Is that to say that cross-section for cross-section male muscle is significantly stronger than female?
If so, that also suggests that men, with their larger bulk across the whole bell curve, will be far more powerful than the women as compared to these understated graphs.
The strongest male human is stronger than the strongest female human. I do not think there is any disagreement about that. Of course, there will be over lap. There are certainly female humans stronger than some male humans.
Are female humans better at things like endurance though or other measures of physical ability? I am not sure. Female humans tend to live longer so there’s that.
I remember reading something that the #100 ranked male in tennis can reliably beat the #1 ranked female in tennis. It’s not even really close.
You missed my point completely. Sorry to have written so badly.
The data was supposedly matched based on “muscle thickness” which AIUI means they compared e.g. a woman with a 10" bicep to a man with a 10" bicep.
My point was that women with 10" biceps are the hugest of the huge and men with 10" biceps are kinda scrawny actually.
So if I’ve understood what they meant, those graphs grossly understate the difference between real men and real women. Where real men have a bunch more bulk than real women.
IOW, if we control for bulk, and men still grossly out-muscle women, then there must be a difference down at the fiber level, where X cross-section or Y ounces of male muscle is materially more powerful than X cross-section or Z ounces of female muscle.
Or, I have misunderstood what “matched on muscle thickness” means.
Did you go to school in the United States? I don’t think I’ve heard anyone refer to a high school team as semi-pro before. When most of us refer to high school sports we’re talking competitive sports. i.e. Those “semi-pro” teams that fill stadiums (at least in Texas). Should we eliminate girl’s and boy’s basketball in favor of having one team for all?
If I remember correctly, @Mijin is from the UK. My understanding is that, at the high school age level, organized sports in schools are very different there than in the U.S.: “school teams” are much less pervasive, and not typically “interscholastic” (i.e., schools playing against each other).
For example, a teenaged boy who is a promising soccer player here in the U.S. would be playing on his high school team, and probably a club team, as well; AIUI, such a boy in the UK would be signed to, and playing for, a “junior” team affiliated with a professional football (soccer) club (hence, “semi-pro”). David Beckham, for example, was playing for junior/youth teams which were affiliated with professional teams (such as Tottenham Hotspur and Manchester United) by the time he was 12 or 13.
Yes. At least that’s my understanding (I haven’t looked at the source data yet). You can find a point of comparison in the grip strength chart, which has significantly more separation in the earlier charts I showed (which were only separated by age). That is, the gap narrows when normalizing for cross-section. But it doesn’t go to zero.
And looking at upper-body strength specifically, there is an enormous gap even when accounting for cross-section. Which, as you say, means they’re understating the difference for the typical case.
All that fits with my anecdotal experience, at any rate. In college a female friend of mine challenged me to arm wrestling. She was about twice my weight and worked on a farm–I was (and am) a scrawny computer nerd that rarely exercises. Nevertheless, I won without too much difficulty. Funnily enough, she accused me of cheating because I used my other arm to brace myself against the table. Not my fault I don’t have the mass to stay in place otherwise!
@Wesley_Clark linked to one of the cases above: the #203 ranked man vs. the Williams sisters. He won handily against both sequentially (just after finishing a round of golf and a couple of shandies).
Then they can make that argument without lying about the facts. And without trying to blur clear distinctions. It’s always the same old woolly-eyed shit like this:
Decades of research have shown that sex is far more complex than we may think. And though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.
All of this “complexity” (which is not that complex in the vast majority of cases) still does not change much. Men are so much stronger that the only overlap is in the outliers.
It might be just barely possible to match men and women up by weight class, where smaller men are matched again larger women. But men are larger and therefore there will be lots of unmatched persons on both ends of the spectrum.
The very first page of the book is available on the Amazon sample page:
They’re clearly trying to deny that there is an immutable biological advantage. They manage to cherry pick a few examples where women caught up to previous men’s records. Of course, they ignore many other records that don’t support their point, and they also ignore the fact that technology has marched on, from training to technique to equipment.
I haven’t read the whole thread, and that isn’t usually how I operate, but I had to jump in here.
First, I have to disagree that women tend to be more cooperative, and second, while I cannot disagree that women have more estrogen (on average), and estrogen does give our skin a bit of softness over men’s (on average), I am not sure that is what the OP means by “softer.”
In regard to women being more cooperative-- I think a lot of women want to believe that, and it’s often in the press statement, but it isn’t my experience.
When I was in the army, women drove me nuts with their unwillingness to work with someone with whom they had some minor grudge (and by work, I don’t mean long-term in-depth tasks-- I mean loading a truck with duffel bags). They’d be perfectly willing to spend more time than the original task would actually have taken, explaining why they can’t work with So-and-so, or just plain bitching about her.
Men can work with other men they don’t like in order to get something over with. If a sergeant passed a group of privates, among whom were a few who did not like each other at all, and the sergeant bellowed at them to do some task, they’d just do it. They’d do the bare minimum, but they’d get it done, and they wouldn’t let personalities interfere.
To be fair, when you had a group of women who all wanted to work together, they’d go much further than required, and do a much better job relative to a group of men, regardless of how the men felt about one another.
But the odds of a random group of women all being friends wasn’t great, and so usually bellowing at a random group of women to do something was a mistake.
With mixed groups, it kinda depended on the mix, and exactly what kind of animosity you had between to women. Most of the women in a mixed group would pitch in the same as the men, but there might be two who would refuse to work at all-- that might not matter, though, and there’d probably be enough people to do that task without the two who were acting like 12-yr-olds.
I will say, though, that experienced Drill Sergeants seemed to have things figured out-- women volunteer for details more readily than men do, so when a truck needed loaded, or the laundry room needed detailing, the DS would call for volunteers-- “I need 5 Mad Dogs to CQ now!” and we’d scurry off. 6 or 7 would show up at CQ.
Men rarely volunteered for anything, but they didn’t bitch when they “got volunteered.” Wow, could women go on about how unfair that was, though-- women in the freaking army.
When you think about that, though, the net result is they same-- you get about the same number of non-complaining men as women.
I can’t really say just what is going on there, but it is something fundamentally different between men and women, at least in the US. I have no idea how much is nature and how much is nurture, though.
I would love to see repeated some of the classic experiments on obeying authority, like the Milgram experiment, repeated but separating men subjects from women in order to get separate data for each gender.
Like, for example, the Fosbury flop. Popularized in 1968. Right in that 50-year segment they cite between the men’s 2.09 m high jump record and the women’s. Yeah, women using an advanced, modern technique (which is only possible with deep foam padding) can just barely match men using an inferior, older technique. Meanwhile, men are now at 2.45 m.
In the case of sports/physical abilities, this probably underestimates the difference between the average man and woman. Men tend to do more sports and exercise so remain fitter and stronger, and are also more likely to have physical jobs. Plus pregnancy and caring for babies tends to mess with your body and interfere with fitness, and it’s harder to get it back afterwards.
My school did the same except that our form groups had 30 kids. All sports were mixed sex… and it really sucked for the girls. It was exactly as the charts posted above showed: even at 11, almost all the boys were better than almost all the girls, so not only was it demoralising, most of us basically didn’t get to play at all when we did team sports.
I wish the authors of that book, and other people pushing ‘feminist’ ideas about how women should compete against men had had this experience growing up, so they would understand their wishful thinking was just hurting girls.
The way I’ve seen it put in the past (by women, as it happens) is that women are more cliquish* than men. So a workplace (or the army) ends up with a bunch of little groups of women who like each other but dislike women outside their group. Meanwhile mean don’t care about all that, and probably don’t even notice and effectively act as a lubricant between the factions.
It’s been my belief for a long time that mixed gender groups work better than single gender ones since they compensate somewhat for the flaws of the other gender, whether cultural or instinctive. Women for example are much less likely to get all macho about workplace comfort and safety.
Yes, yes, men are better at sports than women, on average. Maybe we can bring up tennis for the third or fourth time.
@Moriarty, is that what you were looking for?
That’s right yes.
My point was just that boys and girls playing together isn’t actually that big a deal IME. I went to one of the worst schools in the UK, and there was plenty of “horseplay” at various times, but from my recollection sports was one thing everyone enjoyed enough that they just played and didn’t mess around.
Of course yes, it’s different if we’re talking about competitive teams. And if the US system is based around that, then I guess it’s a non-starter to have mixed teams.
It depends what the claim is. The cognitive bias a lot of people seem to have is to take averages to mean you can take any person from group A and they will be faster, stronger, higher IQ than anyone from group B. They say average but act as if it is a strict categorization.
As I say, almost every youtube video of a woman getting a world record or whatever will be full of comments from men scoffing at their achievement, as if anyone in the comments could get anywhere close.
Many athletes make what they do look so easy that I think a lot of people don’t fully appreciate how difficult it actually is. For some reason, the YouTube algorithm took me to a video of Magnus Sheving, who played Sporticus on Lazy Town, doing one of his aerobic routines during a competition from the 1990s. Did it look goofy? To my eyes, yes, but it dawned on me after about twenty seconds just how difficult the routine was and what kind of physical shape he had to be in to complete his set.
I wouldn’t doubt it if there were a lot of men scoffing at the achievements of those women because they don’t realize how difficult it is. Oh, and of coursed they’re scoffing because it’s women and there are a lot of online trolls who seem to dislike women.
Not sure if you’re familiar with Discworld, but I thought Pratchett’s dwarfs were an interesting look at this. Traditionally they don’t have gender roles, and male and female dwarfs dress the same and look indistinguishable with their clothes on. (In fact they all look and act like men, and are all addressed as ‘he’; another example of default male.) Dwarf courtship is described as consisting largely of a way to tactfully discover the sex of the other dwarf - human men and women dressing differently has obvious utility in avoiding that situation.
For this system to be workable, I think it would have to the case that this is not true for dwarfs:
The behaviours leading to reproductive success must be very similar for male and female dwarfs in their society - I don’t think it’s ever made clear who raises the kids in this system, though.
There’s a plotline spanning several books where after moving to a human city, (presumably) female dwarfs see that in humans, women dress and act differently to men, and want to adopt at least some aspects of the female gender role, against the resistance of traditionalist dwarfs back home. Something of an allegory for transgender people, and probably partly inspired by the earlier fight for gay rights, too.
The point is that using any one of these characteristics alone may be useless (though in practice there will be many that would be correct 80 or 90% of the time if you guessed based on them), but combining lots of them together allows rather high accuracy, as we see with visually identifying adults as male or female in general.
I think also, it’s easier to notice areas where you differ from the norm for your gender, and overlook those where you do fit in. Obviously YMMV, but when I think about it, I can come up with quite a few interests/hobbies/personality traits in which I’m pretty typical for a woman, even though the ones where I’m not are more noticeable to me (and maybe to other people too). This may be affecting your view of how useful they are.
Oh, yes. I see what you mean now. And it is very annoying that some men seem to feel the urge to denigrate women’s achievements like that.
Which one, if you don’t mind me asking?
Not for you, but you’re a man. I already explained why it wasn’t a good experience for me.
True, but when it comes to women athletes a lot of the scoffing is from the perspective of “but men can do X”. Pretty sad really.
And you see it at the other end too; any video showing a woman missing an easy shot or whatever will have people in the comments saying women in general are not cut out for that sport, as if no man ever has missed anything.
Maybe I read too many youtube comments…
In terms of people underestimating athletes in general, that’s true as well of course. There’s a retired NBA player, who was amongst the worst players in the NBA when he played, who makes videos dunking on instagram stars / kids hoping to play in the NBA one day.
I’m not sure how genuine the videos are, but you can see certain points highlighted nonetheless. For instance, that it’s (comparatively) easy to post videos of hitting lots of 3-pointers, but consistently snapping off shots while under the kind of pressure that an NBA defence is going to put up is another matter.
I went to St Edmund Campion in Birmingham. In the year that I did my GCSEs, I think it was something like 45th out of 47 schools in the region, and birmingham was one of the worst regions at the time. It might be a slight exaggeration to put those data points together and say it was one of the worst schools nationwide, but let’s just say rough as fuck.
I also spent some time going to King Edward’s Edgbaston; one of the best performing schools nationwide, without exaggeration, until my scholarship fell through.
The difference in the level of time, resources, and most importantly, culture, is absolute night and day.
Sorry to hear that. Bear in mind though that even with segregated sports some people have bad experiences. I don’t think kids should be forced to play team sports; it’s good to include mandatory exercise but that can take many forms.
Pretty sure Pratchett’s also, and possibly primarily considering when the books were written, objecting to the default-male: women can be whatever they want as long as they act exactly like the cultural standard for men!
I don’t think the cultural ones do; as, again, most people will accurately identify the sex of an individual who is violating simultaneously multiple cultural gender norms and whose agreement with others isn’t visible to the observer. I think that most people are going by the visible combination of secondary sex characteristics; at least in our society in which clothing and hairstyle aren’t so rigorously enforced that people are conditioned not to look past them.
This I think is reinforced by the often-reported phenomenon in which long-haired men or short-haired women are misgendered when seen from behind but immediately correctly gendered when they turn around – several of the secondary sex characteristics can’t be seen from behind. And those (breast development, facial hair (and skin texture when shaven), facial shape, Adam’s apple) are the only further information provided by turning around. They all do have some overlap but for all of them to be in the middle of the overlap area (combined with midrange visible hip development and height, which are visible from behind but which both have a very large overlap area) is uncommon.
I do fit into a number of female codings; but again, those aren’t usually visible to the casual observer. What is visible to the casual observer is my body shape; which, while it doesn’t fit any better into a lot of the clothes easily available that are coded female than it does into a lot of the ones coded male, would be extremely unusual for a man.
And, of course, at least most of those female/male codings are cultural; which we know because there are cultures known to us which code them differently. So they can’t be essential gender differences.
This sort of discussion always makes me remember my aunt. She used to ‘joke’ that I couldn’t be female because I didn’t like shopping. Guess who loved shopping.