As a former professional dancer (modern, with ballet training) I will add that women have more knee and shoulder injuries than men. I wonder if any of these studies covered injuries in women. Because we must be flexible in the birth process, women are more flexible in almost all joints, with a larger range of flexibility, in general, than men, yogis notwithstanding.
As a trans widow, I can tell you that my former husband was insanely jealous of my flexibility and my female hip-to-shoulder ratio. He hated his own large hands and feet, a typical obsession of men with this psychiatric illness of body dissociation with an obsessive sexual component.
He's also obsessed with doing martial arts and defending himself, claiming the false statistics on "vulnerable" cross-dressers being attacked (women like me are attacked far more than cross-dressing men, who are perceived as men, perceived as figures who will fight back) He spars on a women's team and although he's under 6 ft tall, he's a formidable and wiley opponent, I know from our joking "wrestling" during the marriage.
Women must be aware that trying to lift as heavy or have the speed of men can cause injuries. For a window into healthy mind/body work (designed by me, a medium sized woman, I'd like to know the male reaction) here's a short clip from Ute Heggen youtube channel, where trans widows' recovery from the trauma is the theme:
thank you for your well researched and presented article. it really shouldn't need to even be said. but in these insane times it needs to be. it's obvious and necessary. and it's a good thing. men and women are different.
Thank you for your excellent review. It agrees with my own personal observations about the differences between men and women. Men are clearly stronger and faster than women. There's no contest at all. It's a shame that we have to spend our time proving the obvious. But these are the times we live in.
Let me be candid. I've always been extremely bad, laughably bad at every sport and have absolutely no interest in professional or amateur sports. None. My primary concern is not for the"elite" athletic girl or woman, but for all the average or below average, uncoordinated female nerds. The girls who hated mandatory gym classes. The last ones to be picked for every team. The girls who became the women like me.
It was humiliating enough to have to compete against the other girls when I was in high school. It would have been suicide-inducing torture to have to compete against the boys, too. It's for this reason, I vehemently reject the idea that just because every now and then you can dig up a girl or woman who outperforms the average boy or man, that means sex doesn't count. It does count. It counts enormously.
Get boys off the girls teams, and kick the men out of women's sports. It isn't right. And it isn't fair to either the girls and women's sports stars or to all the uncoordinated nerds like me.
No amount of this type of rational and objective examination of biology will sway the trans zealots. For them the fact that the sex based differences encompass so many anatomical and physiological factors - from chromosomes to muscle mass- is simply ignored, or derided as not really facts at all and merely a function of classification style. Then their logic of cherry picking the odd biological anomaly to suit their political aims is at least understandable, even if it is reprehensible.
What I cannot get my head around is why so many otherwise rational people, from rape crisis managers to hospital CEOs, sports and university administrators, politicians and school boards, swallow the trans-propagandists’ bull that biology has nothing to do with being a woman. It’s akin to chairs have 4 legs-pigs have 4 legs-all chairs are pigs muddle-headedness that would at best generate a snort of derision in any other context. But rephrased as some girls can’t have babies- some men can’t get pregnant-therefore anyone with a penis can be a woman, it is not only accepted as gospel, but those who demure are persecuted as criminals.
It’s the most mystifying social contagion I’ve ever come across.
PS
The knee and shoulder injury issues are also to an extent a function of muscle anatomy and physiology. Both are inherently unstable joints and rely on muscle function to stabilise them.
I think the question to pose is "Why is gender identity an appropriate basis on which to form teams/segregated spaces?" instead of arguing why men and women should not be on the same teams, as this article does.
You can present all the statistics and facts possible to make your case, but the sports organizations and associations will continue with the mantra TWAW and TMAM. And female athletes don't count.
In a former career as a trainer, I observed the sexed differences in weightlifting that you outline here. Studying polemology, I have learned to recognize they are evolved around warfare in men versus resources in women. Larger upper-body strength differentials are a heuristic of inter-male status competition.
Male mammals in most species are bigger/ stronger than females. It’s chicken v egg speculation to say what led to the differences. We don’t actually know why, but we can observe in replication what is. I would think any explanation of the differences would need to apply to many male mammals, not just humans.
The relationship between sex differences and combat potential in male primates is lots of primates, for example gorillas, even when those species see very little actual combat. The reason why you look at a photo of Hannah Mouncey playing Aussie football with much smaller women and think "that is wrong" is because you have a built-in evolutionary heuristic for judging combat fairness.
I agree with the observation, and I have actually seen that along with a lot of random chimp and orangutan studies (I have a random cross-section of interests). I see the combat aspect of primates except in the case of bonobos which are curious animals that seem to have a lot in common with middle school boys but I’m like 95% sure bonobo males are still bigger/ stronger than females even though they are matriarchal. My observation goes beyond primates - big cats, bears, whales, wild dogs...... for most mammals - solitary or not - males are bigger than females. The combat aspect seems more related to mating prospects v other males than primate tribal warfare, but that’s just speculation.
I fully agree we innately see a big dude - even one dressed up like a chic - physically competing against women (or children for that matter) and think “that’s wrong.” It is. We see sports as competition but to be an actual competition it has to be fair. Men v women in sports isn’t fair. It breaks my heart my daughter has fewer opportunities than I did because immature morons detached from reality with bizarre god complexes think if they only wish something true hard enough it can actually happen.
You may enjoy reading Mike Martin's "Why We Fight." Also Lawrence Keeley's "War Before Civilization." What you call "mating prospects v other males" is indistinguishable from "primate tribal warfare." The space between kinship blood feud and nation-state conquest is just a spectrum of violence. It's not a vast gulf of time or social development at all.
Sources from Homer to Herodotus blame ancient conflicts on sex difference, enthography and anthropology pin the blame for most intergroup conflicts on sex difference, archaeology shows a universal sex difference in death rates from violence, DNA evidence shows a sex difference in prehistoric violent migrations, and on and on and on.
I know tenured professors of military history who are no longer willing to teach conflict biology because babies will get upset about it. No way that results in more wars, no wayyyy
Thanks for the reference. I just put it in my cart on Amazon. I’ve actually been going down a rabbit hole the last couple months on how advanced human civilizations are likely much older than the narrative. I like the study of how we got where we are and the natural world is a huge part of that story.
Maybe it's so obvious as to be unnecessary to state, but I'm surprised that almost nowhere in your piece do you specify that you're talking about "on average". If on average women are 50-70% as strong as men across a range of muscles, but it's also not uncommon to find men and women who are twice or half as strong as the average for their sex, then clearly it's not true that "men are stronger than women", yet that's the kind of language that you use throughout the piece.
Yes, men are stronger than women. Men are faster than women. Men have more endurance than women. Men are stronger than women. You have to get down hundreds to thousands of men in every physical sport competition before you get to the best woman in that sport. When you can’t name a single sport or measure of strength where women are even equal to men then it is absolutely correct to say men are stronger than women. I have no idea of your physical capabilities, but it’s my personal experience that the physically weakest women are most often the ones convinced the strength/ physical ability difference isn’t that big. Having spent decades working my ass off in physical competitions and sports, there is no girl or woman I’ve ever met in elite athletics or outdoor adventure sports that would make unsupported assertions like yours.
You are arguably wrong on the third one. It's quite likely that women have much better endurance than men. A number of ultra-endurance records across numerous fields, running, swimming, cycling and fell running have very significantly better women's records than men's. It's possible that higher levels of twitch 1 muscle fibres and higher levels of body fat, allow women to go for much longer. Part of why the women's times in some of these competitions are better is also because they manage on much less sleep in multi-day competitions. (Which when you think of the physical demands of pregnancy and breastfeeding, makes sense that women could have a natural ability to manage better with less sleep.)
Do you have a single example of any elite athletic competition where the top woman actually outperformed the top man??? I’ve heard this theory postulates, and yet on investigation it falls flat. Men have faster times in every sports endurance race where the men and women compete on the same course/ field/ body of water there is. While people like to point to theoretical advantages they think women could have, observed actual outcomes prove that even in endurance races males outperform females without exception. Go look at women v boys website. It shows the fastest times for all of these events.
No I don't have a "single" example, seeing as how I named 4 sports. So I have at least 4.
Sabrina Verjee, Fell-runner, her record for the 214 Wainwright Peaks, is 6 hours faster than the male record.
Jasmin Paris, Winner of the Montane Spine Race in 2019, holds the record for the fastest time, an hour and 24 minutes faster than the newest men's record set by Damian hall this year. (Paris pumped breastmilk for her baby during rest breaks.)
Fiona Kolbinger, Cyclist, Winner of the 2019 Transcontinental Race, finished 10 hours ahead of the fastest man.
There are lots more, it's really not that difficult to find them. In running, past the 314km mark, women start to outperform men by .6%. Whether or not that trend will continue if/when ultra racing grows in popularity is obviously still unknown. But women have won numerous ultra-events. And the one large scale study on ultra-running, shows signs of female advantage.
I think maybe your misunderstanding my comment. I don't doubt that the average man is stronger than the average woman. But that is not the same thing as "men are stronger than women". Comparing elite athletes of both sexes doesn't disprove that at all, if anything the sex differentials between elite athletes are likely greater than the differentials between regular people, as men's capacity to respond to training is also greater than woman's. My point is just that if you don't occasionally make it clear that you're talking about men and women ON AVERAGE, and not talking about any individual case, then you are leaving yourself open to be disproven by the simple and self-evident fact that some women are stronger than some men.
I get what you are saying, but find it condescending and unnecessary. I think it’s evident to any human that has met more than a dozen or so other humans that there are exceptions and averages. Insisting on constant semantics gymnastics is a distraction. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying men are stronger than women because men are stronger than women. It’s a replicated fact of life. Your statement about the differences between average men and average women on the other hand isn’t backed by replicated data. It is based purely on your assumptions.
If you read back to my very first sentence, I was like, "maybe it's so obvious as to be unnecessary to state", so you could be right. I didn't mean the comment in an antagonistic way, just a comment. As far as the actual differences, I was just taking those numbers from his post, that, presumably (again) on average, men are 50-70% stronger than women, depending on the particular muscle group in question. You can go back and see that in the post. I'm not wedded to those numbers, I have no idea how accurate they are. My point is that I do know that some men are twice as strong as average, others half, and the same for women. So it stands to reason that a woman who is twice as strong as the average woman will be stronger than a man who is half as strong as the average man. But again, I'm not stating this in an antagonistic way, just making a comment.
I think you are forgetting the bell shaped distribution of strength. Yes there is overlap; but not a whole heck of a lot. There is a reason 15 year old boys (the USA U16 men’s team) beats the junk out of the USA women’s World Cup soccer team in exhibition matches. While the top women are stronger than the weakest men, I think the overlap is smaller than you are envisioning. It is very uncommon to find a man twice as strong as the average, or half as strong for that matter. The population is concentrated around the average. The bell curve.
Men are 50% to 70% stronger than women. That doesn’t mean the top 30%-50% of women are stronger than the weakest 30% - 50% of men. It’s a gross difference in average strength not a comparative proportion.
The average (untrained) man can bench 135 pounds. The average woman can bench around 75 pounds. In this particular area, the average man can bench 80% more than average women. However, elite female athletes (ie the 90th-99th percentile) can rarely bench over 115 pounds. In reality maybe 1% of women can bench what the average man can, while over 90% of men can bench more than the average woman. Think of it more like IQs. 100 is the average but less than 1% have an IQ of 150 or higher, less than 10% have an IQ of 125 or higher. The population concentrates around the average. There is also a bell shaped distribution in physical capabilities. When it comes to physical strength the bell curves put on the same chart overlap a couple standard deviations from the mean. The actual percentage of population overlap is much smaller than the gross difference in the strength of the mean.
I think you're imputing claims about the degree of overlap that I'm not making. "Some" could mean 1 in a million, 1 in a thousand, 1 in 100, 1 in 10, or 1 in 3. I'm not claiming to know the answer to that question, and if you want to make a claim as to what it is, I'm all ears. My point was more grammar and logic, to be precise, you would need to at least occasionally make it clear that ON AVERAGE men are stronger than women, but that doesn't mean that every man is stronger than every woman. If you think that's unneccesary and pedantic, then that's OK too. It's just a comment on an internet forum, not a headline in the New York Times.
Maybe I should clarify my "priors" just to make sure you're not mistaken as to where I'm coming from, I believe that the biological males and biological females are fundamentally different, that gender in so far as its defined as a social construct is merely reflective of those differences, and that spaces and activities reserved for biological females should not be open to biological males, even if said biological males identify as girls or women. Whether I believe that it's incredibly rare so as to be practically nonexistent for women to exceed men in strength or somewhat more common than that doesn't in any way affect my opinions on these topics. I also happen to be married to a three-time Division I women's volleyball national champion, so I . . . uh also know a few things about women's athletics and athletic women!
"There is however no evidence that men and women differ in their ability to voluntarily activate their muscles with their nervous system—a measurement called voluntary activation." - I don't know how extensively this has been studied via rigorous scientific method, but we do have a lot of anecdotal evidence that there might be a difference. Woman almost universally can do many more reps closer to their 1RM than men. For example, if we take a very strong woman and an average man who trains - both have a 1RM of 250 in the bench press. If we put 225 on the bar and tell them to do as many reps as possible, the man will likely get 3 reps, maybe 4 at most. The woman will likely get 5-8 reps.
Similarly, a woman's 5 rep max is usually 90-93% of her 1RM, whereas men's is usually more like 84-87% of their 1RM. These numbers are estimates, and vary person to person, but are roughly accurate across large numbers, based on hundreds of observations.
I've personally observed this hundreds of times, and colleagues or lifters (both men and women) who I mention it to, usually haven't noticed it but after I mention it, say, wow you know what, you're right, I never really noticed that difference before.
I don't know, but suspect, that this is due to differences in neuromuscular efficiency, probably mediated by testosterone in both the womb and in post-birth development (esp puberty). The result is that men can recruit more motor units voluntarily, so can achieve closer to a true "1RM" of maximal motor unit recruitment. Whereas women cannot, and thus their 1RM is not really representative of their true maximum motor unit recruitment.
This would explain why they can do so many more reps at 90% than men can. There may be another better explanation, this is just a hypothesis, but I have yet to see one. Probably because most people haven't yet even made the observation upon which to study it.
Are sex differences in regards to where the strength is (upper body...) and the more muscular mass derive from the adolescence training boys go through and how from babies boys are geared towards physical strength exercises and development? This has happened for thousand of years now, this might have impacted male DNA or biology? Or there are conclusive reasons and evidence to believe the sex differences are natural? Do these differences happen for all males and females or it depends on the female and male?
2:12 is two seconds faster than women’s current times. Not much. Do you want to make a bet that in the next five years women will match or beat that? My point is the biologically determined differences pound for pound in strength and long distance speed between the sexes are not so clear. Calling it “nonsense” and your other ad hominem attacks don’t change that.
Ann - you are being stupid. There is zero evidence for your assertion we will catch up given enough time. Two seconds isn’t much - but 60 years is a long time with lots of technological advances. You are intentionally disregarding that men are a heck of a lot faster today than 60 years ago and that why 3993 men are faster than the very fastest woman. This differential applies to every single spurt. Women today in swimming are approaching times of men 60 years ago, but we’re still no where close to catching men today. Women today are almost as tall as men in the 18th century. Are you also going to claim women will eventually catch up to men in height by ignoring that men today are taller than they were in the 18th century?
Creating fairytales from random data points might create a compelling story in your own mind to formulate uniformed theories for yourself, but there is zero actual evidence women are closing the strength gap with men. It’s like Marxism - it sounds all nice and fuzzy until reality steps in to prove the theory is bull💩 in practice.
Women’s current top speed is the same as the top men’s speed in 1963. Did men’s biology change? Women haven’t been competing in the marathon as long as men have. There has been a progression of reduced times over the decades of this sport. How fast can women get? That’s a reasonable question as well.
More nonsense. 3993 men are faster than the top woman marathon runner. several men in the 1950’s went 2:12 in a marathon. You cherry pick stuff you have zero understanding of, and then try and claim it’s “proof” of something when it’s not. Men competing in marathons today, and every other physical sport, are superior to women. Sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands.
This scholar thinks women are closing the gap in strength pound for pound. I think the jury is still out as to how strong women can get and that is a reasonable position to take. Women haven’t been doing serious weight lifting for very long and top women are already lifting 3 1/2 times their body weight.
Tell me what specifically has been debunked and I’ll find cites supporting my position. As far as men having less opportunities than women do, all the evidence points to the opposite. Less girls and women participate in sports as men, women receive less compensation and attention. Again, I can find cites if you are interested.
This article makes no real effort to distinguish between gender roles that are socially constructed, channeling the sexes in different directions and activities, encouraging and enforcing male domination and preventing women and girls from developing themselves in myriad ways, versus the differing physical capacities biologically inherent in male and female human bodies.
Not long ago women were deemed incapable of running long distances and kept from running marathons. Yet now women’s top marathon speeds match men’s records made in the 1960’s.,And not long ago women were discouraged from even attempting to develop their upper body strength. Now lifting twice one’s body rate is common in top female athletes and there is a woman who has lifted three times her body weight.
In primitive societies women regularly carried heavy loads and I have read anthropological evidence that remains of women in the past evidenced higher upper body musculature than top female athletes today.
And it would be hard to argue that men in many primitive cultures did not engage in dancing to the same extent that women did.
Obviously there are some inherent physical differences in male and female bodies and that women tend to be smaller and lighter is one of them that would in itself lead to less strength on average, but the significance of those biological differences and the extent of them pound for pound with regard to strength, speed, agility and endurance cannot be completely clear in conditions of social inequality and lack of equal opportunity for girls and women to develop their capacities. If there are indeed athletic disadvantages in the female body there may also be advantages. I would think giving birth is an act of endurance above all others.
All this is an argument supporting female only sports teams while men’s teams should be open to women who wish to participate in them.
I’m not getting the sense that you read the article nor checked references.
You’ve said nothing insightful in your reply, just parroted ill considered clichés we’re all sick of hearing from critical theory activists.
Your first sentence, for example, fundamentally misunderstands the obvious goals of the article and deflects into a value judgement. You then go down a rabbit hole of vague assertions and your own prejudices.
Please stop wasting everyone’s time with intellectually lazy disruption. If you want to have a discussion, then begin with honest representation of what the article actually says.
First I am not a”critical theory activist” - whatever that means. I am a radical feminist and a Marxist. Second, ad hominem personal attacks (accusing me of being “dishonest”and “lazy”) are not how to carry out respectful debate.
I disagree with much of your comment. First, nearly all men's sports teams are open to women with most exceptions centering around contact sports for physical safety. Males have much denser bones than females. A female colliding with a male post puberty has a much higher likelihood of the female sustaining significant injuries than two males hitting each other. No, those sports should not be open to women. Guys have a right to compete without worrying if they go up for a header in soccer against a girl, they'll crack her head open. In the same sense girls should have a right to compete against girls without worrying a boy playing dress up will crack their head open in their own soccer league.
In the western world, what inequality? This endless "poor me" mentality is so frustrating. As women and girls in the west, we have far GREATER opportunities to "develop our capacities" than boys and men. I'm 40 and my whole life I took advantage of the endless opportunities to develop myself which, among other opportunities, allowed me to compete as an elite swimmer growing up and function as a damn good whitewater river guide in undergrad. All the boys were still faster swimmers after 10 years old, and the guys who were whitewater guides were all stronger than me even though at a size 0 and 120 pounds I could use leverage to get 350ibs dudes back in the raft in the middle of a class IV rapid (if you fall out in a class V rapid you just gotta swim until you're past it or hope a video boater can grab you). I can't think of a single opportunity that my brother or guy friends had that I didn't, but I can think of several I got they didn't only because I am a female.
Allowing boys and men to claim our immutable biological identity as to be so meaningless they can simply "feel" their way to being a woman is what poses the biggest threat to women and girls in the west. The ideology robs us of the hard-fought opportunities rooted in acknowledging men and women are different. Turning that around and robbing men of male only private spaces and competitions is just as screwed up as robbing women of ours.
I have given birth. Twice. It's an incredible gift to do so, and it is a major physical accomplishment (I am still not sure how they fit through where they came out). But no part of it requires greater physical strength then men, and considering it wipes us out for several days, it's not a "sign" of women having more endurance than men who far more often choose jobs that require hard core physical labor all day every day. We are more flexible than men. Giving birth is a far more amazing, awesome, incredible physical act than anything any man will ever accomplish, but its flatly wrong to somehow imply women innately have physical superiority than men because we give birth. It's not true for humans. It's not even true for the vast majority of mammals.
As far as your marathon assertion goes, you leave out how much men have improved over the same time period. In 1969 Derek Clayton ran a marathon is 2:08:34. Top male runners were just under 2:12:00 in the 1950's. No women has come close to this day. Today the fastest men's marathon time is 2:01:09. The fastest women's time today is 2:14:04. The fasted woman on Earth is the 3993rd fastest man. Yes, that is an enormous and immutable biological difference. Pick a sport and find the same. Nutrition, apparel/gear, and training have all improved as well. While there is evidence women were stronger in past societies, men were stronger too.
The physical differences between men and women are significant and consistently present throughout human existence. Many institutions western women today like to whine about being "oppressive" were likely implemented to protect women - namely marriage and the fact that basically every culture has made rape a crime. To this day married women are happier than those who aren't (unless you reference debunked propaganda by pseudoscientists like Dolan). While these societal structures are far from perfectly implemented, the reality is that men can physically dominate women all they want to. If masculinity in and of itself were purely toxic, there would not be inherent societal expectation that men should protect women and children and successful societies wouldn't have so often centered around protecting women and children.
Women are on average quite a bit shorter than men. I’m more than a foot shorter than my nephew. There’s never been a woman President in the US- it doesn’t mean women aren’t capable of taking that position.
There have been female leaders throughout human history. What a silly comment. There has never been a society where women are even as strong as men. Or as fast as men. Or as big as men. How narrow is your world view? Tiny based on your comments. Also, it’s ludicrous to conflate evidently non-physical jobs with physical capabilities. It’s just a stupid babble.
The article says not a thing about men at all and only implies 5%-10% greater strength in women’s upper bodies then v elites athletes now. If correct it would show super strong prehistoric women who labored all day are still weaker than modern men. What is your point?
I said women are shorter and weigh less than men on average. I’m talking about pound for pound differences between the sexes where the evidence is less clear. Stop arguing with a straw horse.
As a former professional dancer (modern, with ballet training) I will add that women have more knee and shoulder injuries than men. I wonder if any of these studies covered injuries in women. Because we must be flexible in the birth process, women are more flexible in almost all joints, with a larger range of flexibility, in general, than men, yogis notwithstanding.
As a trans widow, I can tell you that my former husband was insanely jealous of my flexibility and my female hip-to-shoulder ratio. He hated his own large hands and feet, a typical obsession of men with this psychiatric illness of body dissociation with an obsessive sexual component.
He's also obsessed with doing martial arts and defending himself, claiming the false statistics on "vulnerable" cross-dressers being attacked (women like me are attacked far more than cross-dressing men, who are perceived as men, perceived as figures who will fight back) He spars on a women's team and although he's under 6 ft tall, he's a formidable and wiley opponent, I know from our joking "wrestling" during the marriage.
Women must be aware that trying to lift as heavy or have the speed of men can cause injuries. For a window into healthy mind/body work (designed by me, a medium sized woman, I'd like to know the male reaction) here's a short clip from Ute Heggen youtube channel, where trans widows' recovery from the trauma is the theme:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gnlaASFJkh0&t=83s
thank you for your well researched and presented article. it really shouldn't need to even be said. but in these insane times it needs to be. it's obvious and necessary. and it's a good thing. men and women are different.
Thank you for your excellent review. It agrees with my own personal observations about the differences between men and women. Men are clearly stronger and faster than women. There's no contest at all. It's a shame that we have to spend our time proving the obvious. But these are the times we live in.
Let me be candid. I've always been extremely bad, laughably bad at every sport and have absolutely no interest in professional or amateur sports. None. My primary concern is not for the"elite" athletic girl or woman, but for all the average or below average, uncoordinated female nerds. The girls who hated mandatory gym classes. The last ones to be picked for every team. The girls who became the women like me.
It was humiliating enough to have to compete against the other girls when I was in high school. It would have been suicide-inducing torture to have to compete against the boys, too. It's for this reason, I vehemently reject the idea that just because every now and then you can dig up a girl or woman who outperforms the average boy or man, that means sex doesn't count. It does count. It counts enormously.
Get boys off the girls teams, and kick the men out of women's sports. It isn't right. And it isn't fair to either the girls and women's sports stars or to all the uncoordinated nerds like me.
No amount of this type of rational and objective examination of biology will sway the trans zealots. For them the fact that the sex based differences encompass so many anatomical and physiological factors - from chromosomes to muscle mass- is simply ignored, or derided as not really facts at all and merely a function of classification style. Then their logic of cherry picking the odd biological anomaly to suit their political aims is at least understandable, even if it is reprehensible.
What I cannot get my head around is why so many otherwise rational people, from rape crisis managers to hospital CEOs, sports and university administrators, politicians and school boards, swallow the trans-propagandists’ bull that biology has nothing to do with being a woman. It’s akin to chairs have 4 legs-pigs have 4 legs-all chairs are pigs muddle-headedness that would at best generate a snort of derision in any other context. But rephrased as some girls can’t have babies- some men can’t get pregnant-therefore anyone with a penis can be a woman, it is not only accepted as gospel, but those who demure are persecuted as criminals.
It’s the most mystifying social contagion I’ve ever come across.
PS
The knee and shoulder injury issues are also to an extent a function of muscle anatomy and physiology. Both are inherently unstable joints and rely on muscle function to stabilise them.
I think the question to pose is "Why is gender identity an appropriate basis on which to form teams/segregated spaces?" instead of arguing why men and women should not be on the same teams, as this article does.
You can present all the statistics and facts possible to make your case, but the sports organizations and associations will continue with the mantra TWAW and TMAM. And female athletes don't count.
Your work is excellent. Well thought out and presented. Thank you.
In a former career as a trainer, I observed the sexed differences in weightlifting that you outline here. Studying polemology, I have learned to recognize they are evolved around warfare in men versus resources in women. Larger upper-body strength differentials are a heuristic of inter-male status competition.
Male mammals in most species are bigger/ stronger than females. It’s chicken v egg speculation to say what led to the differences. We don’t actually know why, but we can observe in replication what is. I would think any explanation of the differences would need to apply to many male mammals, not just humans.
Have you heard about the Gombe Chimpanzee War?
The relationship between sex differences and combat potential in male primates is lots of primates, for example gorillas, even when those species see very little actual combat. The reason why you look at a photo of Hannah Mouncey playing Aussie football with much smaller women and think "that is wrong" is because you have a built-in evolutionary heuristic for judging combat fairness.
I agree with the observation, and I have actually seen that along with a lot of random chimp and orangutan studies (I have a random cross-section of interests). I see the combat aspect of primates except in the case of bonobos which are curious animals that seem to have a lot in common with middle school boys but I’m like 95% sure bonobo males are still bigger/ stronger than females even though they are matriarchal. My observation goes beyond primates - big cats, bears, whales, wild dogs...... for most mammals - solitary or not - males are bigger than females. The combat aspect seems more related to mating prospects v other males than primate tribal warfare, but that’s just speculation.
I fully agree we innately see a big dude - even one dressed up like a chic - physically competing against women (or children for that matter) and think “that’s wrong.” It is. We see sports as competition but to be an actual competition it has to be fair. Men v women in sports isn’t fair. It breaks my heart my daughter has fewer opportunities than I did because immature morons detached from reality with bizarre god complexes think if they only wish something true hard enough it can actually happen.
You may enjoy reading Mike Martin's "Why We Fight." Also Lawrence Keeley's "War Before Civilization." What you call "mating prospects v other males" is indistinguishable from "primate tribal warfare." The space between kinship blood feud and nation-state conquest is just a spectrum of violence. It's not a vast gulf of time or social development at all.
Sources from Homer to Herodotus blame ancient conflicts on sex difference, enthography and anthropology pin the blame for most intergroup conflicts on sex difference, archaeology shows a universal sex difference in death rates from violence, DNA evidence shows a sex difference in prehistoric violent migrations, and on and on and on.
I know tenured professors of military history who are no longer willing to teach conflict biology because babies will get upset about it. No way that results in more wars, no wayyyy
Thanks for the reference. I just put it in my cart on Amazon. I’ve actually been going down a rabbit hole the last couple months on how advanced human civilizations are likely much older than the narrative. I like the study of how we got where we are and the natural world is a huge part of that story.
Maybe it's so obvious as to be unnecessary to state, but I'm surprised that almost nowhere in your piece do you specify that you're talking about "on average". If on average women are 50-70% as strong as men across a range of muscles, but it's also not uncommon to find men and women who are twice or half as strong as the average for their sex, then clearly it's not true that "men are stronger than women", yet that's the kind of language that you use throughout the piece.
Yes, men are stronger than women. Men are faster than women. Men have more endurance than women. Men are stronger than women. You have to get down hundreds to thousands of men in every physical sport competition before you get to the best woman in that sport. When you can’t name a single sport or measure of strength where women are even equal to men then it is absolutely correct to say men are stronger than women. I have no idea of your physical capabilities, but it’s my personal experience that the physically weakest women are most often the ones convinced the strength/ physical ability difference isn’t that big. Having spent decades working my ass off in physical competitions and sports, there is no girl or woman I’ve ever met in elite athletics or outdoor adventure sports that would make unsupported assertions like yours.
You are arguably wrong on the third one. It's quite likely that women have much better endurance than men. A number of ultra-endurance records across numerous fields, running, swimming, cycling and fell running have very significantly better women's records than men's. It's possible that higher levels of twitch 1 muscle fibres and higher levels of body fat, allow women to go for much longer. Part of why the women's times in some of these competitions are better is also because they manage on much less sleep in multi-day competitions. (Which when you think of the physical demands of pregnancy and breastfeeding, makes sense that women could have a natural ability to manage better with less sleep.)
Do you have a single example of any elite athletic competition where the top woman actually outperformed the top man??? I’ve heard this theory postulates, and yet on investigation it falls flat. Men have faster times in every sports endurance race where the men and women compete on the same course/ field/ body of water there is. While people like to point to theoretical advantages they think women could have, observed actual outcomes prove that even in endurance races males outperform females without exception. Go look at women v boys website. It shows the fastest times for all of these events.
No I don't have a "single" example, seeing as how I named 4 sports. So I have at least 4.
Sabrina Verjee, Fell-runner, her record for the 214 Wainwright Peaks, is 6 hours faster than the male record.
Jasmin Paris, Winner of the Montane Spine Race in 2019, holds the record for the fastest time, an hour and 24 minutes faster than the newest men's record set by Damian hall this year. (Paris pumped breastmilk for her baby during rest breaks.)
Fiona Kolbinger, Cyclist, Winner of the 2019 Transcontinental Race, finished 10 hours ahead of the fastest man.
There are lots more, it's really not that difficult to find them. In running, past the 314km mark, women start to outperform men by .6%. Whether or not that trend will continue if/when ultra racing grows in popularity is obviously still unknown. But women have won numerous ultra-events. And the one large scale study on ultra-running, shows signs of female advantage.
I think maybe your misunderstanding my comment. I don't doubt that the average man is stronger than the average woman. But that is not the same thing as "men are stronger than women". Comparing elite athletes of both sexes doesn't disprove that at all, if anything the sex differentials between elite athletes are likely greater than the differentials between regular people, as men's capacity to respond to training is also greater than woman's. My point is just that if you don't occasionally make it clear that you're talking about men and women ON AVERAGE, and not talking about any individual case, then you are leaving yourself open to be disproven by the simple and self-evident fact that some women are stronger than some men.
I get what you are saying, but find it condescending and unnecessary. I think it’s evident to any human that has met more than a dozen or so other humans that there are exceptions and averages. Insisting on constant semantics gymnastics is a distraction. There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying men are stronger than women because men are stronger than women. It’s a replicated fact of life. Your statement about the differences between average men and average women on the other hand isn’t backed by replicated data. It is based purely on your assumptions.
If you read back to my very first sentence, I was like, "maybe it's so obvious as to be unnecessary to state", so you could be right. I didn't mean the comment in an antagonistic way, just a comment. As far as the actual differences, I was just taking those numbers from his post, that, presumably (again) on average, men are 50-70% stronger than women, depending on the particular muscle group in question. You can go back and see that in the post. I'm not wedded to those numbers, I have no idea how accurate they are. My point is that I do know that some men are twice as strong as average, others half, and the same for women. So it stands to reason that a woman who is twice as strong as the average woman will be stronger than a man who is half as strong as the average man. But again, I'm not stating this in an antagonistic way, just making a comment.
I think you are forgetting the bell shaped distribution of strength. Yes there is overlap; but not a whole heck of a lot. There is a reason 15 year old boys (the USA U16 men’s team) beats the junk out of the USA women’s World Cup soccer team in exhibition matches. While the top women are stronger than the weakest men, I think the overlap is smaller than you are envisioning. It is very uncommon to find a man twice as strong as the average, or half as strong for that matter. The population is concentrated around the average. The bell curve.
Men are 50% to 70% stronger than women. That doesn’t mean the top 30%-50% of women are stronger than the weakest 30% - 50% of men. It’s a gross difference in average strength not a comparative proportion.
The average (untrained) man can bench 135 pounds. The average woman can bench around 75 pounds. In this particular area, the average man can bench 80% more than average women. However, elite female athletes (ie the 90th-99th percentile) can rarely bench over 115 pounds. In reality maybe 1% of women can bench what the average man can, while over 90% of men can bench more than the average woman. Think of it more like IQs. 100 is the average but less than 1% have an IQ of 150 or higher, less than 10% have an IQ of 125 or higher. The population concentrates around the average. There is also a bell shaped distribution in physical capabilities. When it comes to physical strength the bell curves put on the same chart overlap a couple standard deviations from the mean. The actual percentage of population overlap is much smaller than the gross difference in the strength of the mean.
I think you're imputing claims about the degree of overlap that I'm not making. "Some" could mean 1 in a million, 1 in a thousand, 1 in 100, 1 in 10, or 1 in 3. I'm not claiming to know the answer to that question, and if you want to make a claim as to what it is, I'm all ears. My point was more grammar and logic, to be precise, you would need to at least occasionally make it clear that ON AVERAGE men are stronger than women, but that doesn't mean that every man is stronger than every woman. If you think that's unneccesary and pedantic, then that's OK too. It's just a comment on an internet forum, not a headline in the New York Times.
Maybe I should clarify my "priors" just to make sure you're not mistaken as to where I'm coming from, I believe that the biological males and biological females are fundamentally different, that gender in so far as its defined as a social construct is merely reflective of those differences, and that spaces and activities reserved for biological females should not be open to biological males, even if said biological males identify as girls or women. Whether I believe that it's incredibly rare so as to be practically nonexistent for women to exceed men in strength or somewhat more common than that doesn't in any way affect my opinions on these topics. I also happen to be married to a three-time Division I women's volleyball national champion, so I . . . uh also know a few things about women's athletics and athletic women!
"There is however no evidence that men and women differ in their ability to voluntarily activate their muscles with their nervous system—a measurement called voluntary activation." - I don't know how extensively this has been studied via rigorous scientific method, but we do have a lot of anecdotal evidence that there might be a difference. Woman almost universally can do many more reps closer to their 1RM than men. For example, if we take a very strong woman and an average man who trains - both have a 1RM of 250 in the bench press. If we put 225 on the bar and tell them to do as many reps as possible, the man will likely get 3 reps, maybe 4 at most. The woman will likely get 5-8 reps.
Similarly, a woman's 5 rep max is usually 90-93% of her 1RM, whereas men's is usually more like 84-87% of their 1RM. These numbers are estimates, and vary person to person, but are roughly accurate across large numbers, based on hundreds of observations.
I've personally observed this hundreds of times, and colleagues or lifters (both men and women) who I mention it to, usually haven't noticed it but after I mention it, say, wow you know what, you're right, I never really noticed that difference before.
I don't know, but suspect, that this is due to differences in neuromuscular efficiency, probably mediated by testosterone in both the womb and in post-birth development (esp puberty). The result is that men can recruit more motor units voluntarily, so can achieve closer to a true "1RM" of maximal motor unit recruitment. Whereas women cannot, and thus their 1RM is not really representative of their true maximum motor unit recruitment.
This would explain why they can do so many more reps at 90% than men can. There may be another better explanation, this is just a hypothesis, but I have yet to see one. Probably because most people haven't yet even made the observation upon which to study it.
Are sex differences in regards to where the strength is (upper body...) and the more muscular mass derive from the adolescence training boys go through and how from babies boys are geared towards physical strength exercises and development? This has happened for thousand of years now, this might have impacted male DNA or biology? Or there are conclusive reasons and evidence to believe the sex differences are natural? Do these differences happen for all males and females or it depends on the female and male?
2:12 is two seconds faster than women’s current times. Not much. Do you want to make a bet that in the next five years women will match or beat that? My point is the biologically determined differences pound for pound in strength and long distance speed between the sexes are not so clear. Calling it “nonsense” and your other ad hominem attacks don’t change that.
Ann - you are being stupid. There is zero evidence for your assertion we will catch up given enough time. Two seconds isn’t much - but 60 years is a long time with lots of technological advances. You are intentionally disregarding that men are a heck of a lot faster today than 60 years ago and that why 3993 men are faster than the very fastest woman. This differential applies to every single spurt. Women today in swimming are approaching times of men 60 years ago, but we’re still no where close to catching men today. Women today are almost as tall as men in the 18th century. Are you also going to claim women will eventually catch up to men in height by ignoring that men today are taller than they were in the 18th century?
Creating fairytales from random data points might create a compelling story in your own mind to formulate uniformed theories for yourself, but there is zero actual evidence women are closing the strength gap with men. It’s like Marxism - it sounds all nice and fuzzy until reality steps in to prove the theory is bull💩 in practice.
Top marathon running speed is 2:14 for women and 2:01 for men.
https://www.runnersworld.com/races-places/a20823734/these-are-the-worlds-fastest-marathoners-and-marathon-courses/
Women’s current top speed is the same as the top men’s speed in 1963. Did men’s biology change? Women haven’t been competing in the marathon as long as men have. There has been a progression of reduced times over the decades of this sport. How fast can women get? That’s a reasonable question as well.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marathon_year_rankings
More nonsense. 3993 men are faster than the top woman marathon runner. several men in the 1950’s went 2:12 in a marathon. You cherry pick stuff you have zero understanding of, and then try and claim it’s “proof” of something when it’s not. Men competing in marathons today, and every other physical sport, are superior to women. Sometimes hundreds, sometimes thousands.
https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/brzycki/files/mb-2002-01.pdf
This scholar thinks women are closing the gap in strength pound for pound. I think the jury is still out as to how strong women can get and that is a reasonable position to take. Women haven’t been doing serious weight lifting for very long and top women are already lifting 3 1/2 times their body weight.
Tell me what specifically has been debunked and I’ll find cites supporting my position. As far as men having less opportunities than women do, all the evidence points to the opposite. Less girls and women participate in sports as men, women receive less compensation and attention. Again, I can find cites if you are interested.
This article makes no real effort to distinguish between gender roles that are socially constructed, channeling the sexes in different directions and activities, encouraging and enforcing male domination and preventing women and girls from developing themselves in myriad ways, versus the differing physical capacities biologically inherent in male and female human bodies.
Not long ago women were deemed incapable of running long distances and kept from running marathons. Yet now women’s top marathon speeds match men’s records made in the 1960’s.,And not long ago women were discouraged from even attempting to develop their upper body strength. Now lifting twice one’s body rate is common in top female athletes and there is a woman who has lifted three times her body weight.
In primitive societies women regularly carried heavy loads and I have read anthropological evidence that remains of women in the past evidenced higher upper body musculature than top female athletes today.
And it would be hard to argue that men in many primitive cultures did not engage in dancing to the same extent that women did.
Obviously there are some inherent physical differences in male and female bodies and that women tend to be smaller and lighter is one of them that would in itself lead to less strength on average, but the significance of those biological differences and the extent of them pound for pound with regard to strength, speed, agility and endurance cannot be completely clear in conditions of social inequality and lack of equal opportunity for girls and women to develop their capacities. If there are indeed athletic disadvantages in the female body there may also be advantages. I would think giving birth is an act of endurance above all others.
All this is an argument supporting female only sports teams while men’s teams should be open to women who wish to participate in them.
I’m not getting the sense that you read the article nor checked references.
You’ve said nothing insightful in your reply, just parroted ill considered clichés we’re all sick of hearing from critical theory activists.
Your first sentence, for example, fundamentally misunderstands the obvious goals of the article and deflects into a value judgement. You then go down a rabbit hole of vague assertions and your own prejudices.
Please stop wasting everyone’s time with intellectually lazy disruption. If you want to have a discussion, then begin with honest representation of what the article actually says.
Exactly right, Ben. Truman Capote said it best, "That's not writing. It's typing."
First I am not a”critical theory activist” - whatever that means. I am a radical feminist and a Marxist. Second, ad hominem personal attacks (accusing me of being “dishonest”and “lazy”) are not how to carry out respectful debate.
I disagree with much of your comment. First, nearly all men's sports teams are open to women with most exceptions centering around contact sports for physical safety. Males have much denser bones than females. A female colliding with a male post puberty has a much higher likelihood of the female sustaining significant injuries than two males hitting each other. No, those sports should not be open to women. Guys have a right to compete without worrying if they go up for a header in soccer against a girl, they'll crack her head open. In the same sense girls should have a right to compete against girls without worrying a boy playing dress up will crack their head open in their own soccer league.
In the western world, what inequality? This endless "poor me" mentality is so frustrating. As women and girls in the west, we have far GREATER opportunities to "develop our capacities" than boys and men. I'm 40 and my whole life I took advantage of the endless opportunities to develop myself which, among other opportunities, allowed me to compete as an elite swimmer growing up and function as a damn good whitewater river guide in undergrad. All the boys were still faster swimmers after 10 years old, and the guys who were whitewater guides were all stronger than me even though at a size 0 and 120 pounds I could use leverage to get 350ibs dudes back in the raft in the middle of a class IV rapid (if you fall out in a class V rapid you just gotta swim until you're past it or hope a video boater can grab you). I can't think of a single opportunity that my brother or guy friends had that I didn't, but I can think of several I got they didn't only because I am a female.
Allowing boys and men to claim our immutable biological identity as to be so meaningless they can simply "feel" their way to being a woman is what poses the biggest threat to women and girls in the west. The ideology robs us of the hard-fought opportunities rooted in acknowledging men and women are different. Turning that around and robbing men of male only private spaces and competitions is just as screwed up as robbing women of ours.
I have given birth. Twice. It's an incredible gift to do so, and it is a major physical accomplishment (I am still not sure how they fit through where they came out). But no part of it requires greater physical strength then men, and considering it wipes us out for several days, it's not a "sign" of women having more endurance than men who far more often choose jobs that require hard core physical labor all day every day. We are more flexible than men. Giving birth is a far more amazing, awesome, incredible physical act than anything any man will ever accomplish, but its flatly wrong to somehow imply women innately have physical superiority than men because we give birth. It's not true for humans. It's not even true for the vast majority of mammals.
As far as your marathon assertion goes, you leave out how much men have improved over the same time period. In 1969 Derek Clayton ran a marathon is 2:08:34. Top male runners were just under 2:12:00 in the 1950's. No women has come close to this day. Today the fastest men's marathon time is 2:01:09. The fastest women's time today is 2:14:04. The fasted woman on Earth is the 3993rd fastest man. Yes, that is an enormous and immutable biological difference. Pick a sport and find the same. Nutrition, apparel/gear, and training have all improved as well. While there is evidence women were stronger in past societies, men were stronger too.
The physical differences between men and women are significant and consistently present throughout human existence. Many institutions western women today like to whine about being "oppressive" were likely implemented to protect women - namely marriage and the fact that basically every culture has made rape a crime. To this day married women are happier than those who aren't (unless you reference debunked propaganda by pseudoscientists like Dolan). While these societal structures are far from perfectly implemented, the reality is that men can physically dominate women all they want to. If masculinity in and of itself were purely toxic, there would not be inherent societal expectation that men should protect women and children and successful societies wouldn't have so often centered around protecting women and children.
The NCAA track hurdles are nine inches lower for women. Are you claiming that they just aren't being challenged enough? Yes/no answer please.
Also. Can you name one woman who has ever competed in the MLB, NFL or NHL? I will give you a million dollars if you can name one.
Women are on average quite a bit shorter than men. I’m more than a foot shorter than my nephew. There’s never been a woman President in the US- it doesn’t mean women aren’t capable of taking that position.
There have been female leaders throughout human history. What a silly comment. There has never been a society where women are even as strong as men. Or as fast as men. Or as big as men. How narrow is your world view? Tiny based on your comments. Also, it’s ludicrous to conflate evidently non-physical jobs with physical capabilities. It’s just a stupid babble.
https://www.science.org/content/article/strong-women-did-lot-heavy-lifting-ancient-farming-societies
The article says not a thing about men at all and only implies 5%-10% greater strength in women’s upper bodies then v elites athletes now. If correct it would show super strong prehistoric women who labored all day are still weaker than modern men. What is your point?
I said women are shorter and weigh less than men on average. I’m talking about pound for pound differences between the sexes where the evidence is less clear. Stop arguing with a straw horse.
No you are babbling nonsense. “Pound for pound” men are stronger and they are bigger/ heavier. Just stop.
We are discussing immutable human bodies and not human potential