Archery scores by gender: Nuradila 2026 study

Thirty-five archers from a university club in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, 16 men and 19 women, shot 36 arrows in a single session, and the authors compared total scores between the sexes. The women averaged 271 points (standard deviation 50.77, range 145 to 335), the men 254.63 (standard deviation 54.43, range 116 to 327). The difference, about 16 points in the women's favour, is not statistically significant (t = −0.920 with 33 degrees of freedom, p = 0.364) and amounts to a small effect (Cohen's d of 0.31). The authors conclude that in this group sex is not the main factor behind the score, and that coaching should look at each athlete's abilities rather than at sex.

The data were collected in July 2026 at the archery range of the sports science faculty at Universitas Negeri Yogyakarta. Every active archer with at least three months of training was included, provided they had no shoulder, arm, wrist or back injury, were present on the day and completed the test. They shot the standard bow of the national division, under the rules of the Indonesian archery federation (Perpani), on that division's target face: 36 arrows in 6 ends of 6.

Each archer shot at a single distance, the one for their competition category, which could be 10, 20, 30 or 40 metres. The scores, recorded on a sheet, were compared with an independent-samples t-test after checking normality (Shapiro-Wilk) and equality of variances (Levene).

The most serious limitation is one the authors do not discuss: the archers did not all shoot at the same distance. A total shot at 10 metres and one shot at 40 do not measure the same thing, and the paper does not say how many men and women shot at each distance; if the categories were spread differently across the two groups, the difference between the sexes is mixed up with the difference between distances. Age, experience and physical and psychological characteristics are also missing, which the authors list as limitations together with the single testing session, and nothing is reported about draw weight.

With 16 and 19 archers, moreover, a study like this has little chance of picking up a small or medium difference: a non-significant result means the difference was not seen, not that it is absent. In the results table the t value is printed as 92 instead of −0.920, and a passage of the journal's template, with its instructions to authors, has been left in the methods, a sign of careless editing.

In this group sex said little about who would score highest: the differences between archers of the same sex were far wider than the gap between the means, with totals from 116 to 327 points among the men and from 145 to 335 among the women. For anyone coaching a mixed group of beginners and intermediates the finding points in a reasonable direction, which is to look at the person before the category. The study cannot support anything further, though: the distances varied, some archers had as little as three months of practice, and the bow was the Indonesian national division bow, not the Olympic recurve or the compound. It says nothing about men and women compared at the same distance or at competitive level.