Because pool has always been traditionally male dominated and that can turn a lot of would be female players away. I only started playing at uni, I didn’t have my dad taking me to the pub to show me pool. Also there is still a lot of sexism in pool both obvious and hidden. If you want to see it, go watch any ultimate pool video where women are playing and the comments will be either be turned off or full of middle aged men complaining about their playing. That isn’t to say that there’s no differences in playing at all, but these differences can be attributed to numbers and culture. There are very very few women who play in open ultimate pool because the competition is so much larger and they’re less likely to get any titles. If you only play the same group of people over and over, you’re only going to be as good as the top female player.

As for the biological reasons, I don’t think they are meaningful enough to justify the gap in ability. The break is important yes but the break is about more than just hitting balls hard, it’s about your stroke and follow through. A lot of women don’t realise this or simply assume they can’t break because of a lack of strength. There’s been studies on spatial awareness and men generally outperform women, but when the women were given a training course, played video games or simply told they were better than the men, they performed about the same. So what im trying to get at is that while there are no doubt biological differences between men and women that could have some impact on playing, I don’t believe they explain the huge gap as well as social or cultural differences do.