Female vs Male Neck Sizes

[GarlicLitre]

Every so often, I have yet another random thought about sex dimorphism in humans. As we know, the differences are all-pervasive but they can still surprise me. Welcome to today's unexpected fact.

The female neck circumference ranges from 28.4cm to 35.6cm.
Male neck circumferences range from 37.9cm to 42.9cm.

Those are for athletes. There is no crossover here; the smallest, slimmest sportsman's neck is thicker than the biggest, strongest sportswoman's.

In the general (American) populace, the biggest and fattest woman's neck can measure 41.3cm. This is matched by a larger overweight man. The largest obese man measures his neck at 47.9cm.

At the skinny end of normal, the tiniest guy's neck is 34.7cm. This is average for an overweight woman.

For what it's worth, mine's 35cm at a BMI of 24 - so I've either measured it poorly or I'm right in thinking I am of sturdy build! (I'm also quite tall ... for a woman.) Tiny guy's shirt might just fit me in the collar, but it sure as hell wouldn't go around me anywhere else.

There's also a difference in shoulder attachment size, but I didn't find data on that - just fairly vague sketch illustrations.

https://www.bodybuildingmealplan.com/average-neck-size/

Watching University Challenge recently and DH said that woman looks a bit ‘odd’, I only had to say look at the size of his neck, no woman has a neck like that.

On a related note, I caught the 4th part of "Human" on that BBC you have these days, and was struck by the comment that developing technology (in this case a strap that helps you throw a spear with more force) meant that females were able to hunt as well as men. Thus increasing a communities resources.

Yes I’ve recently learnt about that study in MSc Psychology - emerging field of Neuroaesthetics - why we find different environments pleasant/unpleasant and the evolutionary reasons.

women prefer and more sensitive to red tones - suggesting a possible better discrimination of plants and ripe foods (hunter gatherers)

Hurlbert and Ling (2007)
www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S096098220701559X

Although 12% of women have the 4 colour sensitive cone types, fewer than that number are tetrachromats. Unless the brain has learned to distinguish the various signals there will be no enhanced colour vision. It seems to be less than 1% of women have it.

I should think though that all of those 12% would be able to develop the enhanced appreciation of colour if from childhood they could make use of it. Maybe there are certain things that could help that. It would be an interesting project for a university to make a colour TV screen with 4 primary colours, optimized for tetrachromats. You would have to have a special camera and special recording equipment too.

Gawd, I love this place,

thank you for digging out the reference