I'm going to guess that creating more categories and divisions produce more winners which reinforce interest in the activity. In this case, we get a news article about a new record, even if it isn't the record.

It's not really, all competitions are unisex, at least on the top level.

But in the rankings you can filter by gender and region, as is quite normal for sports.

The girl, who is from Chengdu, is “the first female speedcuber to average under 4.5 seconds”, CCTV said.

The record regardless of gender is 3.51 seconds. If they didn't have a women's version then there would be no woman champion. Now we have one.

Because women can't compete with men but they still want to win. If they had no chance at winning they would be less motivated to participate at all. Thanks to separate categories more people compete, there's more money, better events, more sponsors and so on and so on.

Even chess has a women's class, for some reason. I'd initially imagined it's for security and feeling safe. But then I heard the ELO is lower for women at a certain level compared to men, so that's weird, and sucks in a way.

Chess also has a women's category.

Bend over to pick up the cube and ooooh my back uggh

The article offers some kind of explanation which may or may not answer your question.

I'm not sure what you mean by pattern based.

It's a cube, where the sides can be rotated. It's not possible to move a single piece without also moving other pieces, so you'll need to apply algorithms in order to solve it. An algorithm is a series of moves that does something. You can use these to manipulate the cube back to the sorted state.

Despite YouTubers attempting to get clicks for showing how to solve it easily, there's is no single algorithm that will always end up with a solved cube. You will need to observe the cube to determine which algorithm to use and how many times.

It's not super difficult to learn though.

It's however very difficult to figure out yourself without memorizing the seemingly random algorithms. The inventor once said it would probably have taken him months to figure out, but someone else best him to it and showed him how, so there's really no shame in looking up the solution.

The number of turns per second (TPS) is pretty insane at world-record levels, yeah.

Not the original one but new toys with the same topology are also called that thanks to the association that controls and licenses the trademark.

No, it's called Rubik's cube.

She posted averages of 4.52 and 4.27 seconds, after solving the Rubik’s Cube five times.

The girl, who is from Chengdu, is “the first female speedcuber to average under 4.5 seconds”, CCTV said.

A video posted by the broadcaster showed her wearing a red gingham bow on her head as she deftly turned and twisted a Rubik’s Cube.