Category: The Conversation

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Jon Bergdoll, Associate Director of Data Partnerships at the Lilly Family School of Philanthropy, Indiana University

Many provisions in the huge tax-and-spending package that President Donald Trump signed into law on July 4, 2025, sometimes called the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, will influence how much money Americans give to charity.

We conduct in-depth research on philanthropy. Together, we have analyzed the tax policy changes.

After crunching the numbers, we predict that the number of U.S. donors will rise, but that individuals, families and corporations will give less overall. We estimate that giving will be around US$5.7 billion less due to these tax policy changes, which went into effect on Jan. 1, 2026. That’s roughly 1% of the nearly $600 billion Americans gave in 2024.

Everyone gets a charitable deduction

As the reforms take effect, the provision likeliest to affect the most Americans should increase giving.

All taxpayers will finally get something that many nonprofit leaders had long sought: a universal charitable deduction.

The new rule will allow people who file on their own to shave up to $1,000 off their taxable income, or $2,000 for married couples who file jointly. Those amounts will not be adjusted for future inflation and will remain the same unless Congress changes them. They won’t affect anyone’s 2025 tax bill, but they will play a role in 2026 and beyond, especially when Americans file their 2026 tax returns in 2027.

The way this works is fairly simple. If a single person gives up to $1,000 or a married couple who file their taxes jointly give $2,000 to charity in a calendar year, they can deduct that much from their taxable income if they do not itemize their taxes.

This new deduction will allow every American individual and family to deduct charitable gifts, at least up to these limits. In practice, if your marginal tax rate is 22%, taking the charitable deduction could cut your tax bill by $220 if you file on your own and $440 if you’re married and file with your spouse, and this opportunity is available for the 90% of households who claim the standard deduction when they file their taxes.

The standard deduction is a fixed amount that all taxpayers may deduct from their taxable income.

Unlike the $300 charitable deduction that all American taxpayers could claim in 2020 and 2021 as part of economic relief measures during the COVID-19 pandemic, the measure is permanent this time around.

While charitable giving did increase in those years, it’s unclear whether this policy contributed to the higher levels of donations. Most likely, that temporary universal charitable deduction was set too low to make a significant difference. What’s more, people tend to respond more strongly to permanent policy changes than temporary ones.

The standard deduction no longer restricts access

Previously, only people who itemized their tax returns – around 10% of filers in recent years – could deduct the value of their charitable gifts from their taxable income.

Using data from 2022, we have estimated around 85% of non-itemized giving was coming from Americans who made donations totaling above the $1,000 and $2,000 amounts Congress set for the universal charitable deduction.

These taxpayers will now get tax breaks for some of that amount when they give to charity. There remains no incentive to give more than they already did in the past.

Encouraging more people to give to charity

While there are many factors that can affect giving patterns, evidence suggests that getting a new tax break makes any given person or family more likely to donate to charity.

Due to the introduction of a permanent universal charitable deduction, we project that 8.7 million more tax filers will donate. Adding this number of people to the most recently available data would bring the share of Americans who give charitably to 52%.

Our colleagues have identified a long-running decline in the number of U.S. individuals and families who give anything to charity each year. In 2020, the most recent year for which data is available, 46% of households made charitable gifts, down from 64% in 2008.

Changes for those who itemize

Two new tax rules, however, could discourage giving by higher-income donors. Those who itemize their taxes can’t deduct any giving below 0.5% of their income. Only their donations that exceed this floor can be deducted.

We found that only a small portion of itemized giving – less than 2% in the data we used – was done by households giving less than 0.5% of their income. We project individual giving will be $2.4 billion lower within this group of donors in 2026 and moving forward – at least relative to what individual giving would have been absent this tax-changing provision.

Another tax change could depress giving by larger amounts. It’s a reduction in the cap on all tax deductions – including the charitable deduction – from 37% to 35%.

While this might sound like a relatively minor difference, we and other scholars have found that high-income Americans tend to be highly responsive to tax policy changes. Perhaps that’s because they hire tax advisers, whose job it is to pay attention to changes like these.

According to 2022 IRS data, the most recent available, around half of all individual giving by people who itemize their tax returns – more than $100 billion – came from households likely to be affected by this 35% ceiling on deductions.

We project that this cap will decrease individual giving by $6.1 billion.

Corporate giving

Corporations gave an estimated $44 billion to charity in 2024, around 7% of all charitable gifts.

They might give less beginning in 2026, due to weaker incentives. The tax reform package includes a measure that makes it impossible for corporations to deduct any charitable gifts from their taxes unless those donations add up to at least 1% of their pretax profits.

Corporate giving has until now hovered around 1% of pretax profits. That pattern might suggest that this provision is likely to significantly discourage corporate giving because many companies will have to choose between getting no tax break at all or giving more to be eligible for one.

However, we’ve found that corporate giving is very top-heavy – as is the case with individual giving. While most corporations don’t give more than 1%, most of the money corporations give to charity actually comes from those that donate at least 1% of their profits.

Donors, including corporations, have a way to avoid missing out on the charitable deduction for those who itemize their tax on their returns. It’s possible to give more money to charity in one year to optimize the tax effects of their donations over time.

One way to go about this is to make gifts to a donor-advised fund, a financial account that people and companies can use to reserve charitable dollars. If a company deposits donations that are large enough to qualify for the corporate charitable tax deduction for one year into a donor-advised fund, it can get a tax break for that year and distribute gifts over two or more years as its executives see fit.

Taking all of the above into account, we project corporate giving to decline by only $1.55 billion, starting in 2026.

A mixed picture

In short, we project that these new tax policy changes will reduce total giving overall by $5.7 billion annually. The greatest downward pressure will be on individual donors who make large charitable gifts and bump up against the 35% cap on what they can deduct from their taxable income when they itemize.

But there is also a new disincentive for some of the middle-class donors who itemize their tax returns due to the new floor for itemizers being able to deduct charitable gifts. And the similar floor for corporate donations could discourage some companies from making gifts they would have made under the old rules.

At the same time, we expect to see the introduction of a permanent universal charitable deduction increase the total number of donors and the gifts that donors with more modest incomes make. Many nonprofit leaders had asked for this change for many years because they believed this change might increase giving overall.

To be clear, these estimated changes are relative to what would have happened had the government not enacted these new tax policies. Giving could still rise, just by less than it otherwise would have.

In addition, other factors affect giving besides taxation, including changes to income, wealth, stock market performance, economic growth and corporate profits.

Jon Bergdoll received funding from Independent Sector, a nonprofit membership group, for an earlier iteration of this research. This research was funded in partnership with CCS Fundraising.

Patrick Rooney does consulting for Rooney & Associates. He has received funding from Independent Sector, which earlier funded the portion of this work on the tax cap at 35%. This current work was funded by CCS, a fundraising consulting firm.

– ref. Tax changes taking effect in 2026 may boost the number of donors but lead to the US missing out on an estimated $5.7B a year in charitable giving – https://theconversation.com/tax-changes-taking-effect-in-2026-may-boost-the-number-of-donors-but-lead-to-the-us-missing-out-on-an-estimated-5-7b-a-year-in-charitable-giving-278137

Source: The Conversation – USA (2) – By Gayle Rogers, Professor of English, University of Pittsburgh

It’s a familiar feeling: You start a text message, and your phone’s auto-complete function suggests several choices for the next word, ranging from banal to hilarious. “I love…” you, or coffee? Or you’re finishing an email, and merely typing the word “Let” prompts your app to suggest “Let me know if you have any questions” in light gray text.

Predictive language technologies have become so routine – baked into smartphones, email services and chatbots – that we barely notice them anymore. But they raise a difficult question: What happens to a writer’s unique voice when AI routinely completes their thoughts – or generates them altogether from scratch?

As the chair of a large English department – and as a scholar who researches the effects of predictive writing – I’ve witnessed firsthand the challenges that generative AI systems such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude pose for individual expression.

This technology has been incorporated into the writing process so fully that it’s almost impossible to imagine encountering a scene from the not-so-distant past: a writer, alone, with a pen and a piece of paper, wrestling with how to best translate their ideas, arguments and stories into something legible and interesting.

Predictive text leads to predictive writing

As many scholars have noted, though, this vision of writing was never fully accurate.

Essays have always incorporated guidance from teachers, professors or writing tutors. A friend might give feedback, or your favorite novelist’s turn of phrase might offer inspiration. The language we use is never fully “ours,” but draws on millions of sources absorbed over the course of our lives.

Just as it’s a myth to imagine that writers compose in a vacuum, there has never been a clear line between genuine human expression versus machine-generated text. As scholars have pointed out, we have been using machines to communicate for a long time. Every technological development – from the quill pen and the typewriter to the word processor – has brought with it changes in how humans express themselves.

However, the ubiquity of predictive language technologies directly threatens human creativity – or, as one study put it, “Predictive Text Encourages Predictive Writing.”

Because generative AI composes and suggests text in highly standardized, predictable patterns, its outputs can read as if they’re dressed-up versions of what linguists call “phatic expression.” These are the overly common phrases that function as social glue more than as conveyors of sentiment: “How are you?”, “Have a good day” or “See you soon.”

But this glue can lose its hold if the technology is used in the wrong situations. Using artificial intelligence to compose a social media post in the wake of a tragedy, or using it to write a fan letter to an Olympic athlete, comes off as insincere.

People are starting to catch on to generative AI’s prose, not because it’s clunky or poorly written, but because it all sounds the same. That’s because large language models are trained on gigantic masses of examples of human writing, and they predict text based on probabilities and commonalities.

Those predictive outputs often end up producing a singular, recognizable voice. Or, as Sam Kriss explained in a recent essay for The New York Times Magazine, “Once, there were many writers, and many different styles. Now, increasingly, one uncredited author turns out essentially everything.”

Slouching toward a cultural mean

Generative AI is accelerating the types of cultural convergence and uniform expression that were already happening.

For example, linguists have shown that regional accents in the U.S. are fading and becoming homogenized due to a mix of migration, urbanization, mass media and social media. Meanwhile, American English continues supplanting many other forms internationally due to the global predominance of U.S.-based media, TV, film and more.

Are we all destined to write and speak alike? Generative AI doesn’t know in advance whether you call soft drinks “soda,” “pop” or “coke.” If you let it choose, it will simply select “soda” for you, since that’s the most common term in its training data.

By contrast, what people typically value in a personal essay, novel, poem or message to a grieving friend is the ability of the human author to demonstrate – clearly and distinctly – something powerful and singular.

Making chatbots less appealing

So how can teachers compel students to craft their own voices? How is that task different today than it was even a decade ago?

It helps to think here about where generative AI struggles, and why.

Chatbots are great at creating relatively bland, highly readable prose, since that’s what is omnipresent in their training data. But they struggle to create the kinds of radically unexpected shifts that appear in novels like James Joyce’s “Ulysses” or songs like Queen’s “Bohemian Rhapsody.”

Several techniques exist to encourage these types of stylistic leaps among student writers.

Teachers can bake unpredictability into the assignment. Creative writing instructors have used techniques for decades to encourage out-of-the-box thinking. They might ask students to draft a poem and then rewrite it while avoiding the letter “E,” or limit themselves to two adjectives at most.

Another tactic involves having students draw from distinctly personal experiences. Teaching students how to explore connections between characters and conflicts in a novel to people and situations in their own lives makes resorting to chatbots less appealing, if not altogether useless. By contrast, impersonal assignments – “Discuss the symbolism of the color green in ‘The Great Gatsby’” – will likely produce generic, predictable results.

Teachers can also ensure the work of their students has a range of readers. If it’s just the professor, students may be less likely to invest time into cultivating their own voice. But if they have to write an essay or story for, say, their friends or their grandparents, they might have more of an incentive to sound like themselves.

Many other strategies exist, from being forced to reverse the argument of an essay to favor the other side, to interviewing strangers for an assignment and including their quotes.

The bottom line: Writers have access to sources – and language – that machines cannot access or generate. Having students wrestle with unconventional modes of composition and revision lies at the heart of ensuring that the technology is more of a helpful thought partner, but not a substitute for their voice.

Gayle Rogers does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. With AI finishing your sentences, what will happen to your unique voice on the page? – https://theconversation.com/with-ai-finishing-your-sentences-what-will-happen-to-your-unique-voice-on-the-page-276036

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Dannell D. Boatman, Assistant Professor and Health Communication Researcher, West Virginia University

Scientists are making rapid progress toward a long-awaited goal that could help to reshape cancer care: mRNA cancer vaccines with the potential to significantly boost the immune system’s ability to fight and eliminate tumors.

Since the early 2000s, there have been over 120 promising clinical trials testing the use of mRNA vaccines to treat multiple cancer types, such as melanoma, brain, breast, lung and prostate cancer.

At the same time, misinformation about so-called turbo cancer began spreading widely on social media, with mainstream media outlets first reporting on it in late 2022. Turbo cancer refers to the false claim that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines cause unusually aggressive cancers.

As a researcher in health communication who monitors cancer-related conversations online, I have seen how quickly new misinformation can spread and the impact it can have on people’s health decisions. In the case of mRNA cancer vaccines, this false narrative could undermine public confidence in an important tool that may help prevent or treat cancer in the future.

Cancer research and mRNA vaccines

Most people likely first heard about mRNA technology through COVID-19 vaccines, but scientists have been studying it for decades.

How mRNA vaccines work is by delivering instructions that prompt the body’s cells to make specific proteins. This process teaches the immune system how to recognize and attack those proteins. In cancer research, scientists can design highly targeted vaccines that train the immune system to find tumor cells and more effectively kill them without harming healthy cells.

One example of this potential comes from studies on glioblastoma, an aggressive brain tumor with few effective treatments. Researchers have found that a personalized mRNA vaccine can rapidly activate people’s immune systems against this type of brain cancer and improve survival.

The body of evidence that mRNA vaccines can transform how researchers harness the immune system to treat cancer is growing. However, even the most promising medical advances can only improve health if people are willing to use them.

Rise of the ‘turbo cancer’ narrative

“Turbo cancer” is a term often used by anti-vaccine advocates who claim – without credible evidence – that COVID-19 mRNA vaccines are causing unusually aggressive cancers.

This inaccurate narrative has trickled into the mainstream news. In September 2025, a controversial U.K. cardiologist claimed that the COVID-19 vaccine contributed to the royal family’s recent cancer diagnoses, spurring immediate backlash from the medical community. Although uncommon, some public figures and health professionals have claimed that the vaccines could cause cancer despite ample contradictory evidence, often by misinterpreting or misrepresenting studies.

Health misinformation can be described as false or misleading health-related claims shared with the public that are not supported by scientific evidence, are based on unverified personal stories or are opinions presented as facts. For example, while tracking discussions about the HPV vaccine across social media platforms, my team and I found that safety fears, mistrust of authority and conspiracy claims were widespread online.

Vaccine misinformation accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, causing what researchers call an infodemic: the rapid spread of both accurate and false health information during a public health crisis. The COVID-19 infodemic made it harder for people to find trustworthy guidance and shaped public attitudes toward vaccines.

“Turbo cancer” reflects many of the same patterns and narratives as the COVID-19 infodemic.

In a social listening study, which involves systematically monitoring online conversations about different topics, my team and I observed countless posts about turbo cancer beginning in July 2023 and continuing through early 2026. Many posts rely on emotionally compelling anecdotes, misinterpretations of animal studies, misuse of adverse events reporting and recycled myths that vaccines alter human DNA. Some posts also link rising cancer rates in younger adults to the COVID-19 vaccine. However, large population studies have found no increased cancer risk following vaccination.

None of these turbo cancer claims are supported by credible evidence. But on social media, repetition, personal stories and scientific-sounding language can make misinformation appear legitimate and help it spread quickly.

Cancer vaccine misinformation harms health

At first glance, fringe claims such as turbo cancer may seem easy to dismiss. But research shows that they can have real-world consequences, and cancer-related misinformation can be particularly consequential.

Inaccurate information about cancer treatment is common online, and researchers have shown that it influences patient decisions. When patients rely on unproven approaches instead of recommended therapies, their risk of death can increase substantially.

Clinicians are already seeing the effects of misinformation in routine care. Oncologists report having to address myths or misleading information that patients have encountered, though researchers do not yet know how common these conversations are across cancer care.

mRNA technology is entering a pivotal phase in its development. Scientific progress is accelerating, but public understanding has not kept pace. Repeated exposure to misleading claims can erode trust in mRNA technology over time, increasing the likelihood that some patients will decline mRNA therapies in the future.

If misleading narratives such as turbo cancer continue to spread, they could complicate the future rollout of mRNA vaccines and limit their lifesaving benefits.

Keeping communication in pace with science

Once misinformation takes hold of public understanding, changing its course can be difficult.

Research has consistently shown that proactive, transparent and persuasive communication can counter misinformation. It also shows that trust, once lost, is difficult to rebuild.

Medical innovations can save lives, but only if communication keeps up. This means monitoring emerging misinformation trends on social media, addressing concerns early on, equipping clinicians to have effective patient conversations and designing public health messaging that builds public understanding of new medical technologies before they are widely introduced in the clinic.

Scientific innovation alone is not enough to improve health. Ensuring that the public can evaluate medical innovations like mRNA cancer vaccines based on evidence, rather than viral misinformation, is part of the scientific challenge.

The future of cancer care depends not just on scientific discovery, but on public understanding and trust.

Dannell D. Boatman receives funding from Merck, Sharp & Dohme LLC, the National Institutes of Health, the National Institute of General Medical Sciences and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

– ref. Cancer vaccines could transform treatment and prevention – but misinformation about mRNA vaccines threatens their potential – https://theconversation.com/cancer-vaccines-could-transform-treatment-and-prevention-but-misinformation-about-mrna-vaccines-threatens-their-potential-276809

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By David Kroll, Professor of Natural Products Pharmacology & Toxicology, University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus

A Denver food and cannabis investigator became suspicious of PolkaDot-branded chocolate bars sitting next to convenience store energy shots and nicotine pouches in January 2026.

Months earlier, California public health officials warned about PolkaDot-branded chocolate bars. California authorities destroyed more than US$3 million of the chocolate after laboratory testing revealed added synthetic psychoactive drugs. The agency warned of severe illness, hospitalization or worse – particularly in children who could mistake the bars for ordinary candy.

Unfortunately, the California case was a beacon of a more widespread problem. In Denver, investigators from the Colorado Department of Public Health & Environment and Denver Licensing and Consumer Protection the Denver Department of Licensing and Consumer Protection warned consumers and removed these products from three retailers. They then partnered with the Denver Police Department to destroy similar products from six additional retailers.

I’m a natural products pharmacologist and professor based in Colorado who has studied the emergence of known and novel psychoactive substances in consumer products. I did some investigating to find out how these products landed on shelves, and how dietary supplement loopholes allowed them to initially evade detection by licensing authorities.

False labels fool retailers and mislead consumers

The PolkaDot-branded chocolate bars were marketed as “mushroom blends” and said to include lion’s mane, reishi, turkey tail and cordyceps — all non-hallucinogenic varieties. But laboratory tests showed otherwise. The bars contained psychoactive drugs: psilocybin and psilocin, the principal psychedelics found in Psilocybe mushrooms, as well as other chemical relatives called synthetic tryptamines.

“We didn’t want any one retailer to feel singled out,” said Jessica Davis, Denver health department’s food and cannabis investigator, in an interview. “We simply asked if they were carrying any mushroom blends. Most didn’t know they contained hallucinogenic mushroom compounds.”

This isn’t the first time psilocybin-laced products have been found in Denver. In the summer 2025, tobacco licensing authorities warned consumers about the same issue in West Coast Gold Caps chocolate bars. And in late 2024, Colorado was one of 34 states where the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported hospitalizations and suspected deaths associated with Diamond Shruumz chocolate bars and gummies.

What PolkaDot is – and isn’t

PolkaDot products look like everyday treats: 2-ounce chocolate bars in multiple flavors, gummies and even liquid “shots” or seltzers. They’re advertised as containing a blend of non-hallucinogenic mushrooms. These products are often sold in natural foods stores as nutritional supplements, even though there is little clinical evidence for their health benefits.

But according to public advisories, PolkaDot bars in Denver contained chemicals prohibited in retail food products.

PolkaDot brand materials, including the paper wrapping of the chocolates – but not the chocolates themselves – are widely available online. That means there isn’t a single regulated manufacturer of the chocolate. Instead, multiple unconnected players can purchase packaging kits and fill them with whatever compounds they choose. As a result, the composition of the same PolkaDot-labeled product can vary considerably across the U.S.

Davis, the food safety investigator, said gas station retailers frequently produced apparently factual invoices from wholesalers, but the paperwork rarely verified what was actually found inside the bars.

“Wholesalers weren’t doing their due diligence,” she said. “Some said they found these at trade shows and were told they were legal.”

No, Colorado didn’t legalize retail sales of psilocybin

Much of the confusion among wholesalers and consumers stems from Colorado’s 2022 Natural Medicine Act. Voters approved Proposition 122, leading to the state’s decriminalization of personal possession, cultivation and sharing of certain natural psychedelic substances. So, while people are free to grow, share and use “magic mushrooms,” it is unlawful to sell them.

Colorado is also building a system for licensed facilitators to offer supervised use of hallucinogenic mushrooms for a variety of mental health issues, but the law did not authorize over-the-counter retail sales at gas stations, smoke shops or corner stores.

“People assume that because Colorado decriminalized natural medicines, anything ‘mushroom’ is fair game to buy. It isn’t. Retail sales are prohibited,” Davis said.

So-called natural or herbal medicine products, such as chamomile for relaxation and echinacea for colds, are regulated in the U.S. as foods – not drugs – under the Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994. Retailers are free to sell products as long as the label does not make false or misleading medical claims or contain unapproved or illicit drugs. The Food and Drug Administration issues a formal warning letter to prohibit sales when products are misbranded, spiked with unapproved drugs or when adverse reactions appear in consumers.

Psilocybin and some semi-synthetic tryptamines are prohibited under Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, governed by the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration. But some of the synthetic tryptamines found in the PolkaDot-branded bars are not explicitly named in this most restrictive classification, although the main building block of these chemicals, diethyltryptamine, or DET, is.

Some of the slightly modified psychoactives found in PolkaDot products are presumed by the DEA and other authorities to circumvent the law.

Small gas station convenience stores buy products from dozens of regional wholesalers. PolkaDot chocolates and other products can slip into local gas stations and evade detection. By contrast, GNC, a national health and nutrition company, manufactures many of its own products and receives others from a select few wholesalers. These retailers tend to know better what’s in the products they carry.

“If you keep [these products] under the FDA’s radar – in small gas stations rather than doing a mass distribution at GNC – you avoid detection until something really bad happens,” Harvard physician Dr. Pieter Cohen told STAT News.

By avoiding federal detection, the detection of problematic products is left to local and regional public health officials or food inspectors and tobacco licensing authorities. If they discover these products, they can revoke food or tobacco licenses, which can cause extensive financial losses, due in part to the low profit margins of gasoline sales alone.

Education first, but enforcement is real

The Denver health department’s messaging has emphasized consumer education and retailer outreach. Advisories urge residents to avoid purchasing PolkaDot products and to report sightings to 311 or via the city’s consumer protection portal so inspectors can track their spread. The department has also underscored that businesses selling unlawful products face fines, license suspension or revocation, and potential criminal penalties.

According to Davis, the Denver food and cannabis investigator, the city’s licensing team has begun coaching retailers on basic due diligence: Does the price point make sense for a legitimate product? Can the wholesaler connect the retailer to the manufacturer? Can the manufacturer provide clear, complete ingredient disclosures and testing documentation? If clerks or suppliers can’t answer conclusively, that’s a red flag.

The practical reality is that routine sweeps won’t catch every mislabeled mushroom product. Denver needs the public to report what they see.

“If you’re seeking natural medicine, we want you to do it safely,” Davis said. “Cultivate it yourself within the law, obtain it from someone you trust or work with a licensed facilitator. Don’t buy mystery bars at a gas station.”

David Kroll does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Magic mushroom-infused products appear in Colorado gas stations – what public health officials want consumers to know – https://theconversation.com/magic-mushroom-infused-products-appear-in-colorado-gas-stations-what-public-health-officials-want-consumers-to-know-274935

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Leanne Snyder, Assistant Professor of Exercise Science, Loyola University Chicago

Every March, millions of Americans fill out brackets and tune in to watch the NCAA college basketball tournaments known as March Madness. The men’s and women’s competitions unfold in parallel, each with their own brackets, champions, storylines and fan bases.

The separation reflects one of the most deeply embedded assumptions in sports: that women and men perform differently enough that they must compete apart.

The divide is so normal, it’s rarely explained: On average, men are faster, stronger and have more endurance. As a result, performance differences between men and women are often assumed to follow directly from these physical traits.

This notion shape how sports organizations structure competition, how coaches train athletes and how researchers study performance. Sex becomes a shortcut – a way to predict what athletes can do before they ever step onto the court.

As an exercise scientist who studies the physical demands of Paralympic sports, I wanted to know whether this assumption actually holds up.

My research on elite wheelchair basketball suggests it may not. I found that many of the differences widely attributed to physiological differences between women and men in sports are far less pronounced in wheelchair basketball players – and in most cases absent altogether.

It may seem that wheelchair sports are too different from nondisabled sports to compare. But in my view, they may instead reveal what sports look like when performance is measured by what athletes can do, rather than presumptions tied to their sex.

Testing different abilities

In most sports, presumptions about physical differences between the sexes appear early, often starting with elementary school physical education classes and youth teams.

Wheelchair basketball works differently. Although international competitions have separate women’s and men’s teams, athletes at the national level often train together, while women sometimes compete in men’s leagues and vice versa.

As part of my Ph.D. research, I examined how elite wheelchair basketball players move during competition by asking athletes from the Australian national men’s and women’s teams to wear movement sensors during five international-level games in 2022.

The sensors recorded how often players accelerated and decelerated, how frequently they changed direction, how fast they moved and how much distance they covered. Accelerations, decelerations and changes of direction are typically the most physically demanding movements in wheelchair basketball. To ensure fair comparisons, I adjusted all measures for playing time.

A consistent difference emerged. Players with less severe impairments – those with greater trunk control and stability – performed more high-intensity actions than players with more severe impairments. Female athletes with less severe impairments accelerated and decelerated more frequently and reached higher peak speeds, and male athletes showed the same pattern.

When I compared performance by sex, however, the differences were much less pronounced. Across most measures – including distance covered, average speed and high-intensity movements – female and male athletes performed similarly over the course of multiple games.

Performance beyond sex

If sex-based performance differences are so common in sports, why didn’t they appear in my research? The answer lies partly in how wheelchair basketball is organized.

To compete, athletes are assigned a classification based on how their impairment affects movement during play. These classifications range from 1.0 to 4.5, with lower numbers indicating more severe impairments. The system is designed to account for athletes with wide variations in physical disabilities, particularly differences in trunk control, balance and the ability to generate force and change direction in their game wheelchairs.

During games, teams must stay under a combined classification limit of 14 points for the five players on court. This means lineups are built around functional movement ability rather than sex, balancing players with different movement capacities within lineups so that no single team gains an unfair advantage.

With this in mind, it makes sense that classification, not sex, explained the differences I observed. In other words, wheelchair basketball is designed around physical variation in sports – not just between women and men, but across individuals with very different movement capacities and roles on the court. In this context, sex becomes one variable among many, rather than the primary basis for performance.

This pattern isn’t unique to wheelchair basketball. In wheelchair rugby, where women and men compete together on the same international teams, research has also found that game demands are shaped more by players’ classification and on-court roles than by sex.

Challenging sports science norms

My findings challenge a near-universal assumption in sports: that sex is the primary factor defining physical ability.

To be clear, there are contexts where sex-based comparisons matter. Differences in average muscle mass, body size and hormone profiles can influence performance in many sports, which is one reason competitions are typically separated into women’s and men’s divisions. Safety concerns are also frequently cited as a reason for maintaining separate competitions.

But when sex becomes the primary framework for understanding performance, it can obscure other important factors such as strength, body size, training history and access to coaching.

Research supports this idea. One study comparing athletes by both sex and strength found that many differences often attributed to sex were better explained by strength. Another review found little consistent evidence for sex-specific movement patterns in jumping and landing tasks, concluding that many reported differences are better explained by training exposure, motor skill or sociocultural factors than by sex alone.

Put simply, what is often labeled a sex difference may instead reflect unequal opportunities to develop physical capacity – much of which is trainable – rather than fixed, innate ability.

This perspective does not mean sex differences disappear, but it suggests that they may not always be the most informative way to understand performance. In some cases, focusing primarily on sex-based categories may even risk underselling what some young athletes are capable of.

Looking more closely at individual factors such as strength, agility, sport-specific skills and training exposure may give coaches a clearer picture of how athletes actually perform, rather than relying on long-standing presumptions about what girls and boys are capable of.

Leanne Snyder does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. My research on wheelchair basketball challenges one of the biggest assumptions about sex differences in sports – https://theconversation.com/my-research-on-wheelchair-basketball-challenges-one-of-the-biggest-assumptions-about-sex-differences-in-sports-261624