As a woman, I have been and always will be both professionally and personally invested in this question. When you broaden the definition of strong or weak and look at the data available for a complete set of strengths or lack thereof , you reach a very different conclusion. Using a broader definition of physical health alone, research proves women as the stronger sex.
Studies show a consistent gender gap in health favoring women and that women, on average,. And the health gap is not the only gap favoring women as the stronger sex. Recent studies on educational achievement prove that there is a similar education gender gap.
On a personal note, one of my male friends from college always tells the story that my best friend and I two women got him through our engineering major at Stanford. In addition to a consistent health gap and an emerging education gap, hormonal factors are also known to favor women. While writing this, I asked two male friends what they thought of the premise that men were the weaker sex.
Women continue to be underestimated and underrepresented on corporate boards and in executive suites but also in higher education and federal and state government leadership roles. News coverage of women candidates for President of the U.
Like women, the impact of this MISperception is underestimated. The current still-male-dominated environment is based in and exploitative of fear, aggressive, competitive behaviors and petty anger and hostility. Shreyansh Mangla. Lifestyle Superior: Men or women?
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Sofia Jahan. Mufliz Khan. Dynamic skills. If he belongs to committees, to the editorial board of the college paper, or to any other extra-academic bodies, his services will not be of much value—he has too little energy left after doing his class-work. Quite otherwise with Peter. He will have each day, on an average, two fruitful hours to devote to some pursuit other than the necessary class-work.
He will be useful to college organizations to which he may belong. As simple member or as chairman of some of these, he will come by a variety of information that Paul will not get.
He will, in particular, learn to manage men, and will have an opportunity to develop the traits of the leader. The greater his knowledge and effectiveness, the more he will be in demand and the more competent he will continue to become. Should Peter have deep intellectual interests and, instead of doing merely the necessary academic work, should he devote his spare energy to the extension of his knowledge and training, a corresponding accumulation of efficiency would take place in that direction.
Four years of college life, with each day two additional hours of fruitful activity on the part of Peter, will produce such differences between him and Paul in actual achievement and power of achievement that no one will regard them as intellectually equal. Even their teachers will get the impression that Peter is the possessor of far greater mental ability than Paul. He is, in fact, better informed and far more efficient; yet they began with intellectual talents of the very same quality.
The ascription of superior performance to superior, intellectual endowment when it is due, in fact, to superior energy is one of the common confusions besetting a muddle-headed humanity. The much-performers in business, politics, and even in the arts and sciences, are often ranked far above the true place in the scale of intellectual talents—talents to observe, to remember, to understand, to appreciate, to reason.
The very quality of the achievements conspires with their quantity to produce the deception. For quality also is improved by long sustained effort. In my student days, I boarded for a while in the same house with a young woman said to have a remarkable gift for the piano. Yet, as time passed, she seemed, more and more discouraged. Her professor was not satisfied with her progress; he complained that she did not practise enough. As she told me that, she added, 'I play six hours a day; I can do no more—I am done up.
The promise of this young woman's talent was frustrated by insufficient energy. Even in the fields of endeavor involving as we say, purely mental work, mathematics for instance,—energy, and not only intellectual talent, determines the quality of achievement. Other things being equal, the person who in the attempted solution of a problem wearies last is the one who has the best chances of success.
But the problem of the advantages due in this field to greater energy must not be considered with reference to a brief period of time. The energy-factor operates throughout life. The greater store of mathematical knowledge accumulated throughout his school and college years by the less easily fatigued person will give him such an advantage over his more easily, tired competitor that now, even in the same space of time, he will readily surpass him, not in amount of work merely, but also in its quality: the problems he will be able to solve will be beyond the present attainments of the other.
The world is full of men of vast achievements, reputed of transcendent intelligence, who owe their success to a surpassing energy actuating a mediocre brain. Not their intellectual talents but their ceaseless use of them is their distinction. The student who in college understood with difficulty may astonish you by the place he takes in the community, while the brilliant youth who with little work was at the top of his class may never be heard from.
Shall we say that the only advantage of the former over the latter must be one of energy, of capacity to work longer hours? There are obviously other differences between people besides quality of intelligence and quantity of energy—as, for instance, the one indicated by the words 'interest,' 'curiosity,' and 'purpose.
The duration of labor to which these incentives prompt at any particular moment is therefore limited by the energy at one's disposal. We may, then, say that, other things being equal, the greater the difference in energy, the greater the difference in mental achievements, both in quantity and in quality. The inferiority in the mental performance of women, however great it may be in quantity or quality, can therefore be explained without the assumption of inferior intelligence.
A direct and measured knowledge of energy-difference between the sexes is not altogether lacking. It is well known that, in so far as muscular power and endurance are concerned, woman is, on the average, markedly inferior to man. This difference cannot possibly be referred to any form of social disability, for it exists among savages, where physical labor is not denied to the sex; it exists in the apes; it exists even in all the species of the mammalian class to which man belongs.
It has been affirmed, furthermore, that at the same weight woman is inferior to man by about thirty per cent. The lesser muscular performance of women when compared with men of the same weight may mean that in the former a smaller part of the total weight is in muscle. In that case, at the same total bodily weight women's muscles would be smaller than those of men. We know, as a matter of fact, that this is so.
Woman is handicapped in athletics, not only by her smaller size,—this is not, it is true, always a handicap,—but also by the weight of organs peculiar to her sex.
Whether that handicap accounts for the whole of the thirty-per-cent difference is a question which, as far as we know, remains for the physiologist to answer. But what have these facts and considerations to do here? Our problem does not refer to muscular performance, but to success in the professions, the arts, the sciences.
Well, muscular and mental fatigue are not so independent of each other as the words might lead one to think. It is well known that physical fatigue incapacitates one for mental work, and also that mental fatigue incapacitates one for physical work.
The truth of the first statement is fairly obvious. Movements result from the enervation of muscles—that is, muscles act only in so far as nervous energy is brought to them and is consumed by them. The second statement—that mental fatigue incapacitates for physical work—is perhaps less obviously true.
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