Well, the discussion should have started with a definition, which abilities constitute a driver who’s good enough for F1.
IMHO, it’s some mixture of reflexes, repetitive precision, computation (anticipation), computation (situation analysis), physical strength, muscle memory, spatial awareness and maybe some more, minor features. Given that, analysis of the subject, focusing on only one of those features is pointless.
While I’d welcome any woman to the sport, I find it unlikely it’ll ever happen. And I don’t think we can simplify it to: it’s not marketed to them and they’re discouraged or they’re not strong enough. IMHO, the fact that few women enter the sport might be based on the fact, that on average women are less competitive than men. From my anecdotal evidence, most men can be easily encouraged by competition to try-hard and be aggressive, while women generally tend to take a less risky approach. And it might have some biological support, as some studies found progesterone to have a negative impact on competitiveness (like:
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/a ... 811100151X).
It wouldn’t be a surprise for me, as for thousands of years, men where competing against each other in various dangerous activities, and so their bodies could evolve to respond better to such inputs.
That is not to say, that there are no competitive women (I personally know one that gladly and easily wipes the floor with men in board games), but there just might be a much smaller percentage of them on a male level of competition. And so the pool of girls who’d want to go directly against boys might be small from the beginning.
