce the best results. Barrel ports will reduce muzzle flip but there is a trade off – the less muzzle flip the more the recoil will come straight back into your hand (harder feel). Ports and comps work together as a system and one can affect the other. More or larger ports and the gun shoots flatter, but the comp does not have as much gas to work with. The comp does not push forward as much with reduced gas pressure.

The way I read that, Bob is suggesting that barrel porting tends to reduce flip, which increases recoil. But the compensator pushes the gun forward, which negates some of the effects of recoil. I do not shoot open, so I'm stuck reading what others have to say and using intuition. Recoil is a very subjective subject anyway, and a .38 Super or 9mm Major definitely has sharper recoil (uncompensated) than .40 Major loads do with heavier bullets. That said, open shooters of both sexes shoot faster. That suggests to me that: 1. there is less recoil overall and/or 2. Open shooters learn to "manage" recoil better and shoot faster because their gun shoots flatter, regardless of whether or not it has more recoil.

Obviously everyone shoots much faster in open than the other divisions, male or female. I'm sure the guns push the hand quite a bit and that it's a different kind of recoil, but I'm not convinced that an open gun transfers more energy into the shooter than a limited gun. An awful lot of energy is being dissipated through the compensator for that to be the case.

[Duane Thomas]

I'm not really seeing a huge difference between what he's saying and what I'm saying. A well-designed comp will deal with some of the recoil increasing effects of the comp, but not all by any means. You still wind up with a very hard kicking gun. Just a potentially very flat shooting, hard kicking gun.

[BritinUSA]

Duane, I think you're right, it would certainly help to explain the differences in the HF between the different divisions. Now here is an interesting question; If a woman were to shoot an Open gun with Minor loads (essentially a steel-gun) would the hit factor difference increase or decrease compared to the men?

Although there would be a decrease in the value of peripheral hits on the target, I am wondering if this would be offset by faster split times as a result of lower recoil/muzzle-flip.

[twodownzero]

I'm not really seeing a huge difference between what he's saying and what I'm saying. A well-designed comp will deal with some of the recoil increasing effects of the comp, but not all by any means. You still wind up with a very hard kicking gun. Just a potentially very flat shooting, hard kicking gun.

Because he's arguing that the primary purpose for the comp is to pull the gun forward, not to push the muzzle down. Brazos' open guns have ported barrels to reduce flip as a consequence.

[Duane Thomas]

I'm not sure this is really the place for a discussion of how and why a compensator works. And why they work better than simple barrel porting. And how barrel porting can degrade the efficiency of a compensator. Though if you want to start a thread on the topic in the Open Gun forum, you will certainly find many people willing to discuss it with you there.

[twodownzero]

I'm not sure this is really the place for a discussion of how and why a compensator works. And why they work better than simple barrel porting. And how barrel porting can degrade the efficiency of a compensator. Though if you want to start a thread on the topic in the Open Gun forum, you will certainly find many people willing to discuss it with you there.

I didn't really mean to drift the thread that direction, it's just one relevant topic in a larger discussion.

Just to clarify, is it your position that it requires greater recoil control skills to shoot an open gun than a limited gun?

[Bob Hostetter]

For what it's worth, in my experience, the advantages of an open gun are capacity, reduced muzzle flip, and easier sight alginment. They are less user friendly in the areas of weight, recoil, grip size, and mechnical manipulation.

Most of the female shooters I have worked with had smaller sized hands, and relatively less upper body strength which made them more sensitive to the disadvantages of the Open gun and less able to take advantage of the benefits. It certainly has never been a lack of commitment, work ethic, or talent.

I agree that it is only a matter of time until there is a top female Open shooter capable of Top 10 national level finishes. I do think there is a strong possiblity that the weapons platform they use might be something other then the now tradational STI/SVI.

[mlmiller1]

Britinusa, I have a question for you. Let me start by saying I don't know how to build a graph or anything like that but I want to know if you took into account that there were probably more women in lower classes than men, especially in Open. Did you compare hit factors along Class divisions?

Of course, I just went to look at the results & with just a quick glance, I may have been wrong. First, there didn't seem to be more women in lower classes in Open. It is kind of curious that none of the women came out that high at this match. Athena Lee & Kay Miculek specifically usually come out quite a bit higher in match scoring than they did at the nat'ls. Interesting.

Still, I wonder if given divisions along class lines, would your results be any different? I am of the opinion that there are a few women that could win almost any match out there. Was there something about the Nat'ls that was somehow skewed to favor(inadvertently of course) men over women? Have you tried this graph with some other major matches? HMMM, things to think about. Very interesting, though.

MLM

[ong45]

One of the great misunderstandings about USPSA/IPSC shooting is the idea that compensated Open division auto pistols recoil less than non-comped auto pistols. This is the exact opposite of what actually happens. Open guns have more recoil than Production pieces, obviously, because at Major power factor there is much more recoil than at Minor. But even at Major power factor in Open/Limited/Limited-10, Open guns have more recoil than in Limited/Limited-10. To understand why, it's important to differentiate between muzzle flip and recoil. Muzzle flip is the amount the front of the gun flips up, recoil is the amount of energy you have coming to the rear. Compensated Major pf auto pistols have little muzzle flip but really heavy recoil.

If I had to explain the disparity in scores between women and men being higher in Open, I would say that a woman's more lightly muscled upper body, and the fact that what muscles are there tend to be not nearly as strong, means she can't handle the more heavily recoiling Open gun as well as the generally more heavily muscled, stronger men. With something like a more lightly recoiling non-comped Major caliber Limited gun, or especially a non-comped Minor pf Production piece, however, the disparity in upper body strength does not come into play nearly as much. This correlates well with the observed reality of the least difference in scores being posted in Production (light recoil, no comp), then a greater disparity in Limited (heavier recoil, no comp) then the greatest difference in Open (heavier recoil plus recoil increasing comp).

Good points on the difference between muzzle flip and recoil, don't you think though that the slide energy slamming into the frame is what causes the majority of muzzle flip ?

I always thought muzzle flip and recoil were related in a cause/ effect kind of way.

Given that i still can't explain why a barrel ported open gun hits my hand harder than a straight comp gun.

Let's say i go along with your theory of why open guns are harder to shoot from a recoil perspective, i think that a physically weaker person would still have a harder time dealing with a lot of muzzle flip rather than recoil.( hand strenght comes to mind )

[BritinUSA]

Britinusa, I have a question for you. Let me start by saying I don't know how to build a graph or anything like that but I want to know if you took into account that there were probably more women in lower classes than men, especially in Open. Did you compare hit factors along Class divisions?

No, I wanted to compare the top three men and the top three women in a straight-up contest.

Still, I wonder if given divisions along class lines, would your results be any different?

If you compare class to class then (in theory) there would be little discernible difference between them.

Why don't we have more women GM's?

The objective here was to try and find if there are any physical factors that could impact women more so than men. Part of that is gathering the data to determine what the differences were with regard to Hit Factors. As Duane pointed out, the recoil/muzzle-flip of the various divisions could account for part of that difference.

The chart shows that the number of rounds in the stage are not a determining factor in performance. If we saw that men scored much higher than women in field stages but less so in short stages, then we could attribute it to faster foot speed for example, but the data does not seem to support that.

I think the Power Factor/gun-type of each division seems to play a much larger role.

[mlmiller1]

Britinusa,

Thanks, I was just wondering how many ways you had looked at it. It would seem obvious to me that if no women were in the top 6, comparing the high HF of the top 3 men to the top 3 women would be almost pointless. The scores themselves bear out the result that men had higher hf than women.

Why is anyone's guess, though. I feel women are fully able to win a major in Open but they don't seem able to pull it off, yet. Physiology must be the reason. It will be interesting to see the conclusions that the O.P. comes up with on her paper when she is done.

MLM

[FranDoc]

... Now here is an interesting question; If a woman were to shoot an Open gun with Minor loads (essentially a steel-gun) would the hit factor difference increase or decrease compared to the men?

A first-person observation from a female shooter: I shoot almost-B class with iron sights. My current .40 Major load through the Caspian causes less (perceived) muzzle flip than the usual 9 Minor load in my XD 4". The splits/transitions with the Caspian are faster. Part of that is due to more experience in the sport, part to the reduced muzzle flip and perceived "softer" feel of the .40 (gun with more mass).

When I've shot Open guns, the overwhelming observation is feeling the "blast in the face", which I assumed was gas venting from barrel ports and from the compensator. The "push back" into my hand was also much harder than from any Limited gun. Granted, my experience with Open guns is fairly limited (and includes guns like XRe's former "Viper", a "concussion junkie's" dream).

The other end of the Open spectrum is a friend's CZ Open that runs 9 Minor. There is very minimal (perceived) muzzle flip, really minimal recoil. It feels like my .22 Open steel gun. With THAT gun, the splits/transitions ARE much faster than with the Limited/Caspian and I can shoot alphas faster.

Although there would be a decrease in the value of peripheral hits on the target, I am wondering if this would be offset by faster split times as a result of lower recoil/muzzle-flip.

I've wondered that as well. I may borrow the 9 Minor CZ, shoot through the (club) match first with that (to eliminate any "practice" bias for the Open gun), then compare it to a reshoot with my usual Limited Caspian.

This would give one data point, not an answer to all the questions above, but quite possibly an interesting comparison.