The author quotes the times 2 minutes 47 seconds and 66 seconds to illustrate that…….. .

Women do not compete against men in sport because of medical misconceptions about their bodies, says Ellis Cashmore, a professor of sociology. He claims it's only in the past 300 years that anatomists have pointed out the differences between men's and women's bodies, apart from the most obvious ones. Before then, they were seen as fairly similar. By the late 19th century, closer examination led to anatomists looking for inferiorities in women's bodies and believing that even their organs had different functions to men's. Cashmore's argument is that despite women's exclusion from most sports for the first half of this century, they have caught men up rather rapidly. Women's best times in the marathon have improved by an average per year of 2 minutes 47 seconds while men's have improved by a mere 66 seconds.