Can someone kindly point me in the direction of some facts/stats about the physical differences between men & women?

[kickassangel]

Apart from the obvious?

I'm sure I read on a thread here, that women are only weaker physically when considering upper body strength.

So, are women broadly speaking as strong as men in their lower bodies?

I've also heard, but not seen facts about, women being better at endurance sports beyond certain levels (e.g. races longer than a marathon).

Cos I'm thinking that
a) if 2 people (male & female) of same age, weight, fitness etc were compered - would they in fact be similar in strength/speed
b) I'd love to see the results of men & women raised equally to see if they in fact turn out to be more similar wrt height, weight etc.

But I have no idea where to start looking. Please help.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_humans

I think that proportionally women have less upper body strength to lower body strength ratio in comparison to men. In addition men have the propensity to grow more muscle .

If you look at sport Women are generally about 10% behind men. However as the sports change from strength to stamina based the difference tends to get less, to the point where it isn't uncommon for women to beat men. I am thinking Iron Man competitions etc. I think men still have an advantage but the playing field is more even.

I am liking your theory though about size being the main difference. Not just height either, limb length, chest size, heart size etc are going to make significant differences without looking at musculatory compositions.

Meant to say as well that part if the proportional difference in upper body strength is down to the fact that women are generally encouraged to be more sedentary in active life e.g. not carry heavy things etc. So lifestyle also plays a part.

In addition social conditioning has an effect psychologically too which has an effect on strength performance.

I often wonder too about training programmes for sports people and whether they are all rooted in men being the default IYSWIM. Sports coaches tend to approach coaching men and women slightly differently psychologically because of the social conditioning and also concentrate in upper body strength in women, but I am wondering whether training should take more account of things like menstrual cycles. There is evidence that women are stronger at certain tines of the month and in pregnancy for example.

Anyway in answer to your question OP, I'll try and dig out some literature for you. The Australian institute of sport tends to have good articles/research on this type of thing.

And apologies for the multiple posts.

Muscle density is lower in women than men and women have proportionally more fat than men.

Hence weight for weight men are stronger but as a marathon running female friend told me yesterday - once they get over 50 miles in ultra races men drop like flies and women carry on.

A woman broke the Men's and Women's Word Record for treadmill ultra running last week.

I think there is a lot in the view that men are built for speed and women for endurance. But it is too early to really know how much potential in terms of strength, speed and endurance women have. When we consider that it is only in 1960 that the 800 metres event was reintroduced for women in the Olympics, that Olympic weightlifting for women only began in 2000 and that women's boxing will be held for the first time in this year's games you realise from how far behind women have to come.

Then see how often some women will stand feebly around waiting for a bloke when something heavy has to lifted, how some worry about looking muscular if they try weight training and you realise how much cultural clutter has to be cleared out of the way before you can really start to evaluate differences.

Working and travelling in rural sub-Saharan Africa I was astonished what light work perfectly normal women made of carrying heavy weights.

My daughters and myself who are perfectly normal sized but have always done our own heavy lifting (so to speak) are stronger than a lot of the men we know, simply because it never occurred to us to plead physical weakness when confronted by something heavy.

Sure, there are differences on average in strength but we won't really know what they until society drops the assumption that women are inherently feeble.

What is it you are trying to resolve OP? People are not standard so if two people one of each sex are brought up together and treated the same way and had all the same physicle attributes still would not tell you if f/m ability is the same. Darwinian determinisim is as others have pointed out subject to other things.

I agree sportsfanatic. We are only just tapping into the potential for women within sport atm.

In fact I pretty much agree with all your post!

I do think that muscular differences are less than people imagine and height/weight differences are more of a factor.

Similarly with your first 'experiment' OP - what would it show? If you compare two men and women of the same height, weight and fitness (muscle to fat ratio?) you might find they have the same strength. But you wouldnt be looking at the average of men and women - you might have a man in the 50th percentile for height and a woman at the 75th percentile.

I don't get this drive to argue away population level difference.

Given that there are higher obesity levels in men compared to women I think this will even things out when comparing average men vs women in the 21st c. Also even if there are differences, given that boys and girls are raised differently re: sports/exercise/expected robustness/even easiness of movement in clothing you can't say that differences are innate rather than environmental.

I don't think the greater upper body strength in men can be explained as cultural. Men are known to have more muscle fibres than women, especially in the upper body & this is caused by testosterone. Female to Male transexuals always report an increase in muscle strength when they begin to take testosterone, so it is a biological construct.

However, in our sedentary society most people are capable of greater strength and endurance than they think they are and it is very possible for a woman who is used to heavy lifting etc. to outperform a sedentary man. Annoyingly however, if said man were to weight train he would very quickly surpass the strength levels of most women, even those who weight train. Men put on muscle mass more easily than women.

It is true that women hold world records for ultra events that are better than mens, especially swimming. They seem to have greater stamina over long distances and it is probably the fact that women have a higher percentage of body fat than men that gives them the extra resources to do this.

it's not uncommon for women to win outright in ultra-marathons.

British ultra runner lizzie hawker recently won the commonwealth 24hr race by running 246km, 3km more than the second place finisher who was first man.

I'm pretty sure that Ann Trason and Pam Reed and maybe some others have also won major races outright (i'm thinking of badwater and leadville in particular). Certainly they beat 99% of all the men that take part in those races.

There's a biomechanist, Katy Bowman, who writes about various things, inviting the need to carry babies in arms, rather than a sling or pushchair. She says it's how it's done in many developing countries, where women will walk for miles a day carrying a baby, and that women's arms are fully capable of adapting to that weight and becoming much stronger than they are in many Western women. I find that interesting - like the moving heavy loads I think a lot of non-athletic strength is just down to how we use our bodies daily.

Women can exert force that is (apparently) roughly equivalent to the force of tube train doors shutting - with their uterine muscles, when in labour.

My feeling is that, while there are some genuine, obvious physical differences between men and women, the point that's often missed is that concepts like 'strength' are shaped by the world we've lived in, the same world that stereotypes men and women. So the things we tend to define as part of 'physical strength' are geared towards confirming the idea that men are stronger than women, whereas things that would show women's strength do not become part of our understanding of what physical strength is, because we haven't developed the concept of physical strength in a world that wants to think of women as strong.

Clear as mud?

Sorry... Meant to say that how we use our bodies is very culturally defined, and Western women have a fairly limited range of socially acceptable movement.

About 15 per cent of women see more colours than everyone else.

LRD - completely agree. I can carry my 3 stone plus daughter for a good five minutes at a time, and until recently slung her on my back for considerably longer. My DH can manage about a fifth of that time and never could sling her without hurting his back. But he can do a chin up, which I can't, so he considers himself to have a stronger upper body than me.

Can't help also thinking that biceps are fairly visible, but no one gets respect for a strong lower back or resilient ankles.

Sorry that I did a post & run - got busy.

I'm just thinking about this.

for a very long time, the argument that black people were stronger, more physically able to do hard work, was used as an excuse for them doing slave labour, then manual labour etc.

It seems to me that the same ideas (but in reverse) are floated around about women, and I just wonder how true it is.

There's a whole load of issues around this that make it hard to look at one particular aspect without going off on a tangent, and I have no idea how much of it is actually backed up by good quality research.

Some of my thoughts are

1. We hear how women are attracted to big, tough men, and men like buxom women, cos we're hard wired to be that way, but I have a feeling that that's a load of baloney. there are a lot of studies which indicate that in nature it doesn't always follow that pattern, and that men didn't always look at women's breasts during sex anyway, so why do people still believe these things? (and lets not get started on the obsession with men being taller than their partners as if that's an immutable law of nature which makes gravity look optional in comparison)
2. Men are stronger, so we need them around to do all the difficult/dangerous jobs. Hence women can't be in front line combat, don't go into construction work etc. I know that statistically it's that way, but how do we know whether societal pressures encourage women to be weaker, but push men to be stronger? Thinking about the numbers of women world wide who carry water - incredibly heavy - every day. Surely women aren't that weak? (and physical strength does not equal being better, yet we tend to make this connection)
3. society does place value/respect on physical prowess, even though nowadays it is less useful than it was. yet typical female strength tends to get overlooked (e.g. how much energy is expended during childbirth, which is pretty essential for society) but we hold competitions & give out rewards to the best sports people. Let's face it, the need for pole-vaulting over a city wall to help win a war is long gone, but still we glorify it.

So I'm wondering how many 'common sense' arguments about biology shaping the social expectations of men/women are in fact complete crap, or whether there's any truth to any of it.

After all, we used not to be able to vote, cos our tiny little brains would explode from all that thinking. Turns out not to have been quite so true.

Kickassangel -

This is not the majority position on this board, but here is my 2c:

A lot of crap has been justified with biology in the past, and people still use biology to try to bolster conservative and exploitive positions (women are feeble, frail, irrational etc...)

But this does not mean that all biological difference is necessarily crap, or that it could anyway justify exploitation and oppression.

Individual human rights and equality don't depend on how tall you are, upper body strength or whether you can crack walnuts with your uterine contractions. So I think it is pointless to try to argue 'who is strongest' in this way or to try to deny any biological difference and put it all down to cultural conditioning. Equality doesn't need that for a justification.

(- just think about your example of slavery. Whether it is right or wrong doesn't depend on whether black people are stronger in reality, either way it is still wrong)

I think most "common sense" ideas about how biology interacts with social systems are probably wide of the mark because evolution isn't common sense, it is really surprising. A good book on this if you are interested is Steven Pinker's Blank Slate.

I absolutely agree that biological differences are no reason to allow for sexism or racism. In fact, they are a reason to be more considerate of each other, not to exploit those differences.

But Ido think that too much emphasis is placed on the biological excuses, and that many if them may not even be facts.

But these ate just my musings, any links it book suggestions gratefully received and likely ton followed up on - eventually

I agree that physical strength is a bit of a red herring anyway. In western society it is not the winner of 'World's Strongest Man' or the winner of Olympic Gold Men's 100m who gets to decide government policies or run international businesses.
These tend to be middle-aged to elderly white men who have generally gained power through means that do not require them to have exceptional sporting prowess. But usually aided by a patriarchal society view.

pubmed

I think that does make sense himalaya.

I think where I (and maybe others?) struggle with arguments from biology is where we're told they must be evolutionary advantages with little evidence - I don't have any issue with people saying they've studied 200 people and found all but one of the men had bigger biceps than the women, or 75 of the women were shorter than the men - it's interesting and seems likely to be true.

I think your following a long tradition of sceptical evaluation Kickass, and as such I would suggest 2 more points for you to consider.

1. As you rightly say these urban myths about strength and ability are propagated by people for a reason. I will take the risk of flaming and be clear that I do not think that the whole purpose is to subjugate women. Politically and economical purposes are served in having easily defined stereotype is useful.

1. It has been noted here that women are now proving themselves very good at long distance and endurance. These are new opportunities and new fields of endeavour in terms of the social construct of what women are capable and find acceptance in doing. We are also being told that in most modern counties the body shape and abilities of people are changing, due to diet and a completely different lifestyle. It may be that breast size and height are changing in response to evolutionary demands. Sorry probably not being very clear or even adding anything to your thinking, not been a great night.