Rock Climbing: The Only Truly Gender-Blind Sport

I was rock climbing in August just outside Las Vegas with a seasoned mountaineer named Patrick when our gearhead chatter about men’s vs. women’s climbing shoes prompted a question about gender. I asked Patrick, a rescue climber and guide who helped start one of the first Vegas rock gyms, about the performance potential of guys vs. girls. Gender parity in climbing is uncommonly common, in contrast with the dozen or so sports in which I’ve competed or dabbled (and the many I’ve spectated). In the four years since I started, I’ve routinely seen women match or best the efforts of much burlier men. But until recently, I still assumed that the guys, as in every other sport I know, could ultimately go higher, faster, stronger.

Patrick’s answer was brief and unhesitating. “They’re equal,” he replied, before belaying [2] me up a face of lovely red sandstone. Once, he later told me, he took a group of government officials out for their first climb. The first three, all men in fairly good shape, struggled up the wall. Then a woman raised her hand and said she wanted to try. “She was a little on the heavy side,” Pat says. “We could barely get the harness around her.” But it was immediately obvious that she had an inherent sense of balance and body position. She scaled the face with ease. "It was beautiful,” Patrick says. “Don't take this the wrong way, but it was like watching the hippo ballet in [the Disney movie] Fantasia [3].”

If there ever was a search for the most gender-blind sport, call off the dogs. Rock climbing is it. Here’s why:

Sports generally reward bulk, speed, strength, and, often, height—all traits in which men tend to have the physical advantage. But climbers can’t rely on brute strength alone. The typically feminine assets of balance, flexibility, and a sprinkle of grace are essential to navigating the vagaries of ancient rock and plastic gym holds. (To effortlessly “dance up the wall” is a high compliment.) Excessive bulk, be it muscle or fat, while not a showstopper, is a definite disadvantage in a sport that rewards a high strength-to-weight ratio. Height can help or hinder, depending on the contours of the rock.

True, most of the top climbers are men, but in a few cases, women have accomplished what men could not. In 1993, Lynn Hill was the first person to free-climb a famously challenging route in Yosemite National Park called "The Nose.” (Unlike previous ascenders of “The Nose,” Hill did not insert artificial holds into the rock. She was still on a rope, but used only natural rock to summit.) Her diminutive size—she’s 5’1”—and small fingers helped her move past key segments of the climb. As Hill later wrote in the American Alpine Journal:

After numerous tries over a three-day period, I discovered a bizarre sequence of moves involving delicate smears, stems, back-stepping, cross-stepping, laybacking, arm bars, pinching, palming, etc. Ironically, what initially appeared [to be] a pitch that would be desperate for a small person turned out to be a unique expanse of rock that almost seemed custom-designed for someone of my body dimensions and background in climbing.

Hill is fantastically strong, of course, but she accomplished her famous ascent with contortions fit for a dance or yoga class, including a move she later dubbed “the Houdini.” The following year, Hill free-climbed “The Nose” in a day, another pioneering feat.

By the 1990s, sports were, by and large, an acceptable extracurricular activity for girls in America. At my school in Honolulu, girls could compete in practically any nonwinter sport—basketball, water polo, golf, kayaking, and even pole-vaulting, which didn’t qualify as an Olympic women’s sport until 2000. A couple of female soccer players joined the football team as kickers. For two years in college, I was on the women’s crew team. (Many thanks to the late Hawaii Rep. Patsy Mink, who wrote Title IX.) But although I shared gyms, weight rooms, courts, fields, and boathouses for years with guys, I never had one as a teammate.

When I started climbing at a rock gym in Anchorage, Alaska, most of my partners were women. One exception was my friend Brook, who’s an amazing endurance athlete. He’s trudged to the top of Denali and once won a 100-mile trail race that he’d decided to run on a whim. Comparing our running abilities would be downright ridiculous. Yet as climbers we were evenly matched. Together we’d puzzle through tricky cruxes, or prod each other to attempt grades beyond our abilities. We were peers, and the beautiful part was that we weren’t exceptional. Visit any climbing gym or outdoor crag and you'll see a multiplicity of guy-girl duos, one partner scaling the wall and the other perhaps yelling up encouragement or helpful hints from the ground.

It’s partly this intuitive camaraderie between the sexes that makes climbing exceptionally gender-friendly. It’s a rare dynamic in a country where even coed sports aren't truly equal. Coed leagues generally have minimum quotas for women or special rules just for us—the assumption being that we ladies represent a bloc of weaker players. Even top climbers routinely team up with the opposite sex. Beth Rodden and her husband, Tommy Caldwell, are one of the best-known climbing duos in America and travel the world establishing new routes together. Hill’s partners on her historic climbs were both men.

Just to make sure my love of climbing wasn’t muddying my view, I looked for comparable gender dynamics in other sports. Pairs skating was out because of its strictly defined male-female roles. Plus, the costumes and thick makeup promote a girliness that is blatantly retrograde in the context of sports. Sailing was a possibility, until I came across studies and news articles showing that many dude mariners are anchored to a tradition of male chauvinism. A 1998 study in the International Review for the Sociology of Sport found that even though sailing “does not inherently favor men’s or women’s bodies,” the sport is used to “demonstrate masculinity among sailing's upper- and middle-class, male participants.” The second most popular women's sailing site on Google advertises its couples’ classes this way: "Guys will learn how to help your partner become a confident sailor and ladies will learn the secret to understanding the wind." And the luge? Men and women compete on the same track, but women start from a position farther down the course.

In other sports, teammates pass you the ball or baton. They shield you from opponents or help you race past them. On rock, your partner is the No. 1 buffer between you and gravity. In moments of fear, as your legs shake and your grip gives out, the gender of the person holding the rope is the last thing on your mind.