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from the *you*-try-keeping-up-with-a-bunch-of-children-all-day dept.
From Medium article:
https://elemental.medium.com/what-makes-women-strong-2c927bf286ef
"What Makes Women Strong?
Science is revealing that when it comes to physical prowess, women may actually be the more powerful sex""If discussions of human physical strength used endurance as the yardstick, women would be strongest. Women have already caught up to, or surpassed, men in some sports like long-distance swimming and ultrarunning, racking up the wins in mixed-gender races (with less support and training than the men). Recently, Camille Herron won 2018's Desert Solstice run, which lasts for 24 hours (she ran 162.9 miles in that time) and Courtney Dauwalter has won 11 mixed-sex ultramarathons, including the Moab 240, a 238-mile race along the Colorado River in Utah. Dauwalter beat the next-fastest competitor there, a man, by 10 hours.
In fact, plenty of research points to the idea that the longer the distance, the better chance a woman has in beating a man, possibly due to a combination of factors like high pain tolerance and less muscle fatigability. There could also be metabolic reasons — some researchers theorize that women burn energy in a way that supports long-distance energy needs. As investigative reporter David Epstein notes in his book, The Sports Gene, when a man and a woman are evenly matched, "the man will typically beat the woman at distances shorter than the marathon, but the woman will win if the race length is extended to forty miles."
[...] "Women are also bodily powerful (the definition of strong) in other ways: Women are also more flexible. "Women tend to have somewhat more laxity in their tendons than men; they are more limber," Dr. Steve Jordan, an orthopedic surgeon at the Andrews Institute for Orthopaedics and Sports Medicine, told The New York Times. Limber people are less likely to get hurt — less time spent on the sidelines or in surgery. Woman also have a very high degree of accuracy — and depending on the physical pursuit, that can make one athlete stronger than the next. Women on the Ladies Professional Golf Association tour regularly significantly outdrive professional men. And according to the National Rifle Association's Colonel Kenneth Haynes — a military logician in the Army who taught both men and women to shoot over a multi-decade career — women shoot guns more accurately: "My units had around 20 percent female personnel in both officer and enlisted ranks. All the women fired Expert their first day, but less than a third of the men did so," writes Haynes."
So, I really wanna hear the fireworks....
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 14 2019, @01:12PM (1 child)
I recently read some articles about the ultimate limit of human athletic endurance in a variety of media sources. The science boiled down to the limit being the ability to convert chemical stored energy into kinetic energy - a function primarily performed by mitochondria, which do not differ between men and women. Since women are carrying around less overall bulk and less energy-consuming, but essentially useless for running, upper body muscle, it's reasonable that women could outperform men in extremely long runs.
Lower overall body mass would not likely play much of a role in endurance swimming, however.
I would take the anecdote from one military trainer with a grain of salt, though. His situation is not only anecdotal, but influenced by a large number of uncontrolled social factors. It would be better to look at the results of high level competitive target shooting. My guess is that, since the article cited hard data for the endurance running and the scientific studies about low-exertion endurance but anecdotes for the target shooting, that either there was no data, the data showed that the men were better, or that there was no difference. It doesn't seem like an area where there should be a major difference, although strength does play a role (target rifles are surprisingly heavy, but not so heavy that a serious athlete of either gender would have trouble). Overall, the article does not justify its claims that women are superior at precision (which seems to show the very gender bias that it claims to be opposed to).
(Score: 4, Interesting) by AthanasiusKircher on Friday June 14 2019, @01:51PM
I would take most quotations in TFA with a grain of salt, as they are not necessarily giving the whole picture. If you actually click on the link to the original article by the military trainer (here [nrafamily.org], as linked in TFA), you'll see that he did NOT use the cited fact to claim that "women shoot guns more accurately." Instead, the very next paragraph after the quoted portion says the following:
In other words, in initial training, women were less bull-headed than men. That's certainly a positive trait too, but it doesn't say that women can shoot better than men. Maybe women CAN shoot better than men (and indeed, that's what the linked NRA article was proposing to discuss), but this anecdote isn't presented as proof of that necessarily. TFA distorted the findings of an article it linked to, which makes me less likely to believe some of the other stats taken out of context as well.
Note that I'm all for encouraging women to do the best that they can. I'm all for praising the fact that they have won some competitive long-distance events against men. I'm all for encouraging more sex integration in sports where women want to compete alongside men to give them challenges (as TFA suggests). I deplore the fact that historically (and still today) women were often viewed as "weaker" for reasons rooted in bigotry.
But half of the stats in TFA sound fishy to me, in the sense that they sound like one bit of data taken out of context. Those data points are important -- and they strongly suggest in some areas of physical prowess that women are competitive and perhaps superior to men. But it does NOT help to present disingenuous arguments by citing stats taken out of context. It just provides fodder for people like the trolls who have already commented on this article here.