Why are men stronger than women? The answer may surprise you | Mickey Z.
Dec. 29, 2015 Recently, a group of Aymara women amazed the world by doing something unexpected. They not only took on the 19,974-foot high Huayna Potosi Mountain in Bolivia but did so while dressed like, um… well, women (read: traditional Aymara clothing). This got me thinking about the carved-in-stone “reality” that the vast majority of men are supposedly bigger, faster, and stronger than the vast majority of women. We’ve all heard the immutable biological factors -- skeletal structure, testosterone , lung capacity, etc . -- but absent from most discussions is the possibility that a social construct like, I don’t know, maybe patriarchy is playing a role. Could our beliefs be causing us to make girls smaller, slower, and less powerful? In a 2009 Newsweek article , Sharon Begley wrote about a study in which mothers were asked to estimate how steep a slope their 11-month-olds could crawl down. “Moms of boys got it right to within 1 degree,” Begley explained