I was curious about this so I looked at the percentiles for the Boston Marathon since the data is readily available.
Roughly speaking, the top 1% of women times lines up with top 10% for men so the data backs up your statement. After that, there's a pretty consistent 20% difference.
% Male Female
0.00 02:09 02:21
0.01 02:38 03:03
0.10 03:00 03:27
0.20 03:12 03:37
0.30 03:22 03:45
0.40 03:31 03:53
0.50 03:41 04:00
0.60 03:51 04:10
0.70 04:04 04:22
0.80 04:22 04:39
0.90 04:50 05:05
0.99 05:50 05:56
1.00 07:58 07:19
I think all of the women mentioned in the article have run at Western States 100, where there are always a decent number of the best men and women (but never as many as want to go, because it's a lottery system with limited spots for elites). It is extremely unlikely a woman will ever win that race. The women's course record (by Ellie Greenwood, one of the women mentioned in the linked article) is 16:47, which is over two hours slower than the men's course record, and in that record-setting run in 2012 she finished the race in 14th place overall. That's an excellent run, even for a male, but she is nowhere near as strong a runner as the best men.
I think all these women are quite aware that they're not at the level of the best men; they're not delusional. It's the media that likes to sensationalize things when they see a woman win a race outright. The media doesn't understand that the fields in these races are wildly uneven; there's a limited number of races where substantial numbers of the best runners show up.
'After scouring the results of nearly 100,000 marathon finishers, Sandra Hunter, a professor of exercise science at Wisconsin’s Marquette University, made an interesting—if not intuitive—find. The more men there are in a race relative to the amount of women, the bigger the performance gap between those genders. “If you had one female for every twenty men, the likelihood that that female is going to be the best . . . compared with the best male in that age group is pretty small,” says Hunter.'
Which suggests it has a lot more to do with the statistics of outliers than anything else. Elite performance is signal (training!) plus noise (daily variation, environmental variance, Athena rooting for you, etc), which can overwhelm the signal on any given day. But each participant is also a random draw on the /signal/ variable as well. Get more people in the event, and you get more draws on the signal variable. Get more people on race day, and you get more chances for outliers on the noise variable.
Consider each runner's skill, training, etc as a sampled variable. Then the top score in the sample depends heavily on the population size. Comparing the best draw from two equivalent groups of different sizes is thus going to favor the larger group. And this sounds like what they observed in the study.
That way we could really see females beat males for example in tennis.
Haven't there been enough "battle of the sexes" tennis matches already for us to know how this will go?