lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] lnr at 11:56am on 04/05/2010
While there's huge overlap in the height ranges of men and women, and some individual men are clearly going to be shorter than some individual women, I don't have any problem with the former statement.

Interestingly if you'd made it about, say, maths ability (or indeed anything which might involve a value judgment) I'd find an equivalent statement much more problematic.
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ptc24: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] ptc24 at 12:51pm on 04/05/2010
How about physical strength? It's a trait that's much less important in our civilised, technological society, and regarded with suspicion as much as with admiration (see negative stereotypes of physically strong people as stupid, and/or violent), but it's still something that a lot of people value.
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lnr: Halloween 2023 (Default)

(no subject)

posted by [personal profile] lnr at 01:58pm on 04/05/2010
That is indeed a difficult one. I think I don't object (too much) to anyone making the statement "men are stronger than women" in the abstract, so long as they don't then use it to say women aren't allowed to do something :)
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naath: (Default)

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posted by [personal profile] naath at 04:12pm on 04/05/2010
I think that (somewhat similar to the maths question) in our society men are very much more encouraged to do things to increase their physical strength and to show it off - your height is something you pretty much can't do anything about, but strength is definately under your control to some extent.

The very strongest men appear to be stronger than the very strongest women (comparing people who compete at weight lifting), but it's not clear to me how strong the "average" man and the "average" woman would be; especially if they both undertook the same amount of strength training activities.

If I were running a weight-lifting competition I would probably assume the men would lift larger weights than the women. If I wanted someone to help me lift a box I'd probably assume that my female friends are just as capable of doing so as my male friends.
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