Les Croupiers Running Club Forum

Everyday sexism that they are only looking for male runners.

I would have been interested! Saying that, not sure I would consider myself an endurance athlete these days! 😁

“Dear Amanda, Claire and fellow runners,

In order to reassure all members that there is no prejudice involved in our recruitment process, I think it is important that I elaborate a few of my initial points regarding the effect of gender. As little is known about the independent and/or combined influence of fitness status and ageing on the sympathetic regulation of heart and blood vessel function, we wish to conduct our study in a way that ‘controls’ or reduces any additional physiological factors that may independently influence our results. Gender has a huge independent influence on heart and blood vessel function. This is primarily due to significant fluctuations in hormone levels that occur during the menstrual cycle in females. Accordingly, any female hormonal changes would have a significant independent effect on the physiological variables that we wish to assess and would reduce the reliability of our findings. This effect would also be magnified in any women taking oral contraception. As our current study design involves 3 separate visits, any female participant would have to be assessed at an identical stage of their menstrual cycle for all 3 visits, which would likely result in each assessment having to be assessed a month apart. Additionally, we would have to ask all female participants taking oral contraception to stop taking their medication during this period of assessment. Not only did we feel that this was an unreasonable and unethical request, due to such lengthy gaps between each assessment, it would also reduce the validity of our findings. My supervisors and fellow research team members have extensive experience in assessing sex differences and are confident that an additional study can be designed that will be far less intrusive to female participants and will not require such sacrifices. Nevertheless, as it is currently unknown whether fitness and age will have an independent/combined effect on the sympathetic regulation of heart and blood vessel function, it is important that we address this initial question before investigating whether gender has an additional influence. Indeed, this is an area that we are very keen to explore in the future and would welcome the involvement of any of your female club members.

I hope this clears up any confusion. I really appreciate the Les Croupier members bringing this issue to my attention, as I can completely understand how our eligibility criteria may have seemed unjustified without this information.

Best wishes,
Den”

Thanks in advance,

Den

Denis Wakeham MSc
MPhil/PhD Candidate in Cardiovascular Physiology and Health

Cardiff School of Sport
Cardiff Metropolitan University
Cyncoed Campus, Cyncoed Road
Cardiff, CF23 6XD