Jesse Singal brought this piece in Deadspin, She’s Got The Strength, But Who Has The Power?, to my attention.
Some very interesting sections:
When we shove the concept of athletic ability—strength, for instance—into the same black-and-white binary that we try to put gender into, we’re wrong. There is no stark line separating what men can do athletically and what women can. Some women, in fact, are bigger, faster, and stronger than some men. A large data set analyzed for a 2018 study looked at the body composition and endocrine profiles of 689 elite cisgender athletes in various sports. When it came to physical attributes there was complete overlap between the men and women analyzed, McKinnon pointed out. For instance, the shortest person in the data set was male, not female. The lightest male weighed the same as the lightest female. There were men athletes and women athletes who had testosterone levels that hit the top of the chart and the bottom. Simply put, the range of any physical characteristic within a sex, (like, for instance, the six feet of difference between the shortest man in the world and the tallest man) is far greater than the average difference in height between the average man and the average woman (five inches). And elite athletes tend to live at the far ends of these spectra anyway.
…
USA Powerlifting’s response to transgender athletes is head-spinning. The thing about all this talk equating hormone replacement therapy to doping, and the threat to “biological females,” and the “unfair advantages” of “male puberty,” is that it’s based entirely on social perceptions of gender.
“There’s absolutely no scientific evidence at all that supports their position,” said Rachel McKinnon, an expert on athletes’ rights and a professor of philosophy at the College of Charleston, and a world champion track cyclist to boot.
Recently a very successful person told me that mathematical intelligence is probably overrated in comparison to verbal intelligence. It is true that some women are bigger, faster, and stronger than some men, and therefore a lot of social policy follows from this truth? Well, empirically that seems to be the case today.
Despite the irrefutable sophistication of words, I decided to pull some data from the National Center for Health Statistics. These data are useful because they separate by sex and age (and in some cases race/ethnicity). Rather than focusing on ranges, I was curious about the distributions for two characteristics:
- Height in males and females of a range of ages and between the sexes
- Dominant hand grip strength in a range of ages and between the sexes
In some cases, there were age intervals, so I simply took the midpoint (e.g., 25-29 becomes 27). Also, they had an 80 and over category. I just left that as 80.
First, let’s look at the age. The figure below shows the distribution of height for males and females over the years, with intervals along with two standard deviations for each age.