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Notes -
Is this an edge for the right tail (women win more events), or an edge for the average competitor (the mean/median woman competing does better than the mean/median man)? The former would be extremely impressive in the context of reduced interest (uninterested women who could have become winners don't even compete, yet the remaining women are still better enough to win), but the latter is just what you would expect from selection bias (the less talented women are more likely to quit than the less talented men, so the latter bring down the male average but the former don't bring down the female average).
Anecdotally, I've heard multiple different firearms instructors report that on average women learn faster than men, and they generally attribute it to humility - by the time they've convinced their male students to "unlearn" bad habits, their female students have already started perfecting good habits. The people saying this included some who are unabashedly sexist in the opposite direction in other contexts, so I don't think their reports here were just "women are wonderful" bias. They might be comparing averages to averages and so just reporting what we'd expect from selection bias, though. Some may also have other unconscious motives to want to encourage women - another common anecdote is that the men in a mixed-sex training class tend to work much harder after they realize the women are starting to beat them.
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