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Poll: As two women are selected for Sussex County cricket team, should all sport be gender blind?

 

Wednesday 16 January 2013 12:40 GMT
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(Getty Images)

Cricket, a sport with a gender-bias rap sheet almost as long as golf, has taken a landmark step towards greater equality between the sexes after it was revealed that two of the successful England women's team will play for Sussex County's second string in the 2013 season. This might in turn lead to female cricketers competing at the highest level of the men's game, a development Clare Connor, former England captain, called "not beyond the realms of possibility".

The move has reignited debate on sport and sex discrimination, with many asking if this is the beginning of the end for rigid boundaries between the men and women's games.

Golf has already experimented with mixing as former women's world Number 1 Annika Sorenstam competed in men's events, though without much success.

Backers of gender-blind competition herald this move as another blow to the "old boys" club mentality that pervades some sports (women, for example, were only allowed in to Lords cricket ground in 1999), sceptics suggest that the men's and women's games are kept separate for biological rather than chauvinistic reasons.

Where do you stand? Should sport be gender blind, or should boys and girls play apart?

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