Are men actually stronger than women?

Question: Are men actually stronger than women?

Asked by klbkelly to Freya, Katy, Louise, Pamela on 16 Mar 2010 in Categories: About.
- anon answered on 16 Mar 2010:
  
  Statistically yes. If you took the average man and the average woman you would find that the man would be stronger than a woman.
  
  However, my money will always be on Wonder Woman if she got into a fight with Superman. She’d just laugh at him for wearing his pants on the outside and he would cry.
- Katy Milne answered on 16 Mar 2010:
  
  In what way? I think the strongest men are probably stronger than the strongest women. Similarly the fastest men can probably run faster than the fastest women. However, there could be a woman who could beat Usain Bolt or his equivalent one day. Its not quite the same but I am most definitely better than my boyfriend (and most of my male friends) at fixing things and that is often considered to be a man’s job. I think that women should always have the option of competing with men.
- Pamela Docherty answered on 16 Mar 2010:
  
  Another good question Kelly! For this one, I refer you to my friend Helen, who was a mathematician but is now training to be a physiotherapist:
  “The shortest answer is: On average, yes.
  Longer answer:
  Firstly, you need to define what ‘strength’ actually is. Basically the strength of a muscle is the amount of force it generates when it contracts (shortens) in a single maximum effort. That’s important, because it’s different from endurance (how long a muscle can keep going for) or power (strength over time). This is dependent on how physically big the muscle is, so when you see someone with big muscles they’re almost certainly stronger than someone with small muscles.
  Men on average have more muscle than women, and (because of testosterone) find it easier to gain and maintain muscle bulk than women. So, in most cases, men are stronger than women.
  However, men and women can both become stronger by doing strength training. Everyone’s bodies do a thing called ‘specific adaptation to imposed demand’ (called the SAID principle in muscle physiology), that means your body adapts to the (specific) things you ask it to do regularly. So, if you lift heavy things a lot or do lots of weight training then the muscles you’re working will get physically bigger (hypertrophy) so that they can better manage whatever it is you want to do (lift weights, say). That means that a woman who does a lot of weight training could be stronger than a man who doesn’t do much in the way of strengthening exercise.”
- Louise Pendry answered on 16 Mar 2010:
  
  My baby brother (2 years younger than me) and me used to fight all the time when we were growing up – I was fab at nailing him! Then he hit puberty. I then became decidedly less keen on scrapping with him as I always lost. So personal experience tells me that men are stronger than women.
  
  Science backs this up. One study that was carried out looked at differences between men and women in leg and arm strength. Women had only just over half the strength of the men in both areas. Scientists found out it was due to women having less muscle fibres and different proportions of muscle fibres.
  
  Women have different strengths though!
- Freya Harrison answered on 17 Mar 2010:
  
  Ahhh, this is a statistics question! I like statistics (yes, really… please stay with me on this one!) So imagine you have 100 women and 100 men of the same age, all fit and healthy, and you can measure their strength. Let’s say that you decide to measure how much weight they can bench press for 10 reps.
  
  Then you line them all up in order of strength – strongest at one end, weakest at the other. It’s unlikely that you’d find all the men at one end and all the women at the other – there would be some overlap where your line went boy-girl-boy. So it’s not true that all men are stronger than all women.
  
  So your question becomes: on average, are men stronger than women? In other words, how big is the region of your line where men and women overlap? Or… is the variation in strength between men and women bigger than the variation in strength between people of the same sex?
  
  You would probably answer “yes,” “fairly small compared with the length of the line” and “yes, it is” to these three questions. On average, men can bench press more weight than women, but if you picked pairs of men and women at random then in some cases the woman would bench press more than the man.
  
  Of course, you’ll notice I’ve picked one very specific measure of strength here. I chose upper body strength. Do you think we’d get the same result if we chose another measure of strength, e.g. leg strength?
  
  Also I said that we’d picked mean and women of the same age who were all physically fit. Age and fitness would all affect strength, so we have to make it a fair test by making these equal across all our experimental people. If you had a load of 20-year-old women who were from rowing teams and who went to the gym every week, versus a group of 80-year old men with asthma, I think it’s pretty obvious what you’d conclude and why!
  
  And I’m assuming you mean physical strength… there are other kinds of strength too, e.g. I think I’ve read that women tend to have higher pain tolerance than men and you might argue that this is a kind of strength.

Question: Are men actually stronger than women?

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