I think you'll find in reality most people in the sport are strong advocates of women's racing, including the UCI - who you surely know does not put on the tour

I think you'll find in reality most people in the sport are strong advocates of women's racing, including the UCI - who you surely know does not put on the tour de france. It's up to ASO to design the tour format(who admittedly has the UCI basically under their control). Also, while you're correct about women endurance in general, the tour de france is not really an endurance race. It's 21 different races, some of them endurance, some of them all out sprints, some of them all out time trials. As someone who lives with a category 1 woman racer, and has been involved in the sport for 16 years, women do not recover as quickly as men do. Someone will still win the race of course, and it will still be fun to watch, but the repeated efforts do effect women differently than men. In my experience, very few of the women racing actually want longer distances. When I was involved with putting on races, one or two loud voices would advocate for it, but come the day of the event, races that were equal length in the pro/cat 1 fields would have dismal attendance if they were the same length as the pro/cat 1 men's fields. Of those that did show up, the abandon rate was much higher than normal for those same local fields at other races. We even went as far as surveying all the teams and racers before one stage race, and overwhelmingly the women did not want the men's length (for road races) and times (for criteriums). Admittedly, at the pro-tour level this might be different, but to get to the pro tour level, racers must start in amateur and local pro levels. We mandated equal pay outs at the state level, and some races dropped off the calendar because their budgets couldn't support it (or lowered men's payouts to compensate). Those that didn't saw no increase in attendance in women's fields after the increase either. That wasn't really a surprise, as most people are motivated more by the racing itself than some payout until you get to pro-tour levels. Men and women both effectively pay for the privilege to race in all but the most elite fields. More than being sexist, cycling is incredibly classist. The equipment is obscenely expensive, and the time it takes to train and get better is out of reach for most people with "normal" jobs. The funnel of junior racers coming in decreases every year, and the only fields we see growth in are masters categories (who can actually afford to race).