ski racing and ariels have been around a lot longer. I'm sure when women first entered the gap there was significantly larger as well. The gap is probably the smallest in ski jumping, but it could be said that technically women's bodies are better for the sport since you want to be skinny and wide and women have hips (a woman even holds the record for this).
In regards to racing... I don't know of any women that have moved up to the top starting after puberty. Men get stronger women go from being little boys to having an entirely different body. 1 or 2 are outliers, if you could say this was a consistent thing, that could have some validity.
In the mean time, even many of the women's current pros had "special" circumstances. Many with older brothers that were already professionals, backgrounds in gymnastics, moguls, diving, rollerblading. Same could be said for the older male pros (outside of the older brother thing). Men populated the sport a lot quicker and adapted faster. Women just sort of watched and went... yeah, I'll keep racing. The same shift that happened in men's is now happening in women's. Perhaps we'll never be quite as good, but certainly we can try. It's going to take one lean girl though to acquire the same type of body mass and strength you see in a lot of the male professionals. So perhaps the prepubescent looking 5ft gymnasts are our best shot.
Somewhere in eastern Europe, there is an underground women's freestyle skiing training facility filled with olympic gymnast failures. Likely to be released right before the Olympics and will take the sport by storm. Cool Runnings 2, Winter 2015