Why are women not as strong as men?

[Pythagorean]

Well, anecdotally, sexual selection stereotypes perpetuated by the media would suggest that some women in the human population prefer hunky males while virtually no males prefer hunky females. No idea how that idea pans out in our evolutionary history, though.

 

[bobze]

In deed Jack. The biological reason for our difference isn't because we evolved to hunt, its because we met horribly violent deaths at the hands of other men. The "men as hunters" and gender roles came later as a consequence of culture, not biological pressures. In fact, if you look at hunter-gather societies (HG), it is culturally dependent with gender roles. Even in modern ones, for example in the Agta peoples;

Agta women participate in a full range of daily subsistence and maintenance activities. They hunt, using dogs, knives, and bow and arrows; they kill a significant portion of the wild pig and deer. During 185 days of observation (55 trips) at Nanadukan, Cagayan, for example, teams of female hunters killed 22.2 percent of the prey with a 30.4 percent success rate. Mixed teams of men and women accounted for another 35.0 percent of all meat, with a 41 percent success rate. Women, both youth and adult, also fish. Women are especially noted for their skills in spearfishing, working in rough, deep waters as well as in shallow streams. Both men and women gather food, although the former favor honey collection, seldom joining women in securing mollusks from rivers or the ocean. Women tend to dominate the procurement of plant foods, except fruits. In recent years, however, Agta have neglected forest plant foods, preferring instead domesticated cereal grains and roots.

Link

Shows that women are, biologically capable of hunting just like men. And that differences seen in gender-specific-tasking is cultural. Not biological.

Which again, going back to other species (lions for example), makes sense.

 

[D H]

It is usually (but definitely not always) the males who are the hunters in hunter-gatherer societies. It is almost always (but still not always) the males who are the warriors in the more aggressive hunter-gatherer societies. Why?

There are physiological differences between men and women, but for the most part it's a difference of degree rather than kind. On average, males are taller than females, have a higher relative center of mass than do females, are leaner than females, have stronger leg muscles than do females, and are faster runners than are females, but in all cases there's a huge overlap between the genders. There are plenty of females who are well-equipped physically to do the hunting in hunter-gatherer societies, and women do participate in the hunting in some of these societies.

There are a few places where the differences between the genders are distinct.

• Testosterone. Males have a lot more testosterone than do females. This explains the difference in upper body strength between males and females, and perhaps also aggressiveness. This might explain why warriors are almost always men (we think with our gonads), but it does not explain why men are the hunters. Upper body strength is not an asset when it comes to hunting, particularly the kind of hunting our primitive ancestors did. We need to look deeper.
• Mommy hips. Consider the female high school track star. She could run with the best when she was young. Then her hips started broadening in prep for having babies. This made her gait change and made her running not quite as efficient as it used to be. The act of having babies makes for full-blown mommy hips. Those hips that are essential to having human babies with humongous heads are a huge hindrance to running efficiently for long distances. Add in the fact that our ancient ancestors needed to have *lots* of babies because only half lived to adulthood and it's game over for most women.
• Milk. To add insult to injury, that new baby needs Mommy around and takes her out of physical activities such as hunting for a couple of years or so. Multiply by four and it's not just game over with regard to women being the hunters. It's game, set, and match.
• Menstrual bleeding. In many primitive societies, women and weapons don't mix. Existing primitive societies place a huge tabu on bleeding women touching weapons designed to make animals bleed. All kinds of bad magic apparently happens when this tabu is violated. There's lots of archeological evidence that our ancestors had similar tabus regarding menstrual cycles, and generalizing on this, any contact at all between women and weapons.

 

[1MileCrash]

I'll give you an example: pound for pound, women's muscles are as strong as men's - they are made of the same stuff - so men and women with the same muscle mass should perform comparably in strength tests. So who is being compared?

Also you are assuming that everyone is thinking of strength the same way you do - this may well be the case, but I'd prefer not to make that assumption.

Getting you to be specific should help expose the underlying assumptions.

But the question does have other underlying assumptions that I was confident others would bring up :)

Oh come on. I think we all know well and clear what the OP means. Women are physically weaker than men.

If you want to say "well pound for pound they are the same strength." Fine, let us rephrase the question to "why do women naturally have, and have less potential to build, muscle mass" if that helps you grasp what everyone else already did.

 

[bobze]

I
[*]Milk. To add insult to injury, that new baby needs Mommy around and takes her out of physical activities such as hunting for a couple of years or so. Multiply by four and it's not just game over with regard to women being the hunters. It's game, set, and match.

Might want to revise that:

That's certainly how it seemed to Professor Barry Hewlett, an American anthropologist who was the first person to spot male breastfeeding among the Aka Pygmy people of central Africa (total population around 20,000) after he decided to live alongside them in order to study their way of life more closely. By the time he noticed that babies were sometimes being suckled by their fathers, it wasn't as stunning a revelation, however, as it might have been had he spotted it going on in the breastfeeding room at Mothercare in Manchester.

What's fascinating about the Aka is that male and female roles are virtually interchangeable. While the women hunt, the men mind the children; while the men cook, the women decide where to set up the next camp. And vice versa: and it's in this vice versa, says Hewlett, that the really important message lies. "There is a sexual division of labour in the Aka community - women, for example, are the primary caregivers," he says. "But, and this is crucial, there's a level of flexibility that's virtually unknown in our society. Aka fathers will slip into roles usually occupied by mothers without a second thought and without, more importantly, any loss of status - there's no stigma involved in the different jobs."

Link

Put your western male nipples to good use DH!

On a more serious note, like I pointed out above gender roles are cultural, not biological. Sure, lots of cultures have co-opted what began as biology. The answer to the OP's question though, physical differences in men and women is because of sexual dimorphism and lots of male-male competition, not because evolution "chose" men to be hunters.

 

[Simon Bridge]

I thought it was generally known and accepted that men are often obliged to help women with the more physically demanding aspects of daily life (e.g. moving furniture, carrying heavy loads, etc.) and industry (e.g. logging, construction), and hence that paleolithic women may also have had trouble doing certain things without male help.

You are mistaken - I know female lumberjacks and miners and they need no help from the men thank you. I personally am male and would have a lot of trouble in those jobs - I also tend to need help with furniture.

Many women live in modern NZ with no male support at all - when they need to shift stuff they do what the men do - ask their friends for help or use strategy. The "generally known and accepted" idea about men helping women out a lot is more cultural that biological.

If one demands that every statement, regardless of how controversial it may or may not be, be supported by scientific citations, then discussion of any sort (including this one) would become nearly impossible.

ON the same note, some statements cry out to be challenged - nobody is demanding that every statement in a discussion needs scientific backup - just the more out-there statements made in a discussion in a scientific forum.

Like I said - the statement under contention was that "most women are so weak that they cannot survive, without male help, in the wild" ... a statement like "some women are so weak..." would not have requires support. If the statement were made in Penthouse Forums, again, no problem. But the level of evidence is not going to need ot be as good as, say, for acceptance into a scientific journal.