tayken wrote: I'll take this further and say qualifying times for races like Boston should be the same for both genders, as opposed to the 30mins window. There are a lot of females that run faster than women, so not all Boston qualifiers are created equal.
When you become race director, you can make the decisions based on your arbitrary criteria.
Your argument that there should be the same (EQUAL) qualifying time for men and women ignores some obvious physiological and practical truths. If you are starting from that point, I'm not sure you can really participate in a valid discussion. But briefly:
Boston used to have just one qualifying time across all ages and genders. This was back when the demand wasn't nearly as high for the race (and the concept of striving for a BQ as a valid bar for all runners to gauge your athletic performance didn't really exist in the same way). As the race became more popular, the RD's realized that they wanted the qualifying times to be more EQUITABLE to have a good diversity of runners across all age groups and genders. The qualifying times have evolved over the years.
The current 30-minute difference in qualifying times based on a combination of factors-- age-graded calculators, historical registrations, and their desire to keep a good balance between men and women in their race. It's not a perfect calculation (for some age groups 30 minutes might be considered too high, for others too low), but it's what they have decided on for various reasons.
Here's an article with arguments based on science if you care to read. (This article discusses mostly statistics, not the actual physiology-- but that's out there too.)
http://sciencebasedrunning.com/2015/10/ ... o-qualify/